Medical research

A potential active ingredient for nerve regeneration

Nerve fibers (axons) transmit brain and spinal cord signals through nerves to target muscles or skin, and vice versa. Damage to these fibers thus leads to a disruption of connections and, consequently, to paralysis or numbness. ...

Medical research

Human cells building 'molecular highways' captured for first time

Researchers at the Center for Genomic Regulation (CRG) in Barcelona and the Spanish National Cancer Research Center (CNIO) in Madrid have captured the world's first high-resolution images of the earliest moments of microtubule ...

Neuroscience

Overlooked tau-RNA interaction may play key role in dementia

Sometimes in science, "Eureka!" moments happen with surprisingly little effort. Sometimes they take years or decades to emerge. Such was the case with Brian Kraemer's research team and their recent study of the protein tau ...

Neuroscience

Research team models neuron traffic jams in the brain

Carnegie Mellon University's Jessica Zhang and Angran Li have developed a new way to model material transport regulation in neurons, focusing on the "traffic jams" that occur in these neural pathways. The traffic jams play ...

Medical research

A new hope for a therapy against retinitis pigmentosa

Retinitis pigmentosa, a degenerative genetic disease of the eye, is characterized by progressive vision loss, usually leading to blindness. In some patients, structural defects in the photoreceptor cells have been observed, ...

HIV & AIDS

Investigating mechanisms behind early HIV-1 infection

Northwestern Medicine investigators have discovered that a microtubule regulatory protein inhibits early HIV type 1 (HIV-1) infection, according to findings published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Medical research

Slowed cell division causes microcephaly

The birth of a human being requires billions of cell divisions to go from a fertilized egg to a baby. At each of these divisions, the genetic material of the mother cell duplicates itself to be equally distributed between ...

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Microtubule

Microtubules are a component of the cytoskeleton. These rope-like polymers of tubulin can grow as long as 25 micrometers and are highly dynamic. The outer diameter of microtubule is about 25 nm. Microtubules are important for maintaining cell structure, providing platforms for intracellular transport, forming the spindle during mitosis, as well as other cellular processes. There are many proteins that bind to the microtubule, including motor proteins such as kinesin and dynein, severing proteins like katanin, and other proteins important for regulating microtubule dynamics.

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