News

What can we learn from prairie voles, Burmese pythons, shortfin mollies, and naked mole rats? Researchers from across the world are studying unusual laboratory animals with astonishing traits in their quest to answer important questions in the fields of biomedicine and neuroscience.

CU Boulder engineers and faculty from the Consortium for Fibrosis Research & Translation (CFReT) at the CU Anschutz Medical Campus have teamed up to develop biomaterial-based “mimics” of heart tissues to measure patients’ responses to an aortic valve replacement procedure, offering new insight into the ways that cardiac tissue re-shapes...

Telomerase reverse transcriptase (TERT), an enzyme associated with nearly all malignant human cancers, is even more diverse and unconventional than previously realized, new University of Colorado Boulder research finds. Telomeres, the protective ends of chromosomes, help to maintain genomic stability. In most normal adult human cells, the telomeres eventually shorten...

Healthy cells have a built-in self-destruct mechanism: Strands of DNA called "telomeres" act as protective caps on the ends of your chromosomes. Each time a cell replicates, telomeres get a little shorter. Think of it like filing your nails with an Emory board - after enough filing, you hit your...

CU Boulder and Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) biochemists have revealed a key regulatory process in a gene-suppressing protein group that could hold future applications for drug discovery and clinical treatment of diseases, including cancer. The new research, recently published in the journal Genes & Development , centered on a...

I just got back from the Evolution Meeting in Providence and I’m full of information and ideas for research. I had the opportunity to reconnect with past colleagues and meet some new people. Other CU Boulder folks attended, including the labs of Dan Doak, Nancy Emery, Nolan Kane, Stacy Smith,...

Undergraduate and graduate students at CU Boulder will soon get new opportunities to pursue careers in the biomedical industry. At a meeting this week, members of the CU Board of Regents voted to approve a series of new degrees in biomedical engineering offered by the CU Boulder College of Engineering...

Nearly all species’ genomes are littered with millions of genetic sequences called transposons, which are virus-like parasitic elements that can replicate and spread within host genomes. Collectively, transposon-derived sequences constitute about 50 percent of the human genome sequence, and are believed to have - over tens of millions of years...

Humans interact in social networks every day around the office coffee pot, online with Facebook and in their communities through political elections. The structure and connections within these networks and others shape how information is shared. That in turn defines much of our modern life and collective behavior, though little...

A 2015 study found that “social inequality” across a range of disciplines was so bad that just 25 percent of Ph.D. institutions produced 71 to 86 percent of tenured and tenure-track professors, depending on field. The effect was more extreme the farther up the chain the researchers looked, based on...