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 CARDIOLOGY: Mutation that Disrupts Calcium Signaling May Be One Cause of Heart Failure
A rare case of familial heart failure has shown that a loss of calcium regulation in heart cells may directly cause this hereditary form of the disease. It may also be the culprit in other forms of heart failure. Jonathan Seidman, Christine Seidman, Joachim Schmitt (l to r), and colleagues found that in one family, a mutation in the small protein phospholamban led to an inability to pump calcium back into reservoirs in cardiac muscle cells. Though abnormal calcium signaling is a feature of heart failure, this study, published in the Feb. 28 Science, provides the first evidence that a loss of calcium regulation can cause the failure. The team developed transgenic mice for their work that now offer a model for further investigation of the link between heart failure and calcium signaling.
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 PUBLIC HEALTH: Software Rings Early Alarm on Bioterrorism
Digital detectives Kenneth Mandl, Marcello Pagano, and Ben Reis (l to r) have developed earlier, more reliable ways to identify emerging biological outbreaks. Reported in the Feb. 18 (online Feb. 3) Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, their software improvements have immediate practical application in new surveillance systems being developed to detect bioterrorist attacks in time for an effective public health response. Starting with 10 years of emergency visit data, the researchers expanded the window of analysis and modeled specific patterns of outbreak, then tested their formulas against simulated outbreaks.
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 CELL BIOLOGY: Molecular Movies Catch Mitochondria Dividing
Ramiro Massol, Tom Kirchhausen (l to r), and Aster Legesse-Miller have recently trained their microscopes inside the cells of living yeast and captured mitochondria in the act of dividing. Their images, which appear in the Feb. 6 online version of Molecular Biology of the Cell are remarkable not just from a technical viewpoint--they are among the first 3-D images of living mitochondria--but also from a scientific perspective. They are beginning to rewrite our understanding of mitochondrial behavior.
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Copyright 2003 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College
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