Erratic, involuntary movements often emerge as a side effect of the primary medication used to treat Parkinson’s disease. Texas Biomed researchers and collaborators have shown a compound can substantially reduce those movements in animal studies. A new study from Texas Biomedical Research Institute (Texas Biomed) and collaborators has identified a promising drug candidate to minimize uncontrolled, erratic muscle movements, called dyskinesia, associated with Parkinson’s disease. The small molecule, called PD13R, reduced dyskinesia by more than 85% in the marmoset animal…
Scientists from McGill University develop new biomaterial for wound repair. Combining knowledge of chemistry, physics, biology, and engineering, scientists from McGill University develop a biomaterial tough enough to repair the heart, muscles, and vocal cords, representing a major advance in regenerative medicine. “People recovering from heart damage often face a long and tricky journey. Healing is challenging because of the constant movement tissues must withstand as the heart beats. The same is true for vocal cords. Until now there was…
Research team led by Göttingen University use genomic data to discover five species hidden in rare alga. All land plants originated from a single evolutionary event when freshwater algae got a foothold on land, giving rise to an astonishing biodiversity of plants on earth. However, the group of algae that would later give rise to land plants had already been living and evolving in both freshwater and terrestrial habitats for over one billion years. There is a tiny group of…
The involvement between electron transfer (ET) and catalytic reaction at electrocatalyst surface makes electrochemical process challenging to understand and control. How to experimentally determine ET process occurring at nanoscale is important to understand the overall electrochemical reaction process at active sites. Recently, a research group led by Prof. LI Can and Prof. FAN Fengtao from the Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics (DICP) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) captured the electron transfer imaging in electrocatalysis process. This study was published in Nano…
Furtwangen University study suggests for the first time a link between Parkinson’s disease and the eukaryotic microbiota in the gut. Parkinson’s disease is characterised by a slow, progressive loss of nerve cells in certain brain areas. The disease is still incurable and the exact causes are unclear. The dopamine deficiency in the brain can only be controlled to some extent in the initial phase of the disease. Basic research is being conducted in an attempt to unravel the mystery of…
World Soil Day… Soils are the basis of life and climate protectors at the same time – but things are not good for them. Due to overfertilization, deforestation, salinization and overgrazing, nearly two billion hectares of arable and pasture land worldwide are affected by moderate to severe soil degradation.* The result: declining yields, lower biodiversity, declining groundwater quality, less carbon dioxide sequestration. According to IPCC reports, a critical situation has already been reached by 2030. On the occasion of World…
International Study… Viruses are survivors! Desert heat and desiccation can’t harm some of them. „We find viruses and microbes in the driest and most radiation-intensive, non-polar region on Earth, which is really amazing,“ says Prof. Dr. Alexander J. Probst from the Environmental Biology and Biotechnology Department at the University of Duisburg-Essen (UDE). An international team led by Probst discovered the viruses and microorganisms in the Atacama Desert. This has been published in the journals „mSystems“ * and „Microbiome“ **. The…
A type of cell transformation known as EMT enables cancer cells to break away from the tumor and form metastases elsewhere. However, this process does not always take place in full. Researchers at the University of Basel have now been able to show that tumor cells contribute differently to the formation of metastases and the development of therapy resistance, depending on whether they have undergone full or only partial transformation. Most cancer patients do not die as a result of…
A multi-institutional team of investigators led by bioengineer Ankur Singh has developed research tools that shed new light on a virtually untreatable form of prostate cancer, opening a pathway that may lead to novel therapeutics and a glimmer of hope for patients. Androgen receptor pathway inhibitors can prolong survival for patients with advanced prostate cancer. But about 20% of patients develop more advanced-stage neuroendocrine prostate cancer in response to this type of hormone therapy, and so far, researchers haven’t had effective ways…
The coronavirus’s tangled strands of RNA could offer new ways to treat people who get infected. To the untrained eye, the loops, kinks and folds in the single strand of RNA that makes up the coronavirus genome look like a jumble of spaghetti or tangled yarn. But to researchers like Amanda Hargrove, a chemistry professor at Duke University, the complex shapes that RNA takes on as it folds upon itself could have untapped therapeutic potential in the fight against COVID-19….
Researchers at the University of Bonn have developed a molecular structure that can cover graphite surfaces with a sea of tiny flagged “flagpoles”. The properties of this coating are highly variable. It may provide a basis for the development of new catalysts. The compounds could also be suitable for measuring the nanomechanical properties of proteins. The results were published online in advance in the journal “Angewandte Chemie”. Now the print edition has been published, which shows a part of the…
Malaria is one of the most dangerous infectious diseases. The causative pathogens are microorganisms of the genus Plasmodium. A particularly dangerous form of the disease is caused by Plasmodium falciparum. Artemisinin is one of the most important antimalarial drugs against this parasite. However, in a mutant of the pathogen that is now spreading, the effect of artemisinin is limited. A team of researchers around Robin Schumann, a biochemist from Kaiserslautern, has now found the mechanism behind this: A protein that…
Plant research: publication in the Plant Biotechnology Journal For plant breeding, it is important to create as many combinations as possible of genetic variants within a short time to select the most suitable candidates between plants with many different characteristics. The working group of Prof. Dr. Benjamin Stich from Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf (HHU) has now developed a method for using natural variations to identify what are referred to as ‘highly recombinogenic individuals’. They have presented their method, which has…
The mechanisms governing the light-sensitive activities of phytochrome, a bacterial protein, have been clarified at atomic scale resolution, opening the door to understanding black rot disease, as well as to regulating other bacterial pathogenicities. Black rot disease in cabbages, radishes and related cruciferous crops may have disastrous consequences for the yield and production of marketable plants. The bacterium Xanthomonas campestris is the major cause of black rot disease, which works by retarding several light-mediated biological processes. Behind this biological retardation…
Researchers in Japan have designed the first bottom-up designed peptides, comprising chains of amino acids, that can form artificial nanopores to identify and enable single molecule-sorting of genetic material in a lipid membrane. Biological nanopores are generally channels made by pore-forming proteins, that can detect specific molecules, but such natural channels are difficult to identify, limiting proposed applications in low-cost, speedy DNA sequencing, small molecule detection and more. “Nanopore sensing is a powerful tool for label-free, single-molecule detection,” said corresponding…
Aspergillus fumigatus is a fungus that is widespread in the environment and causes life-threatening infections in humans. An international team of researchers has now taken a closer look at the pathogen’s great genetic diversity. Serious fungal infections The fungus Aspergillus fumigatus causes severe infections in more than 300,000 people worldwide every year. These infections are particularly problematic in immunocompromised patients with a fatality rate up to 50 %. Treatment of these diseases relies on triazole antimycotics. However, resistance to these…
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