WIKIMEDIA, JULIE6301Investigators from Washington University in St. Louis and their colleagues have found that early-life malnutrition can have profound impacts on a child’s gut microbiome, even after he’s been provided with a healthy diet. Their work was published in Nature this week (June 4).
The study represents “a real step forward in terms of having a technique to look at development of the microbiome in children,” Josef Neu, a pediatrician at the University of Florida who studies gastrointestinal health of neonates and was not involved in the work, told The Scientist.
WIKIMEDIA, BIGPLANKTONTwo groups working to elucidate the mechanisms behind different metabolic phenomena stumbled on the same unexpected discovery: “there’s an immune pathway that regulates thermogenesis,” or the production of heat within adipose tissue, explained Peter Tontonoz, who studies lipid signaling at the University of California, Los Angeles, but did not participate in the research. Both teams found that the activation of beige fat into energy-burning tissue relies on an innate immunity pathway that also plays a role in pathogen response. Their work was published in Cell this week (June 5).
GRAZIANO MARTELLOInteractions among a dozen transcription factors make mouse embryonic stem cells (ESCs) capable of self-renewal, a team of researchers from the Wellcome Trust-Medical Research Council Cambridge Stem Cell Institute and the Microsoft Research Computational Science Laboratory reported in Science this week (June 5). Separately, a group led by scientists from the University of Chicago pinpointed a protein-protein interaction that enables mouse ESCs to differentiate.
“The conclusion here is that the gene network of self-renewal is simple, which should be the case,” said Sui Huang, a professor at the Institute for Systems Biology ...
