Nitrogen is a basic building block of all the body’s proteins, RNA and DNA, so cancerous tumors are greedy for this element. Researchers at the Weizmann Institute of Science, in collaboration with colleagues from the National Cancer Institute and elsewhere, have now...
As reported recently in Australian Jewish News by Shane Desianik The potential to uncover cures and personalised treatments for cancer through advancements in genomic medicine was significantly boosted earlier this month when the partnership between Australia’s Garvan...
When the body needs to repair nerve injury, the machinery is already in place. Hidden within nerve cells is a ‘one-ring-to-rule-them-all’ kind of trigger: a molecular machine that can ramp up the synthesis of the necessary proteins on demand, right at the injured...
New research from the Weizmann Institute of Science and recently published in Nature Communications has delved into the process by which small sequences of RNA – microRNAs – regulate the long ones, predicting ways in which microRNAs would bind to the messenger...
A new analysis from the Weizmann Institute of Science and partners suggests hundreds of millions more could eat from the same resources if we switched to plant-based diets. About a third of the food produced for human consumption is estimated to be lost or wasted...
Three papers published in Nature and broadly reported in the media, answer a question that scientists have been asking ever since Galileo first observed the famous stripes of Jupiter: Are the colorful bands just a pretty surface phenomenon, or are they a significant...
The question of nature vs nurture extends to our microbiome – the personal complement of mostly-friendly bacteria we carry around with us and a new study brings more hope for improving our health. Study after study has found that our microbiome affects nearly every...
Being born with a 'tabula rasa' – a clean slate – for the brain is something of a curse. Our brains are already wrinkled like walnuts by the time we are born, but babies born without these wrinkles – smooth brain syndrome – suffer from severe developmental...
New Weizmann research in bats and published in Science has identified 'social place cells' in the brain that respond to the locations of others in the spatial environment, revealing a sub-population of neurons that encode the specific location of other bats that are...
Autism typically involves the inability to read social cues, often associated with visual difficulty in interpreting facial expression. New research from the Weizmann Institute of Science, reported this week in Nature Neuroscience, suggests that the sense of smell may...
An international research team, including physicists from the Weizmann Institute of Science, has for the first time succeeded in observing a merger of two colliding neutron stars. The merger was simultaneously picked up by three detectors built for this purpose: the...
New research from the Weizmann Institute of Science published in Cell Reports and recently reported in The Times of Israel, indicates that oxygen starvation could toughen up immune T cells for cancer immunotherapy. So it is not just mountain climbers and endurance...
There is another reason why chemotherapy sometimes does not work: bacteria. In a study published in Science, researchers found that certain bacteria can be found inside human pancreatic tumours, with some containing an enzyme that inactivates a common drug used to...
The Nature Index of Innovation 2017, which points industry to institutions providing ideas behind inventions, has placed the Weizmann Institute of Science in sixth place in an international ranking of the world’s top 200 research institutions. The Index ranked the...
Researchers at the Weizmann Institute of Science have found a whole new role for one of the most famous proteins in cancer research – p53. If any gene has a celebrity status, it is the tumour suppressor p53. The gene has been featured on magazine covers, pronounced...
Heart disease remains the leading cause of death worldwide, yet the few available treatments are still mostly unsuccessful once the heart tissue has suffered damage. Mammalian hearts are actually able to regenerate and repair damage – but only up to around the...
Eight years ago he was a postdoctoral student of Nobel Laureate, Professor Ada Yonath of the Weizmann Institute of Science, spending three years in Israel studying. Now Dr Matthew Belousoff of Monash University’s Biomedicine Discovery Institute (BDI), is...
We usually think of the immune system as the body’s police force, vigilantly patrolling for invading pathogens and toxins to destroy—but a new study published in Nature Communications from Professor Orly Reiner’s laboratory in the Weizmann Institute's Department of...
Small aquarium fish that fail to swim toward schools of fish on the side of their tanks are yielding clues to human conduct. New research in the laboratory of Professor Gil Levkowitz of the Weizmann Institute of Science’s Molecular Cell Biology Department follows the...
At times we all lose our nerve. But certain nerve losses, crucial during early nervous system development, may later play a role in diseases like amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) or peripheral neuropathy. New research at the Weizmann Institute of Science is...
Professor Yosef Yarden, a member of the Weizmann Institute’s Department of Biological Regulation, has been awarded the 2017 Israel Prize in Life Sciences. The Prize, which is the country’s highest honour, will be presented to Professor Yarden in celebration of his...
People might eat greens to lower their cholesterol levels, but contrary to common belief, most plants are not cholesterol-free. Reported recently in Nature Plants, researchers at the Weizmann Institute of Science have now deciphered the biochemical reactions...
If you get up in the morning feeling energetic and clearheaded, you can thank your liver for manufacturing glucose before breakfast time. Among a host of other vital functions, it also clears our body of toxins and produces most of the carrier proteins in our blood....
In addition to the classic stress response in our bodies – an acute reaction that gradually abates when the threat passes – our bodies appear to have a separate mechanism that deals only with chronic stress. New Weizmann Institute of Science findings, recently...