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Aug. 10 (UPI) -- Reductive stress linked to heart disease

SALT LAKE CITY, Aug. 10 (UPI) -- Excessive levels of an anti-oxidant called reduced glutathione may contribute to heart disease, a U.S. cardiologist said.

Dr. Ivor Benjamin and colleagues at the University of Utah said the protein alpha B-Crystallin normally helps other proteins fold inside cells. When it works properly, the cell produces the correct amount of reduced glutathione, which is healthy for the body -- but if the gene that makes alpha B-Crystallin is mutated, the protein unfolds improperly into aggregates and produces reduced glutathione in such excessive levels that it harms the heart.

The resulting condition is called reductive stress, the university said Friday in a release.

The report, published in the journal Cell, said lowering the level of reduced glutathione in mice with the mutated gene prevented heart failure.

Benjamin said heart disease, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and other deadly diseases are associated with oxidative stress, in which "free radical" molecules travel the body, triggering chemical reactions that damage proteins and causing them to form aggregates.

He said there is little proof that anti-oxidants prevent heart and other protein-aggregate diseases.

"This is a case of too much of a good thing," Benjamin said.

Baby salmon sharks dying a strange death

MONTEREY, Calif., Aug. 10 (UPI) -- Researchers are trying to figure out why baby salmon sharks are washing up dead on central California beaches.

Almost a dozen dead sharks have been found in the past month, The Santa Cruz Sentinel said Friday.

Necropsies have shown that most of the salmon sharks had bacteria-induced brain infections at the time of their deaths, but researchers say they don’t know the source of the bacteria.

The newspaper said salmon sharks, common in the Gulf of Alaska, are rarely spotted alive in the waters off California’s central coast. Dave Casper, a veterinarian with Long Marine Lab at the University of California-Santa Cruz, is asking local salmon fishermen to try to catch a live salmon shark so that he can study it.

"What is the common source for this bacteria, and do adults harbor the bacterium in their systems?" said Casper. "So far, all we've got is this encephalitis. There are more questions than answers."

Dead zone off Texas coast shrinking

SAN ANTONIO, Aug. 10 (UPI) -- U.S. researchers say a dead zone of oxygen-depleted seawater off the coast of Texas appears to be shrinking.

Texas A&M University oceanographer Steve DiMarco said a 1,750 square-mile dead zone off the mouth of the Brazos River was spotted this summer after heavy rain caused record flows down the river and into the Gulf of Mexico, The San Antonio Express-News said Friday.

DiMarco said it appears that oxygen levels are improving and the low-oxygen, or hypoxic zone, is beginning to break up.

In hypoxic zones, lighter fresh water floats on top of salt water and disrupts the normal process through which wave action injects dissolved oxygen from the air into seawater.

The condition can kill bottom-dwelling marine species such as shrimp and crab, the newspaper said.

Land-use policies protect Peru rainforest

STANFORD, Calif., Aug. 10 (UPI) -- A U.S. report says land-use policies in Peru that designate specific regions for legal logging have helped temper rain forest degradation and destruction.

An analysis of high-resolution satellite data by the Carnegie Institution’s Department of Global Ecology found that the logging plan -- combined with protection of other forests and the establishment of territories for indigenous peoples -- helped keep large-scale rain forest damage in check between the years 1999 and 2005.

The researchers, however, found an increase in forest disturbance in two areas of the jungle where the forests are accessible by roads.

"We found that only 1 percent to 2 percent of this disturbance in Peru happened in natural protected areas," lead author Paulo Oliveira said Friday in a release. "However, there was substantial forest disturbance adjacent to areas set aside for legal logging operations. This leakage of human activity outside of logging concessions is a concern."

The report was published online in the journal Science Express.