amudu

Monday, April 9, 2012

Life in color : Blue

LiFe In CoLoR : Blue by National Geographic

Many of us love blue color, color of the sky, ocean, sleep, twilight. A pure blue is the color of inspiration, sincerity and spirituality. Dark blue is the color of truth and moderation.do you know a blue iris means your friendship is very important to me. Artists use it to show perspective, So put some blue in your life and give yourself calm and relaxation.

Gravity changes along the Moon

CURTIN UNIVERSITY

"Our new lunar gravity map now shows, for the first time, how the pull of gravity changes from location to location over the rugged surface of the Moon."

Image: DWPhoto/iStockphoto

Using detailed topographic information from NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter mission, Curtin’s Western Australian School of Mines (WASM) spatial scientists, Dr Christian Hirt and Professor Will Featherstone, were able to reveal the fine structure of the Moon’s gravity field in brand new detail.

Dr Hirt, who calculated the new gravity maps, said that the findings showed existing gravity models neglected approximately 50 per cent of the lunar gravity signal.

“The Moon’s gravitational pull is about one-sixth of the Earth’s. Our new lunar gravity map now shows, for the first time, how the pull of gravity changes from location to location over the rugged surface of the Moon,” Dr Hirt said.

“This reveals features of the lunar gravity field, including pockmark signatures, showing gravity accelerations are higher at the bottom of impact craters than the elevated crater rim, and revealing the strength and variation of gravity acceleration over the entire surface of the Moon.”

Dr Hirt said the research to improve gravity field maps for the Moon came from an approach that was successfully tested on Earth and could also be used for other solid planetary bodies.

Dr Hirt and Professor Featherstone’s research findings were recently published in the prestigious journal Earth and Planetary Science Letters (Issue 1. May 2012, Vol. 329-330, pages 22-30).

This work has been funded by the Australian Research Council.

Editor's Note: Original news release can be found here.

Stomach cancer genes identified

DUKE-NUS GRADUATE MEDICAL SCHOOL

Stomach cancer is the second most deadly form of cancer in the world, causing more than 700,000 deaths each year. This discovery of genes linked to the disease could pave the way for improved treatments.

Image: spanteldotru/iStockphoto

An international team of scientists, led by researchers from Duke-NUS Graduate Medical School (Duke-NUS) in Singapore and the National Cancer Center Singapore (NCCS), has identified hundreds of novel genes that are mutated in stomach cancer, the second-most lethal cancer worldwide.

The study, which appears online on April 8, 2012 in Nature Genetics, paves the way for treatments tailored to the genetic make-up of individual stomach tumors.

Stomach cancer is the second leading cause of cancer death globally with more than 700,000 deaths each year, and is particularly common in East Asia. Treatment of this deadly disease is often difficult and unsuccessful because of late detection of tumors and a poor understanding of the causes of stomach cancer. In the United States, less than quarter of patients survive more than five years after diagnosis, even after treatment.

“Until now, the genetic abnormalities that cause stomach cancers are still largely unknown, which partially explain the overall poor treatment outcome,” said Assoc. Prof. Patrick Tan, M.D., Ph.D., senior author of the study from the Cancer and Stem Cell Biology Program at Duke-NUS. Assoc. Prof. Tan also leads the Genomic Oncology Program at the Cancer Science Institute of Singapore and is a group leader at the Genome Institute of Singapore.

Using state-of-the-art DNA sequencing technology, the research team analysed tumor and normal tissue from stomach cancer patients, which led to the discovery of the novel gene mutations.

“This technology allows us to read the DNA sequence of the genes in each cancer genome for less than US$2,000 (SGD$2,500), an incredibly low price,” said senior co-author Assoc. Prof. Steven G. Rozen, Ph.D., who heads the Computational Systems Biology and Human Genetics Laboratory in Duke-NUS. “This is also a major team effort involving both basic scientists and clinicians.”

The team included scientists and clinicians from three research groups affiliated with Duke-NUS, including one headed by senior co-author Prof. Teh Bin Tean, M.D., Ph.D., director of the NCCS-VARI Translational Research Laboratory at the National Cancer Center Singapore.

“Our study is one of the first gastric cancer studies to investigate the vast majority of human genes at the single nucleotide level,” said Prof. Teh. “We screened 18,000 human genes and identified over 600 genes that were previously unknown to be mutated in stomach cancer.”

Two of the 600 stomach cancer-associated genes identified, FAT4 and ARID1A, proved to be particularly interesting. A further analysis of about 100 stomach tumors found these genes to be mutated in 5% and 8% of stomach cancers, respectively. In some patients, portions of the chromosome containing the two genes were found to be missing, further evidence that genetic defects affecting these genes occur frequently in stomach cancer.

Experiments in the lab demonstrated the importance of these two genes in driving stomach cancer, as manipulation of FAT4 and ARID1A function altered the growth of stomach cancer cells.

“More research is required to realize the clinical implications of these findings. ARID1A and FAT4 are likely also involved in many other cancer types, not just stomach cancer,” noted Assoc. Prof. Tan, whose research team is actively working on translating the results of this study into clinical applications.

With more than 100,000 new cases of stomach cancer each year likely to be caused by mutations in FAT4 or ARID1A, drugs against these targets may someday lead to more effective treatment of stomach tumors and other cancers.

In addition to Duke-NUS and the National Cancer Center Singapore, the study also involved collaborators from the Cancer Science Institute of Singapore; Genome Institute of Singapore; National University of Singapore; Singapore General Hospital; Van Andel Research Institute, Michigan, USA; Northwestern University, Chicago, USA; Yonsei Cancer Center, Seoul, South Korea; Queen’s University, Belfast, UK; and Welcome Trust Sanger Institute, Hinxton, UK.

Support for this study was provided by the National Medical Research Council (Ministry of Health, Singapore), as part of the Singapore Gastric Cancer Consortium. Funding was also received from the Cancer Science Institute of Singapore, Duke-NUS Graduate Medical School, Genome Institute of Singapore (Agency for Science, Technology and Research), and the Lee Foundation.

Editor's Note: Original news release can be found here.

Discovery could improve vaccines

WALTER AND ELIZA HALL INSTITUTE

Researchers have discovered how a vital immune cell recognises dead and damaged body cells, a find that could help them create 'next-generation' vaccines.

Image: plrang/iStockphoto

The discovery of how a vital immune cell recognises dead and damaged body cells could modernise vaccine technology by ‘tricking’ cells into launching an immune response, leading to next-generation vaccines that are more specific, more effective and have fewer side-effects.

Scientists from the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute have identified, for the first time, how a protein found on the surface of immune cells called dendritic cells recognises dangerous damage and trauma that could signify infection.

Dendritic cells are critical for raising the alarm about the presence of foreign invaders in the body such as viruses, bacteria and parasites as well as tumour cells and other dead or damaged cells. Also known as antigen-presenting cells, they digest and present molecules from damaged cells to other immune cells that recognise foreign invaders and launch an immune response.

The research was a collaborative effort that involved a team of immunologists, protein chemists and structural biologists. The research team was led by Dr Mireille Lahoud (formerly from the Immunology division), Dr Jian-Guo Zhang (Cancer and Haematology division), Dr Peter Czabotar (Structural Biology division) and Professor Ken Shortman (Immunology division).

Dr Lahoud said the study, published today in the journal Immunity, demonstrated that the immune system has evolved a very clever way of detecting damaged and dead cells to help promote an immune response.

“Dr Irina Caminschi and I previously identified a protein called Clec9A (C-type lectin domain family 9A) that sits on the surface of specialised types of dendritic cells and responds to damaged and dying cells,” Dr Lahoud said. “In this study we discovered that Clec9A recognises and binds to fibres of actin, internal cell proteins that are found in all cells of the body. Actin is only exposed when the cell membrane is damaged or destroyed, so it is an excellent way of finding cells that could harbour potentially dangerous infections and exposing them to the immune system.”

Professor Shortman said that exploiting Clec9A could be used to generate a new, more modern class of vaccines that are more effective and have fewer side-effects. “The Clec9A protein is one of the best targets currently known for improving immune responses,” he said. “By creating vaccines that bind to Clec9A, we can trick dendritic cells to think they have encountered a damaged cell and help to launch an immune response to the infectious agent of our choice.”

Professor Shortman said targeting Clec9A could decrease the amount of vaccine needed by 100 to 1000 times. “Traditional vaccine technology for generating immunity, such as using inactivated whole viruses or parasites for immune recognition, requires large amounts of vaccine in the hopes it will encounter the correct immune cells, and incorporates other substances (adjuvants) that are needed to signal to the immune system that something foreign is happening. We are proposing a new type of vaccine that we know will head directly to the right cell to help stimulate an immune response, and doesn’t cause the same side-effects because it is more specific,” Professor Shortman said.

Dr Lahoud said that the finding could develop or increase the efficacy of vaccines for diseases that do not currently have good preventive options, such as malaria, or HIV. “There is also the possibility that the system could be used to develop therapeutic vaccines for treating diseases, such as some forms of cancer, as well as for preventing them,” she said.

Since completing this research, Dr Lahoud and Dr Caminschi have accepted positions at the Burnet Institute.

This work was supported by the National Health and Medical Research Council of Australia, the Australian Research Council and the Victorian Government.

Editor's Note: Original news release can be found here.