Regulatory decision suggests high bar for obesity drugsThe US FDA's Endocrinologic and Metabolic Drugs Advisory Committee voted 10–6 against the use of Vivus' investigational product Qnexa for the treatment of obesity.The lowdown: The FDA's advisory committee's negative vote against Qnexa — a
Despite the existence of established, effective therapies for hypertension, new methods of blood pressure and cardiovascular risk reduction are still needed. Novel approaches are targeted towards treating resistant hypertension, improving blood-pressure control, and achieving further risk reduction beyond blood-pressure lowering. Modulation of the renin–angiotensin–aldosterone system
A laser-based method of preparing nanostructures gives good control over their shape and composition
Advances in nanomagnetics research have brought powerful applications in magnetic sensing technology, but so far no high-resolution magnetic-imaging tool is available to characterize complex, often buried, nanoscale structures.
Some genes exclusively express only their maternal or paternal copy. Studies of the brain extend the list of such imprinted genes by an order of magnitude, highlighting their spatial and temporal regulation.
Appl. Phys. Lett.97, 043703 (2010) 10.1063/1.3467263The use of major crop plants such as maize (corn) in biofuel production is a source of contention, but there are other options; including photosynthetic algae, which can be grown in bioreactors. Radhakrishna Sureshkumar
Nuclear pores form post-mitotically but also during interphase and over the course of cell cycle, their number doubles as does nuclear volume. It is now shown that the appearance of new nuclear pores during interphase is cdk-dependent, though nuclear growth is not, suggesting that these two processes are regulated distinctly.
Recently described tiny RNAs (tiRNAs) are derived from sequences immediately downstream of transcriptional start sites. Here a second class of nuclear ∼17–18 nucleotide small RNAs is described and found to map to the splice donor site of internal exons.
Multi-ion pores produce a lower conduction rate when faced with a mixture of two conducting ions than with either single one, in what is called the anomalous mole fraction effect. Now high-resolution structures of the bacterial K+ channel MthK pore, together with functional studies, reveal that K+ occupancy of specific sites in the selectivity filter can block the passage of Na+ ions.
