Word: roundworm
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...finding that bodes well for the development of new human antibiotics, Harvard researchers have determined the identity of the trigger that causes roundworm bacteria to excrete virulent substances...
Harvard Medical School Professor Jon Clardy teamed with researchers in the department of biological chemistry and molecular pharmacology to pinpoint the amino acid proline—a component of hemolymph, or insect blood—as the trigger for the transformation of roundworm bacteria from dormant to virulent, eliciting comparisons of the bacteria to Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde...
When normal cells are hijacked by cancer cells, the natural substances are similarly triggered to aid the proliferation of the cancer. Just as the Harvard scientists were searching for the transforming factor in the case of the roundworm, the trigger of how normal cells aid cancer cells in becoming lethal tumors is “the unknown everybody is going after right now in cancer research,” Kalluri said...
Twenty years ago, Ruvkun and Ambros, then fellows working in the laboratory of MIT professor H. Robert Horvitz, began studying the genes that control the development of the Caenorhabditis elegans, a 1 mm-long roundworm that biologists often use as a model organism, from newly-hatched larva to fully-grown adult...
...must have about 100,000 genes stitched onto our 23 pairs of chromosomes, only to discover that the number is less than a third of that. Like a vaccine against pride, the sublime achievement of the human intellect reveals that we have only twice as many genes as a roundworm, about three times as many as a fruit fly, only six times as many as bakers' yeast. Some of those genes trace back to a time when we were fish; more than 200 come directly from bacteria. Our DNA provides a history book of where we come from...