Calcium, the most abundant mineral in the body, is found in some foods, added to others, available as a dietary supplement, and present in some medicines (such as antacids). Calcium is required for muscle contraction, blood vessel expansion and contraction, secretion of hormones and enzymes, and transmitting impulses throughout the nervous system. The body strives to maintain constant concentrations of calcium in blood, muscle, and intercellular fluids, though less than <1% of total body calcium is needed to support these functions.
The remaining 99% of the body's calcium supply is stored in the bones and teeth where it supports their structure. Bone itself undergoes continuous remodeling, with constant resorption and deposition of calcium into new bone. The balance between bone resorption and deposition changes with age. Bone formation exceeds resorption in growing children, whereas in early and middle adulthood both processes are relatively equal. In aging adults, particularly among postmenopausal women, bone breakdown exceeds formation, resulting in bone loss that increases the risk of osteoporosis over time.
Ion channels are essentially passageways through membranes that transport signals to a cell’s environment and enable it to respond.
Many corals are sensitive to bright light, so capturing their dynamics with traditional microscopes is a challenge.
Cellular waste disposal, where autophagy and lysosomes interact, performs elementary functions, such as degrading damaged protein molecules, which impair cellular function, and reintroducing the resulting building blocks such as amino acids into the metabolic system.
When neurons fire an electrical impulse, they also experience a surge of calcium ions.
Scientists have completed large-scale tests on a new type of five-minute urine test that measures the health of a person's diet, and produces an individual's unique urine 'fingerprint'.
As many cancer patients will confirm, the chemotherapy prescribed to kill the disease is often more debilitating than the cancer itself, with a range of horrendous side effects.
An international research team has used new X-ray techniques to describe how the architecture of healthy human bones is built up. The team has uncovered a hitherto unknown structure in healthy bones.
Korea Brain Research Institute (KBRI headed by Suh Pann-ghill) announced on the 2nd that the joint research team of KBRI (team led by Dr. Mun Ji-young), Seoul National University, and Pohang University of Science and Technology discovered the proteins that engage in the formation of MAM, which is the cellular signaling hub.
For the first time, a research team led by Martin Fussenegger, a professor at ETH Zurich, has successfully used electric current to directly manipulate gene expression.
Patients with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), also known as Lou Gehrig's disease, lose muscle control as nerve cells or neurons in the brain and spinal cord degenerate and can no longer send signals to muscles.
An international research team has for the first time obtained the structure of the light-sensitive sodium-pumping KR2 protein in its active state.
Retina is the only part of the central nervous system that can be visualized noninvasively with optical imaging approaches.
Dr. Akhilesh K. Gaharwar, associate professor, has developed a highly printable bioink as a platform to generate anatomical-scale functional tissues. This study was recently published in the American Chemical Society's Applied Materials and Interfaces.
Like people, neurons need to talk to one another. But instead of turning thoughts into words, these cells convert electrical signals into chemical ones. For nearly 30 years, biochemist Edwin Chapman has studied how one protein triggers this crucial conversion.
Researchers in Pennsylvania and Texas have discovered a novel protein sensor that limits the amounts of fat and sugar that are converted into energy by human cells, during the starvation periods.
Experts at the University of Tokyo have identified a new protein in the pathway that leads to Alzheimer's disease. Researchers used the "molecular scissors" of CRISPR/Cas9 to search for new genes related to the neurodegenerative disease.
Biophysicists from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology and the University of Groningen in the Netherlands have visualized a nearly complete transport cycle of the mammalian glutamate transporter homolog from archaea.
The glutamate receptors do not actually adhere to “distance keeping.” Now, high-resolution microscopic studies have revealed that the receptors often appear in small groups at the synapses and remain in contact with other proteins.
A research team, which also included scientists from the National Synchrotron Light Source II (NSLS-II), has reported a novel method for imaging proteins in three dimensions (3D) with nanoscale resolution.
Our brain contains tens of billions of nerve cells (neurons) which constantly communicate with each other by sending chemical and electrical flashes, each lasting a short one millisecond (0.001 sec). In every millisecond, these billions of swift-flying flashes altogether traveling in a giant star-map in the brain that lights up a tortuous glittering pattern.
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