Business-CIC BigScience Newswire

• Stimulus grant to help MSU team improve drug development from plants
  Scientists at Michigan State University are receiving nearly $3 million from the National Institutes of Health to uncover how several popular plants make medicinal compounds. The funding, part of a larger $6 million award via the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, will provide scientists the resources to understand exactly which genes are involved in the synthesis of medicinal chemicals in several plants -- clearing the way for cheaper and more effective ways to produce drugs.
• MIMICKING NATURE, SCIENTISTS CAN NOW EXTEND REDOX POTENTIALS
  New insight into how nature handles some fundamental processes is guiding researchers in the design of tailor-made proteins for applications such as artificial photosynthetic centers, long-range electron transfers, and fuel-cell catalysts for energy conversion.
• Hybrid molecules show promise for exploring, treating Alzheimer's
  One of the many mysteries of Alzheimer's disease is how protein-like snippets called amyloid-beta peptides, which clump together to form plaques in the brain, may cause cell death, leading to the disease's devastating symptoms of memory loss and other mental difficulties.
• Longer toes, unique ankle structure aid sprinters
  University Park, Pa. -- Longer toes and a unique ankle structure provide sprinters with the burst of acceleration that separates them from other runners, according to biomechanists. "At the start of a sprint the only way a runner can speed up is through the reaction force that results from the action of leg muscles pushing on the ground," said Stephen Piazza, associate professor of kinesiology, Penn State. "Long toes provide sprinters the advantage of maintaining maximum contact with the ground just a little bit longer than other runners."
• MSU researcher: Obesity significantly cuts odds of successful pregnancy
  Obese women are as much as 28 percent less likely to become pregnant and have a successful pregnancy, according to research that earned a Michigan State University professor a national award. The findings by Barbara Luke, a researcher in the MSU College of Human Medicine's Department of Obstetrics, Gynecology and Reproductive Biology, focused on data of nearly 50,000 women using assisted reproductive technology.
• Birds' selective fall hearing may hold lessons for humans, researchers say
  It appears that some birds have found a simple solution when they are not looking for a mate in the fall - they just ignore love's call by muting their hearing. Purdue biologists studying how both birds and humans adapt to noise have found that some bird species have degraded hearing ability in the fall - when it's not mating season - as well as in other select situations. The findings have potential implications for hearing loss in humans, said Jeffrey Lucas, a professor of biological sciences.
• RESEARCHERS TO PERFORM SEX CHANGE OPERATION ON PAPAYA
  The complicated sex life of the papaya is about to get even more interesting, thanks to a $3.1 million grant from the National Science Foundation. The NSF grant will fund basic research on the papaya sex chromosomes and will lead to the development of a papaya that produces only hermaphrodite offspring, an advance that will enhance papaya health while radically cutting papaya growers’ production costs and their use of fertilizers and water.
• UIC Researchers Have Immune Cells Running in Circles
  Researchers at the University of Illinois at Chicago College of Medicine have identified the important role a protein plays in the body's first line of defense in directing immune cells called neutrophils toward the site of infection or injury.
• $2M NIH Grant to Fund Study on Pain in Sickle Cell Disease
  Researchers at the University of Illinois at Chicago will use a $2 million federal grant to investigate why patients with sickle cell disease experience chronic pain -- and to develop drugs to treat it.
• Study reveals second pathway to feeling your heartbeat
  A new study suggests that the inner sense of our cardiovascular state, our "interoceptive awareness" of the heart pounding, relies on two independent pathways, contrary to what had been asserted by prominent researchers. The University of Iowa study was published online this week in the journal Nature Neuroscience.

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