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Specialized natural killer cells in human tonsils pack a punch

Tonsils are a source of sore throats and an excuse for ice cream. But they also provide an important protective service, their immune-cell-rich tissue acting as the body’s first defense against the germs about to be swallowed or inhaled. Researchers have known that tonsils are packed with B cells...

Rockefeller bacteriologist wins Dart/NYU Award

Emil C. Gotschlich, head of Rockefeller University’s Laboratory of Bacterial Pathogenesis, is one of three winners of this year’s Dart/NYU Biotechnology Achievement Awards. Administered by the Biotechnology Study Center of New York University School of Medicine, the Dart/NYU Awards recognize the...

Nanoscale tool allows scientists to study membrane proteins one at a time

In biology, as in construction, it’s all about having tools that fit the job. Researchers at Rockefeller University have now created a tiny tool, more than 10,000 times smaller than the diameter of a human hair, capable of encasing single membrane proteins from living cells. The new system, which...

President Emeritus Frederick Seitz dies at 96

Frederick Seitz, president emeritus of The Rockefeller University and a former president of the National Academy of Sciences, died Sunday, March 2 in New York. He was 96. A distinguished physicist and educator who held key government posts for over three decades, Seitz received the National Medal...

microRNA-203 helps build skin's protective barrier

Every minute, 30,000 of our outermost skin cells die so that we can live. When they do, new cells migrate from the inner layer of the skin to the surface of it, where they form a tough protective barrier. In a series of elegant experiments in mice, researchers at Rockefeller University have now d...

Device allows scientists to control gene activity across generations of cells

Just as cells inherit genes, they also inherit a set of instructions that tell genes when to become active, in which tissues and to what extent. Now, Rockefeller University researchers have built a device that, by allowing scientists to turn genes on and off in actively multiplying budding yeast ...

Understanding primate evolution could aid HIV research

Evolution moves in fits and starts, shaping species through random genetic mutations that can help them survive or even hasten their death. But although the mutations occur by chance, the process can create surprisingly similar results. Now, in a startling twist, new research has provided an exam...

Psoriasis lesions loaded with newly discovered immune cell

A new study of psoriasis patients shows that a recently discovered immune cell, called Th17, appears to be a key player in the disease and occurs in far higher concentrations in their skin than occurs in skin of healthy individuals. Rockefeller University researchers James Krueger, D. Martin Cart...

Pilot study to examine link between vitamin D and insulin resistance

Vitamin D isn’t just for bones anymore. Researchers at The Rockefeller University Hospital have begun a clinical study to explore a possible connection between vitamin D deficiency and insulin resistance. The hypothesis, that raising blood vitamin D levels in an obese, insulin-resistant populatio...

BMP protein maintains crosstalk between cells that control hair growth

Genes, it turns out, are only as active as the signals that turn them on and off. Now scientists from Rockefeller University have identified the signaling molecule that ratchets up and clamps down the activity of key genes in dermal papilla, a type of skin cell whose unique collection of proteins...