Category: Scientific Advances
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Mechanisms Driving Inherited Heart Disease
Northwestern Medicine scientists have identified a novel mechanism for how mutations in desmoplakin — a protein that helps cells stick together — can lead to cardiac arrhythmias and other diseases.
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Exploring the Mechanisms of Poxvirus Replication
A study published in the journal Cell uncovers how poxviruses take control of a protein complex in order to enhance their replication and counteract an immune response in hosts.
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Long Non-Coding RNA May Play Role in Fat Metabolism
A team of scientists has identified thousands of lincRNAs — long non-coding RNA molecules produced by so-called “junk DNA” — that are unique to human fat cells and may play an important role in fat metabolism.
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Mapping Calcium Channels Provides New Insights into Disease
Northwestern Medicine scientists have discovered the activation mechanism of a calcium channel, providing new insights for future drug development targeting this calcium signaling pathway.
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Understanding the Epigenetics of Sex Determination
A team of scientists has identified a key enhancer of Sox9 — a gene critical for male sex development — and demonstrated that deleting the enhancer results in male-to-female sex reversal in animal models.
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Increased Cell Recycling Could Treat Aging-Related Conditions
Enhancing autophagy, the system that recycles old or dysfunctional cells, could have therapeutic effects in a variety of aging-related diseases, according to a pair of Northwestern Medicine studies.
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New Insights Into Nicotine’s Effect on Reward Pathways
A Northwestern Medicine study has expanded the understanding of nicotine’s influences on the brain’s reward pathway, with implications for the development of anti-addiction therapies.
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Understanding Structures That Hold Cells Together
A study, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, provides new insights into the organization of a key protein called cadherin within structures called adherens junctions, which help cells stick together.
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How the Brain Anticipates Errors and Encodes Expectations
New study demonstrates the midbrain’s role in encoding identity errors and how those are used to update expectations in the orbitofrontal cortex.
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Genome Analysis Identifies Mutations in Pediatric Cancers
Scientists found more than 100 possible cancer-causing mutations and defective alleles in a large-scale genetic analysis of pediatric cancers that was co-authored by Elizabeth Perlman, MD, and published in Nature.
