News by Subject Medicine & Health

A new randomized controlled trial shows wearing a vibrating collision device can reduce collisions in people who are blind and visually impaired, adding a potential new tool that can be used by these populations in addition to a long cane, to ensure independent travel safety.

Researchers from Osaka University have found that the attachment of a ubiquitin molecule to a protein called PCNA at the lysine 107 position causes gross chromosomal rearrangements. This lysine is located where two PCNA molecules interact, and the ubiquitin attachment to it may change the ring structure they form. The ubiquitin attachment occurs through the action of Rad8 (a ubiquitin ligase) and Mms2-Ubc4 (a ubiquitin conjugating enzyme). This implies that inhibiting the human equivalent of this ubiquitination could prevent cancer.

The neurotransmitters GABA and glutamate have complementary roles -- GABA inhibits neurons, while glutamate makes them more active. Published 22nd July in PLOS Biology, researchers led by Roi Cohen Kadosh and George Zacharopoulos from the University of Oxford show that levels of these two neurotransmitters in the intraparietal sulcus of the brain can predict mathematics ability. The study also found that the relationships between the two neurotransmitters and arithmetic fluency switched as children developed into adults.

A computational analysis of COVID-19 tests suggests that, in order to minimize the number of infections in a population, the amount of testing matters more than the sensitivity of the tests that are used. Philip Cherian and Gautam Menon of Ashoka University in Sonipat, India, and Sandeep Krishna of the National Centre for Biological Sciences TIFR, Bangalore, India, present their findings in the open-access journal PLOS Computational Biology.