LA JOLLA, CA—In the spring following a forest fire, trees that survived the blaze explode in new growth and plants sprout in abundance from the scorched earth. For centuries, it was a mystery how seeds, some long dormant in the soil, knew to push through the ashes to regenerate the burned forest.
LA JOLLA, CA—Liver fibrosis results from an excessive accumulation of tough, fibrous scar tissue and occurs in most types of chronic liver diseases. In industrialized countries, the main causes of liver injury leading to fibrosis include chronic hepatitis virus infection, excess alcohol consumption and, increasingly, nonalcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH).
LA JOLLA, CA—Salk researcher Terrence J. Sejnowski,
professor and head of the Computational Neurobiology Laboratory, has been elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a distinction awarded annually to global leaders in business, government, public affairs, the arts and popular culture as well as biomedical research.
LA JOLLA, CA—On April 12, the Salk Institute unanimously approved the election of Sanjay Jha, former CEO of Motorola Mobility, to its Board of Trustees.
LA JOLLA, CA—On the eve of the anniversary of the first polio vaccine, the Salk Institute was honored with a generous gift from Michael Crick, the son of the late Nobel laureate and Salk faculty member, Francis Crick.
LA JOLLA, CA—The Salk Institute is pleased to announce the promotions of faculty members, John Reynolds to the rank of full professor and Clodagh O’Shea and Tatyana Sharpee to associate professors based on recommendations by the Salk faculty and nonresident fellows, and approved by President William R. Brody and the Institute’s Board of Trustees.
LA JOLLA, CA—The irony of getting away to a remote place is you usually have to fight traffic to get there. After hours of dodging dangerous drivers, you finally arrive at that quiet mountain retreat, stare at the gentle waters of a pristine lake, and congratulate your tired self on having “turned off your brain.”
LA JOLLA, CA—The Salk Institute is pleased to announce Step into Discovery, a day featuring the inaugural 5K Walk for Salk and Explore Salk, a free community open house offering behind-the-scenes tours of the world-renowned Institute.
LA JOLLA, CA—Salk neuroscientist Terrence J. Sejnowski joined President Barack Obama in Washington, D.C., on April 2, 2013, at the launch of the Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies (BRAIN) Initiative—a major Administration neuroscience effort that advances and builds upon collaborative scientific work by leading brain researchers such as Salk’s own Sejnowski.
LA JOLLA, CA—On the eve of the 60th anniversary of the discovery of DNA, James Watson, a legendary scientist who helped changed the history of molecular biology, spoke at the Salk Institute about his recent work in cancer research.
LA JOLLA, CA—The American Association for Cancer Research (AACR), the world’s oldest and largest professional organization dedicated to accelerating scientific progress to prevent and cure cancer, has selected four Salk scientists and two of the Institute’s nonresident fellows to be inducted in its first class of the fellows of the AACR Academy.
LA JOLLA, CA—Ever find yourself racking your brain on a Monday morning to remember where you put your car keys?
LA JOLLA, CA—A team of scientists, including researchers from the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, has discovered that a drug used to treat canker sores appears to reverse obesity in mice. The findings, published February 10 in Nature Medicine, may lead to new weight-loss medications that could have an impact on growing obesity and diabetes rates in the United States.
The drug, amlexanox, has been on the market for more than 15 years. Different formulations of the drug are used in Japan to treat asthma and in the United States to treat canker sores. Human clinical trials for weight loss are expected to begin later this year.
LA JOLLA, CA—Scientists at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies have identified patterns of epigenomic diversity that not only allow plants to adapt to various environments, but could also benefit crop production and the study of human diseases.
Ian Trowbridge, an esteemed researcher who had been a member of the Salk faculty for almost three decades, passed away on Wednesday, February 6.
LA JOLLA, CA—You might think you have nothing in common with mustard except hotdogs. Yet based on research in a plant from the mustard family, Salk scientists have discovered a possible explanation for how organisms, including humans, directly regulate chemical reactions that quickly adjust the growth of organs. These findings overturn conventional views of how different body parts coordinate their growth, shedding light on the development of more productive plants and new therapies for metabolic diseases.
LA JOLLA, CA—In this week’s Nature Methods, Salk researchers share a how-to secret for biologists: code for Amazon Cloud that significantly reduces the time necessary to process data-intensive microscopic images.
LA JOLLA, CA—Ever since discovering a decade ago that a gene altered in lung cancer regulated an enzyme used in therapies against diabetes, Reuben Shaw has wondered if drugs originally designed to treat metabolic diseases could also work against cancer.
LA JOLLA, CA—The Salk Institute for Biological Studies has received a $42 million gift-the largest in the Institute’s history-to establish the Helmsley Center for Genomic Medicine (HCGM), a research center dedicated to decoding the common genetic factors underlying many complex chronic human diseases.
LA JOLLA, CA—For humans to grow and to replace and heal damaged tissues, the body’s cells must continually reproduce, a process known as “cell division,” by which one cell becomes two, two become four, and so on. A key question of biomedical research is how chromosomes, which are duplicated during cell division so that each daughter cell receives an exact copy of a person’s genome, are arranged during this process.
