After more than 20 years, scientists have solved the full-length structure of a Janus kinase
The breakthrough came on molecular biologist Christopher Garcia's birthday.
The breakthrough came on molecular biologist Christopher Garcia's birthday.
Molecular & Computational biology
Mar 10, 2022
1
836
Cavefish are seemingly insignificant: They are small, they live in tucked away places humans rarely go, and they're quite common, found on every continent except Antarctica. But researchers from the Stowers Institute for ...
Plants & Animals
Jul 20, 2020
0
391
Scientists have created the first completely artificial protein switch that can work inside living cells to modify—or even commandeer—the cell's complex internal circuitry.
Biochemistry
Jul 24, 2019
5
634
For roughly two thousand years, Chinese herbalists have treated Malaria using a root extract, commonly known as Chang Shan, from a type of hydrangea that grows in Tibet and Nepal. More recent studies suggest that halofuginone, ...
Biochemistry
Feb 12, 2012
29
0
(PhysOrg.com) -- Selenium is a trace element crucial to life -- too little or too much of it is fatal. In the July 17 issue of the journal Science, researchers at Yale University and University of Illinois at Chicago detail ...
Cell & Microbiology
Jul 16, 2009
0
1
If you're of a certain age, you'll remember Buckminster Fuller's distinctive "geodesic domes" - soccer-ball-shaped structures that the late futurist envisioned as ideal human domiciles. Tel Aviv University chemists remember ...
Bio & Medicine
Mar 19, 2009
1
1
Smallpox has a nasty history throughout the world. Caused by poxviruses, smallpox is one of the few disease-causing agents against which the human body's immune system is ineffective in its defense.
Jan 23, 2009
0
0
Autoimmune diseases are mysterious. It wasn't until the 1950s that scientists realized that the immune system could harm the organs of its own body. Even today, the fundamental causes and inner workings of most autoimmune ...
Bio & Medicine
Mar 21, 2024
0
110
A multidisciplinary study published in Nature has elucidated the structure of the machinery responsible for writing much of our "dark genome"—the 98% of our DNA that has largely unknown biological function. These results ...
Biotechnology
Dec 14, 2023
0
160
Autoimmune disorders are among the most prevalent chronic diseases across the globe. Emerging treatments for autoimmune disorders focus on "adoptive cell therapies," or those using cells from a patient's own body to achieve ...
Bio & Medicine
Nov 14, 2023
0
65
Autoimmunity is the failure of an organism to recognize its own constituent parts as self, which allows an immune response against its own cells and tissues. Any disease that results from such an aberrant immune response is termed an autoimmune disease. Autoimmunity is often caused by a lack of germ development of a target body and as such the immune response acts against its own cells and tissues. Prominent examples include Coeliac disease, diabetes mellitus type 1 (IDDM), systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE), Sjögren's syndrome, Churg-Strauss Syndrome, Hashimoto's thyroiditis, Graves' disease, idiopathic thrombocytopenic purpura, rheumatoid arthritis (RA), lupus and allergies. Autoimmune diseases are very often treated with steroids.
The misconception that an individual's immune system is totally incapable of recognizing self antigens is not new. Paul Ehrlich, at the beginning of the twentieth century, proposed the concept of horror autotoxicus, wherein a 'normal' body does not mount an immune response against its own tissues. Thus, any autoimmune response was perceived to be abnormal and postulated to be connected with human disease. Now, it is accepted that autoimmune responses are an integral part of vertebrate immune systems (sometimes termed 'natural autoimmunity'), normally prevented from causing disease by the phenomenon of immunological tolerance to self-antigens. Autoimmunity should not be confused with alloimmunity.
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