Scientists at the Wake Forest University School of Medicine, the University of Manchester in the United Kingdom, and the Virginia Bioinformatics Institute at Virginia Tech have taken the first steps toward constructing a systems biology map of iron metabolism.

Duke University chemists are using modified magnetic resonance imaging to see molecular changes inside people's bodies that could signal health problems such as cancer.

Common genetic polymorphisms induce major differentiations in the metabolic make-up of the human population, according to a paper published November 28 in the open-access journal PLoS Genetics.

A research team led by Mitchell Lazar, MD, PhD, Director of the Institute for Diabetes, Obesity, and Metabolism at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, has discovered a key molecular partnership that coordinates body rhythms and metabolism.

Why are some species of plants and animals favored by natural selection? And why does natural selection not favor other species similarly?

Scientists know that different normal and diseased tissues behave differently. But a method that tells them just how they do so may one day give medical science a new way to fight obesity, hypertension, diabetes and other dangerous disorders of the metabolism.

New insight into key players in iron metabolism has yielded a novel tool for distinguishing among root causes of iron overload or deficiency in humans, the researchers report in the August issue of Cell Metabolism, a publication of Cell Press.

UC Irvine researchers have found a molecular link between circadian rhythms – our own body clock – and metabolism. The discovery reveals new possibilities for the treatment of diabetes, obesity and other related diseases.

Two new research studies have discovered a long sought molecular link between our metabolism and components of the internal clock that drives circadian rhythms, keeping us to a roughly 24-hour schedule. The findings appear in the July 25th issue of the journal Cell, a publication of Cell Press.

Scientists from the Institute for Bioinformatics and Systemic Biology of the Helmholtz Zentrum München and the Faculty for Biology of the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität have shown that biological indicators for diseases caused or influenced by environmental factors can be detected by the systemic analysis of the body’s metabolism (metabolomics).

Duke University Medical Center scientists have found a mechanism that allows cells starved of iron to shut down energy-making processes that depend on iron and use a less efficient pathway involving glucose. This metabolic reshuffling mechanism, found in yeast cells, helps explain how humans respond to iron deficiency, and may help with diabetes research as well.

Many bacteria break their metabolic processes into chunks. That may be logically tidy, but it’s often metabolically inefficient. Researchers have now figured out the factors that tend to make bacteria more modular.