Tag Archives: pathogen

Chlamydia knock out body’s own cancer defense

Hundreds of mutations occur every day in almost every cell in our body. The protein p53 is then activated in order to limit these changes in the genome: either the cell repairs the damaged DNA or, if that is not possible, it triggers the cellular suicide program. In this way, cells are normally protected against the development of cancer. As the Berlin-based team at the Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology reported last year, chlamydial infections lead to a drastic increase in the mutation rate. …

Study identifies protein that helps prevent active tuberculosis in infected patients

The discovery could help doctors identify people who are at the greatest risk for the highly contagious and potentially fatal lung disease, and it could point the way toward new treatment strategies for TB. The study, conducted in partnership with researchers from Harvard University School of Public Health and the University of Michigan School of Medicine, was published in the Aug. 20 online edition of the journal Science Translational Medicine…

Resistant against the flu

Whether it is H1N1, H5N1 or H7N9: The flu virus influenza A exists in many different types as its two coating proteins haemagglutinin (HA) and neuraminidase (NA) can be combined in various ways. Theoretically, more than 100 different pairings are possible. Additionally, the coating proteins themselves can undergo changes. This variability is one of the reasons why the flu vaccination has to be renewed every year…

Mutations of immune system found in breast cancers

Bernard Friedenson, associate professor of biochemistry and molecular genetics at UIC, looked at the DNA sequences of breast cancers from 21 different women and found mutations in genes involved in immunity in every one of them. The mutations were different in each of the breast cancers he analyzed, but all the mutations would have affected some aspect of pathogen recognition and defense, especially against viruses, Friedenson said. His results are published in the November issue of Functional & Integrative Genomics…

Portable device provides rapid, accurate diagnosis of tuberculosis, other bacterial infections

"Rapidly identifying the pathogen responsible for an infection and testing for the presence of resistance are critical not only for diagnosis but also for deciding which antibiotics to give a patient," says Ralph Weissleder, MD, PhD, director of the MGH Center for Systems Biology (CSB) and co-senior author of both papers. "These described methods allow us to do this in two to three hours, a vast improvement over standard culturing practice, which can take as much as two weeks to provide a diagnosis." Investigators at the MGH CSB previously developed portable devices capable of detecting cancer biomarkers in the blood or in very small tissue samples. Target cells or molecules are first labeled with magnetic nanoparticles, and the sample is then passed through a micro NMR system capable of detecting and quantifying levels of the target. But initial efforts to adapt the system to bacterial diagnosis had trouble finding antibodies — the detection method used in the earlier studies — that would accurately detect the specific bacteria…