Lifeboat Foundation

Are watery eyes a symptom of cancer?

Watery eyes can be a sign of cancer, says Gombos. “Cancer can involve the system producing tears, but more commonly the cancer involves the drainage system, so the tears don’t drain properly,” he adds.

However, watery eyes alone don’t correspond directly to a particular type of cancer, and the presence of watery eyes doesn’t predict the severity or stage of cancer, say both Al-Zubidi and Gombos.

There are many microbes in our environment; many are harmless, some perform important functions, and some may pose a threat. Aspergillus fumigatus, for example, is a fungus that can be often be found in soil, as well as decaying organic matter; it has a crucial role in recycling carbon and nitrogen on our planet. A. fumigatus is also widely distributed in the air, so on average, people probably inhale a few hundred spores of A. fumigatus every day. This fungus is highly adaptive, and it can also evade weakened immune defenses in immunocompromised individuals to cause lung infections, called Aspergillosis. There are limited treatment options for this disease, and it’s difficult to treat effectively.

Scientists have now analyzed genetic data from about 250 strains of this fungus, and data from 40 Aspergillosis patients that characterized the lung microbiomes of these individuals. This showed that when people are infected with A. fumigatus, the composition of their lung microbiome begins to change dramatically. The findings have been reported in Nature Communications.

Researchers from the United Kingdom hope that a new, publicly available database they have created will shrink, not grow, over time. That’s because it is a compendium of the thousands of understudied proteins encoded by genes in the human genome, whose existence is known but whose functions are mostly not.

The database, dubbed the “unknome,” is the work of Matthew Freeman of the Dunn School of Pathology, University of Oxford, England, and Sean Munro of MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, England, and colleagues, and is described in the open access journal PLOS Biology. Their own investigations of a subset of proteins in the database reveal that a majority contribute to important cellular functions, including development and resilience to stress.

The sequencing of the human genome has made it clear that it encodes thousands of likely protein sequences whose identities and functions are still unknown. There are multiple reasons for this, including the tendency to focus scarce research dollars on already-known targets, and the lack of tools, including antibodies, to interrogate cells about the function of these proteins. But the risks of ignoring these proteins are significant, the authors argue, since it is likely that some, perhaps many, play important roles in critical cell processes, and may both provide insight and targets for therapeutic intervention.

Study explores perspectives on the applications of somatic genome editing.

DNA sequencing technology, i.e., determining the order of nucleotide bases in a DNA molecule, is central to personalized medicine and disease diagnostics, yet even the fastest technologies require hours, or days, to read a complete sequence. Now, a multi-institutional research team led by The Institute of Scientific and Industrial Research (SANKEN) at Osaka University, has developed a technique that could lead to a new paradigm for genomic analysis.

DNA sequences are sequential arrangements of the nucleotide bases, i.e., the four letters that encode information invaluable to the proper functioning of an organism. For example, changing the identity of just one nucleotide out of the several billion nucleotide pairs in the human genome can lead to a serious medical condition. The ability to read DNA sequences quickly and reliably is thus essential to some urgent point-of-care decisions, such as how to proceed with a particular chemotherapy treatment.

Unfortunately, genome analysis remains challenging for classical computers, and it’s in this context that quantum computers show promise. Quantum computers use quantum bits instead of the zeroes and ones of classical computers, facilitating an exponential increase in computational speed.

Immune system changes in the pregnant body that protect the fetus appear to extend to the brain, where a decrease in immune cells late in gestation may factor into the onset of maternal behavior, new research in rats suggests.

In adult female rats that had never given birth—which typically don’t like being around babies—depletion of these cells sped up their care for rat newborns that were placed in their cage.

The loss of these cells, called microglia, and the related uptick in motherly attentiveness were also associated with changes to neuron activity in several regions of the rat brain, suggesting shifts in immune function have a role in regulating maternal behavior.

However, there are no drugs that specifically block MAPK4 that could be tested to reduce tumor growth. Instead, Yang and his colleagues explored an alternative approach.

We showed that blocking both AKT and PDK1 effectively repressed MAPK4-induced cancer cell growth, suggesting a potential therapeutic strategy to treat MAPK4-dependent cancers, such as a subset of TNBC, prostate and lung cancer.

“In this study we have not only advanced our understanding of the molecular mechanism underlying the tumor-promoting activity of MAPK4, we also have found a potential novel therapeutic approach for human cancers,” Yang said.

© 2023 American Academy of Allergy, Asthma & Immunology. All Rights Reserved.

For many people, they are tiny pests. These fruit flies that sometimes hover over a bowl of peaches or a bunch of bananas. But for a dedicated community of researchers, fruit flies are an excellent model organism and source of information into how neurons self-organize during the insect’s early development and form a complex, fully functioning nervous system.

That’s the scientific story on display in this beautiful image of a larval fruit fly’s developing nervous system. Its subtext is: fundamental discoveries in the fruit fly, known in textbooks as Drosophila melanogaster, provide basic clues into the development and repair of the human nervous system. That’s because humans and fruit flies, though very distantly related through the millennia, still share many genes involved in their growth and development. In fact, 60 percent of the Drosophila genome is identical to ours.

Once hatched, as shown in this image, a larval fly uses neurons (magenta) to sense its environment. These include neurons that sense the way its body presses against the surrounding terrain, as needed to coordinate the movements of its segmented body parts and crawl in all directions.