Triple negative breast cancer is the most aggressive subtype of the disease and is notorious for a poor prognosis, but scientists are working on a breakthrough method of converting these treatment-resistant tumors into a ...
A team of researchers at the University of Pennsylvania, working with a colleague from the University of Texas Medical Branch and another from Boston University and Boston Medical Center, has found that the SARS-CoV-2 virus ...
How does SARS-CoV-2 evade our immune defenses? It's a good question, actually. When SARS-CoV-2 defeats host defenses, we need to know how it does so, and conversely, when host defenses prevail, that also needs to be understood. ...
(Medical Xpress)—The BRCA1 gene, known for its role in suppressing the growth of breast and ovarian tumors, could be necessary for brain development. In a study appearing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, ...
(Medical Xpress)—Researchers in the U.S. have developed a new method to study damage to DNA and resultant translocations in living cells.
A new "atlas" of the human ovary provides insights that could lead to treatments restoring ovarian hormone production and the ability to have biologically related children, according to University of Michigan engineers.
Apr 5, 2024
0
34
Cancer cells are characterized by their aggressiveness: they grow rapidly and spread to other parts of the body. To enable this, numerous mechanisms come into play, and one of them involves a protein called MYC, which activates ...
Mar 7, 2024
0
34
Researchers at the National Institutes of Health have mapped the 3D organization of genetic material of key developmental stages of human retinal formation, using intricate models of a retina grown in the lab.
Dec 13, 2023
0
27
Trans-vaccenic acid (TVA), a long-chain fatty acid found in meat and dairy products from grazing animals such as cows and sheep, improves the ability of CD8+ T cells to infiltrate tumors and kill cancer cells, according to ...
Nov 22, 2023
16
322
CAR T cell therapy, a powerful type of immunotherapy, has begun to revolutionize cancer treatment. Pioneered at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSK), the therapy involves engineering a patient's T cells so they recognize ...
Nov 14, 2023
0
67
Deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) is a nucleic acid that contains the genetic instructions used in the development and functioning of all known living organisms and some viruses. The main role of DNA molecules is the long-term storage of information. DNA is often compared to a set of blueprints or a recipe, or a code, since it contains the instructions needed to construct other components of cells, such as proteins and RNA molecules. The DNA segments that carry this genetic information are called genes, but other DNA sequences have structural purposes, or are involved in regulating the use of this genetic information.
Chemically, DNA consists of two long polymers of simple units called nucleotides, with backbones made of sugars and phosphate groups joined by ester bonds. These two strands run in opposite directions to each other and are therefore anti-parallel. Attached to each sugar is one of four types of molecules called bases. It is the sequence of these four bases along the backbone that encodes information. This information is read using the genetic code, which specifies the sequence of the amino acids within proteins. The code is read by copying stretches of DNA into the related nucleic acid RNA, in a process called transcription.
Within cells, DNA is organized into X-shaped structures called chromosomes. These chromosomes are duplicated before cells divide, in a process called DNA replication. Eukaryotic organisms (animals, plants, fungi, and protists) store most of their DNA inside the cell nucleus and some of their DNA in the mitochondria (animals and plants) and chloroplasts (plants only). Prokaryotes (bacteria and archaea) however, store their DNA in the cell's cytoplasm. Within the chromosomes, chromatin proteins such as histones compact and organize DNA. These compact structures guide the interactions between DNA and other proteins, helping control which parts of the DNA are transcribed.
This text uses material from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA
