BOSTON--Scientists at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard Medical School have found that a common cancer protein leads a second, totally different life in normal adult brain cells: It helps regulates memory formation and may be implicated in Alzheimer's disease.

It's like if you come into my house without permission, I'll depress you and drive you to suicide. Guess our bodies know how to do this kind of a thing at the molecular level.

For first time, scientists show an HIV vaccine impacts the genetic makeup of the virus Results suggest new vaccine strategies to debilitate viruses by tapping into this response: 

A research team led by Dr. James Mullin, Professor of Microbiology at University of Washington, Seattle, devised a vaccine that was expected to stimulate the production of HIV specific T Helper cells which would decrease the viral load. Unfortunately, the virus underwent genetic modification(it's biggest weapon: it cannot be targeted because it changes genetically) and slipped through the vaccine's fingers. The researchers analysed the transformed virus and proposed that eventhough the vaccine couldn't kill the transformed viruses, it could be used to exert selective pressure on the virus. That is, it even if it can't be killed directly, it can be forced to change into something that can be killed easily.

Originally Published in: Nature Medicine, 27 Feb '11. 

Photo: Colored Scanning Electron Micrograph of a T4 cell (green) infected with HIV (red). ©NIBSC/Science Photo Library

Genetically engineered spider silk could help overcome a major barrier to the use of gene therapy in everyday medicine, according to a new study that reported development and successful initial laboratory tests of such a material. It appears in ACS' journal Bioconjugate Chemistry.

David Kaplan and colleagues note that gene therapy -- the use of beneficial genes to prevent or treat disease -- requires safe and efficient carriers or "vectors." Those carriers are the counterparts to pills and capsules, transporting therapeutic genes into cells in the body. Safety and other concerns surround the experimental use of viruses to insert genes. The lack of good gene delivery systems is a main reason why there are no FDA-approved gene therapies, despite almost 1,500 clinical trials since 1989. The new study focused on one promising prospect, silk proteins, which are biocompatible and have been used in everyday medicine and medical research for decades.
The scientists describe modifying spider silk proteins so that they attach to diseased cells and not healthy cells. They also engineered the spider silk to contain a gene that codes for the protein that makes fireflies glow in order to provide a visual signal (seen using special equipment) that the gene has reached its intended target. In lab studies using mice containing human breast cancer cells, the spider-silk proteins attached to the cancer cells and injected the DNA material into the cells without harming the mice. 
The results suggest that the genetically-engineered spider-silk proteins represent "a versatile and useful new platform polymer for nonviral gene delivery," the article notes.
The authors acknowledged funding from the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation.


A piece of current collection from biotech news worldwide..........

How we come to express the genes of one parent over the other is now better understood through studying the platypus and marsupial wallaby---and it doesn't seem to have originated in association with sex chromosomes.

New evidence of sea-level oscillations during a warm period that started about 125,000 years ago raises the possibility of a similar scenario if the planet continues its more recent warming trend, says a research team led by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI).

An international research team led by biologists at the University of California, Riverside and Texas A&M University has released for the first time a large and robust DNA matrix that has representation for all mammalian families. The matrix -- the culmination of about five years of painstaking research -- has representatives for 99 percent of mammalian families, and covers not only the earliest history of mammalian diversification but also all the deepest divergences among living mammals.

Scientists at Harvard-affiliated Dana-Farber Cancer Institute have successfully disrupted the function of a cancer gene involved in the formation of most human tumors by tampering with the gene’s “on” switch and growth signals, rather than targeting the gene itself...