The gut has its own built-in pacemakers, populations of specialized cells that control smooth muscle contraction in the stomach, small intestine and colon.

Ian Macara, Ph.D., professor and chair of the Department of Cell and Developmental Biology, recently returned from Scotland, where he received this year’s Colin Thomson Memorial Medal for his contributions to cancer research.

Researchers at Vanderbilt University have established the molecular basis for the function of Replication Protein A (RPA), a DNA binding protein that is a crucial “scaffold” for genome replication, response to damage and repair.

Hundreds of the world’s leading music cognition researchers are coming to Nashville from Saturday, Aug. 1, to Wednesday, Aug. 5, as Vanderbilt plays host to the biennial meeting of the Society for Music Perception and Cognition.

Vanderbilt investigators demonstrate that a certain eye lens protein is evolutionarily conserved between zebrafish and rat, suggesting that zebrafish can be used as a model system to understand eye lens disorders such as cataracts.

Compounds found in olives and olive oil have anticancer activity, which may contribute to the cancer preventive properties attributed to the Mediterranean diet.

Vanderbilt investigators have discovered how human antibodies induced during testing of an experimental “bird flu” vaccine kill the virus.