Those of you who know anything about British popular culture will no doubt be familiar with Benny Hill. The Benny Hill Show was long-running and immensely popular—although it was often accused of being sexist, it was the men who were usually shown up to be idiots (admittedly in the presence of scantily clad females). Very…
A piece of basic research made it into even mainstream news sites yesterday: the finding that the peptide thymosin ß4 can prime adult cardiac epithelium to produce new muscle cells after a heart attack. Getting the heart to regenerate itself after injury is a goal of the British Heart Foundation’s campaign to ‘Mend Broken Hearts’,…
It might be on the edge of Biology, but hey, we have an Ecology Faculty and climate change is going to affect us all. Are you a climate scientist? Parental advisory–some ‘strong’ language
Section Head Ken Baldwin is a physiologist and biophysicist who studies the regulation of motor protein gene expression in muscle. Transcription of myosin isoforms is affected by exercise and hormones. Intriguingly, epigenetic mechanisms appear to be involved, and Ken is particularly interested in the effects of low gravity on the expression of heavy chain myosin…
How exactly do you mend a broken heart? We’ve been looking at the British Heart Foundation’s ‘Mending Broken Hearts‘ campaign recently, with videos from the legend Desmond Julian, and a BHF-funded Fellow, Paul Riley.
You might remember an interview with Desmond Julian here at NS. We talked to Desmond because it fitted well with the launch of the British Heart Foundation’s Mending Broken Hearts campaign complete with talking fish. Last month we also published the results of our Best Places to Work (Postdocs) survey, in which University College London…
One of the highlights, if you can call it that, of working in Cambridge was the not infrequent chance to visit the now-defunct Synchrotron Radiation Source at Daresbury. Although I spent many hours in one or other of the experimental hutches, coaxing diffraction patterns from reluctant crystals, I never got to see inside any of…
Professor Geoffrey Burnstock proposed the purinergic hypothesis, describing what is probably the most primitive (oldest) signalling pathway in the body. He cloned the first purinergic receptor in the early ’90s, and is now excited about the pathophysiology of these receptors, and especially their application to potential treatments for many diseases, including epilepsy, Alzheimer’s and cystic…
Probing the behaviour of anything inside a cell can be a bit tricky. Jaideep Mathur, at the University of Guelph, Ontario, has come up with a series of photoconvertible fluorescent probes that can be used inside plant cells. Mathur uses them to study the insides of plant cells. One of these probes is an F-actin…
Determining the structures of neurotransmitter transporters is not only technically difficult (integral membrane proteins are notoriously recalcitrant subjects), but also the subject of much controversy. Knowledge of structure is essential to understanding mechanism, which can of course lead to more rational therapeutic design. Neurotransmitter transporters are important for the re-uptake of neurotransmitters after synapse firing:…
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