Gut microbiota influences the ability to lose weight
Peer-Reviewed Publication
Gut microbiota influences the ability to lose weight in humans, according to new research. The findings were published this week in mSystems, an open-access journal of the American Society for Microbiology. “Your gut microbiome can help or cause resistance to weight loss and this opens up the possibility to try to alter the gut microbiome to impact weight loss,” said lead study author Christian Diener, Ph.D., a research scientist at the Institute for Systems Biology in Seattle, Washington.
Researchers have discovered a material that is only four atoms thick and allows for the study of the motion of charged particles in only two dimensions. Such studies could lead to pivotal discoveries in solid electrolytes for batteries and other applications.
At present-day, more than ten percent of all global marriages occur among first or second cousins. While cousin-marriages are common practice in some societies, unions between close relatives are discouraged in others. In a new study, researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology (MPI-EVA) in Leipzig, Germany, and the University of Chicago investigated how common close parental relatedness was in our ancestors.
An international collaboration has identified what may be the oldest work of art, a sequence of hand and footprints discovered on the Tibetan Plateau.
The Texas Heart Institute has announced that a research team led by its Vice President for Research Dr. Darren Woodside and Dr. Peter Vanderslice, of the Molecular Cardiology Research Laboratory, has pinpointed a game-changing application for the 7HP349 integrin activator – an immunostimulant developed by Houston-based 7 Hills Pharma, which Woodside and Vanderslice both helped to establish. Working in tandem with 7 Hills and a research group at the University of Texas Medical Branch (UTMB) led by Dr. Nisha Garg, the team have published a new study in Nature Partner Journal Vaccines that offers an innovative approach to enhancing the immune response in individuals by utilizing 7HP349 as an oral medication taken in the days following a vaccine dose in order to strengthen its effectiveness.
Hospitalized patients with opioid use disorder died at a rate comparable to those who suffered heart attacks within a year of hospital discharge, according to a new study from Oregon Health & Science University. The study is the first to characterize the rate at which people with opioid use disorder died a year after they leave the hospital.
Researchers at the Salk Institute’s Harnessing Plants Initiative (HPI) have established a five-year, $6.2 million collaboration with Nadia Shakoor, PhD, principal investigator and senior research scientist, and her team at the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center to identify and develop sorghum plants that can better capture and store atmospheric carbon.
Yan Cui, PhD, associate professor in the UTHSC Department of Genetics, Genomics, and Informatics, recently received a $1.7 million grant from the National Cancer Institute for a study titled “Algorithm-based prevention and reduction of cancer health disparity arising from data inequality.” Dr. Cui’s project aims to prevent and reduce health disparities caused by ethnically-biased data in cancer-related genomic and clinical omics studies. His objective is to establish a new machine learning paradigm for use with multiethnic clinical omics data.
The neurotransmitter dopamine influences the activity of a wide variety of brain areas. A deficiency of this substance can have drastic consequences: The death of dopamine-producing nerve cells in the substantia nigra - a particularly sensitive part of the brain - is what causes the core symptoms of Parkinson's disease. An international team from the University of Bonn has now investigated the role played by the transcription factor BCL11A in mice and human cells. If this important factor is missing, the neurons are even more sensitive and more likely to die. The researchers suspect that BCL11A plays a protective role for neurons. The study is now published in Cell Reports.
Epigenetic changes in old age increase risk of osteoporosis and bone fractures
The study, published in Genome Medicine, found that predicting a patient's future rheumatoid arthritis prognosis could be possible by zeroing in on the trillions of bacteria, viruses and fungi that inhabit their gastrointestinal tract, known as the gut microbiome. The findings suggest that gut microbes and a patient's outcome of rheumatoid arthritis are connected.
Net of history, infant and postneonatal mortality rates are substantively higher under Republican-controlled state legislatures than under non-Republican–controlled ones, according to a new study in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, published by Elsevier. Findings suggest that effects may be greater for Black infants than for White infants.