From the birthplace of Dolly the sheep comes another advancement in cloning, as scientists at Scotland’s University of Edinburgh have reportedly created brain tissue from patients suffering from mental illnesses.
According to NewsCore reports, researchers at the university’s Centre for Regenerative Medicine (CRM) have developed a method of taking a patient’s skin sample, turning it into stem cells, and then directing them to grow into brain cells. They then study those man-made brain cells hoping to learn more about patients suffering from ailments such as bipolar depression and schizophrenia.
“A patient’s neurons …

Your genes could be a strong predictor of whether you stray into a life of crime, according to a research paper co-written by UT Dallas criminologist Dr. J.C. Barnes.
“Examining the Genetic Underpinnings to Moffitt’s Developmental Taxonomy: A Behavior Genetic Analysis” detailed the study’s findings in a recent issue of Criminology. The paper was written with Dr. Kevin M. Beaver from Florida State University and Dr. Brian B. Boutwell at Sam Houston State University.
The study focused on whether genes are likely to cause a person to become a life-course persistent offender, …

Persistent bacterial infections can make a mess of our bowels and the usual treatment method of adding antibiotics usually causes even more disruptions. Researchers, however, are fine tuning a treatment that involves adding a sample of the stool of another which jump-starts the infected patients immune system, reports Kerry Grens for Reuters Health.
The procedure is used primarily to treat patients with infections from the bacterium Clostridium difficile. “It’s unbelievably effective,” said Dr. Neil Stollman, who was not involved in this research, but who has reported similar success using colonoscopy to …

Scientists have improved the eyesight of two people who were nearly blind by injecting their eyes with stem cells from human embryos.
One patient, a 51-year-old graphic artist, had suffered from Stargardt’s disease, the most common form of macular degeneration in young patients, since she was a teenager.  Her condition had progressively worsened to the point she was unable to read a single letter on a standard eye chart and was legally blind.
A second patient, aged 78, suffered from dry macular degeneration, the leading cause of blindness in the elderly, and …

The same mechanism that stabilises the DNA in the cell nucleus is also important for the structure and function of vertebrate muscle cells. This has been established by RUB-researchers led by Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Linke (Institute of Physiology) in cooperation with American and German colleagues. An enzyme attaches a methyl group to the protein Hsp90, which then forms a complex with the muscle protein titin. When the researchers disrupted this protein network through genetic manipulation in zebrafish the muscle structure partly disintegrated. The scientists have thus shown that methylation also …