La Jolla, CA – Come summer, we will once again marvel at the amazing athletic skills of Olympic athletes while in fact, the simple act of walking is no less remarkable. Just to prevent us from toppling over, the neuromuscular circuitry that controls all bodily movements relies on constant sensory feedback from the periphery to fine-tune its commands to hundreds of muscles.
La Jolla, CA – The Salk Institute announced today that Irwin and Joan Jacobs have established a $10 million matching fund to support the creation of 10 Senior Scientist Endowed Chairs. By providing a match, this fund enables 10 donors to each make a gift of $2 million to create and name a highly prestigious and permanent chair. The Irwin and Joan Jacobs Leadership Challenge will add a $1 million match to each gift, thus providing each Chair with a $3 million endowment. Each named chair will provide key support to a Salk Institute Senior scientist.
La Jolla, CA – Those spindly plants that desperately try to reach for a break in the canopy formed by larger plants all suffer from the same affliction: Shade avoidance syndrome or SAS. Now, the molecular details of SAS have been brought to light by researchers at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies.
La Jolla, CA – Dr. Clodagh O’Shea, an assistant professor in the Molecular and Cellular Biology Laboratory at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, has been selected for the 2007 Young Investigator’s Award in Gene Therapy for Cancer. She will receive $500,000 over a three-year period to develop the “next generation oncolytic adenoviruses for p53-selective tumor therapy.”
La Jolla, CA – The fifth annual Pearl Meister Greengard Prize, an international award to recognize outstanding women scientists, has been awarded to Salk professor Vicki Lundblad, Ph.D., for her groundbreaking work in telomere biology.
La Jolla, CA – A team of scientists at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies has discovered that the roundworm C. elegans constructs the protective tips of its chromosomes – known as telomeres – with a little more panache than do mammals, a finding that could deepen our understanding of the interrelationship of aging and cancer.
La Jolla, CA – Continually revved up insulin production, the kind that results from overeating and obesity, slowly dulls the body’s response to insulin. As a result, blood sugar levels start to creep up, setting the stage for diabetes-associated complications such as blindness, stroke and renal failure. To make matters even worse, chronically elevated blood sugar concentrations exacerbate insulin resistance.
La Jolla, CA – Perhaps the oldest question in the world is “where do I come from?”
La Jolla, CA – A nuclear receptor protein, known for controlling the ability of cells to burn fat, also exerts powerful anti-inflammatory effects in arteries, suppressing atherosclerosis in mice prone to developing the harmful plaques, according to new research by scientists at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies and the Harvard School of Public Health.
La Jolla, CA – For quite some time now, scientists suspected the so-called hexosamine pathway – a small side business of the main sugar processing enterprise inside a cell – to be involved in the development of insulin resistance. But they could never quite put their finger on the underlying mechanism.
La Jolla, CA – The editors of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) selected the article “Targeted delivery of proteins across the blood-brain barrier” by Brian J. Spencer, Ph.D. and Inder M. Verma, Ph.D., for the 2007 Cozzarelli Prize, which recognizes papers that reflect the highest standards of scientific excellence and originality.
La Jolla, CA – Tatyana Sharpee, an assistant professor in the Laboratory for Computational Biology, has been named an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow. She will receive a grant of $50,000 for a two-year period.
La Jolla, CA – Controlled by a tightly regulated choreography that determines what should go up and what should go down, plants develop along a polar axis with a root on one end and a shoot on the other.
La Jolla, CA – The Vilcek Foundation has named Salk professor Dr. Inder Verma as the recipient of its 2008 prize in biomedical science. The honor is awarded annually to foreign-born individuals for their extraordinary contributions to society in the United States.
La Jolla, CA – Boosted by physical and mental exercise, neural stem cells continue to sprout new neurons throughout life, but the exact function of these newcomers has been the topic of much debate. Removing a genetic master switch that maintains neural stem cells in their proliferative state finally gave researchers at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies some definitive answers.
La Jolla, CA – A gift of $11.5 million has been received on behalf of the Nomis Foundation, a European foundation being established by G.H. “Heini” Thyssen, a long-time friend and Trustee of the Salk Institute, to fund appointments for new investigators specialized in microbial pathogenesis and viral and cellular immunology. The gift, which will launch the Immunobiology and Microbial Pathogenesis program, fulfills a critical component of the Institute’s strategic scientific plan.
La Jolla, CA – Ipsen (Euronext:FR0010259150; IPN) and the Salk Institute for Biological Studies announced today that they will be signing a memorandum of understanding setting the framework for the creation of the Ipsen Life Sciences Program at the Salk Institute. The mission of the partnership is to advance knowledge in the field of proliferative and degenerative diseases through fundamental and applied biology research.
La Jolla, CA – Early stage breast cancer that has not yet invaded the surrounding tissues may already contain highly motile cells, which brings the tumor one step closer to metastasis, report researchers at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies.
La Jolla, CA – Cells keep a close watch over the transcriptome – the totality of all parts of the genome that are expressed in any given cell at any given time. Researchers at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies and the University of Missouri-Kansas City teamed up to peel back another layer of transcriptional regulation and gain new insight into how genomes work.
La Jolla, CA – Suppressing a cellular cleanup-mechanism known as autophagy can accelerate the accumulation of protein aggregates that leads to neural degeneration. In an upcoming issue of Autophagy, scientists at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies report for the first time that the opposite is true as well: Boosting autophagy in the nervous system of fruit flies prevented the age-dependent accumulation of cellular damage in neurons and promoted longevity.
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