Personalized cancer treatments are no longer just options of the future. In the past few years, researchers have made significant progress in ‘teaching’ the body’s immune T cells to recognize and kill specific cancer cells, and human clinical trials have shown that this approach can successfully eliminate tumors. Cancer patients today can be a part of the following clinical scenario: a patient comes to the hospital where physicians and scientists analyze his or her tumor to identify cancer-specific markers that…
Electrons are able to move within molecules, for example when they are excited from outside or in the course of a chemical reaction. For the first time, scientists have now succeeded in studying the first few dozen attoseconds of this electron movement in a liquid. To understand how chemical reactions begin, chemists have been using super-slow motion experiments for years to study the very first moments of a reaction. These days, measurements with a resolution of a few dozen attoseconds…
Heart Center of the University Hospital of Bonn investigates how the communication between cells can be regulated Through their basic research, physicians at the Heart Center of the University Hospital Bonn have discovered how the communication between individual cells can be influenced with the help of a specific protein. These findings are an important approach to improving the treatment of diseases such as arteriosclerosis (calcified blood vessels), which causes heart attacks. The study was published online in advance in the…
ERA-NET project NExT on translational research on cancer Since autumn 2019, the Fraunhofer Institute for Biomedical Engineering IBMT coordinates the BMBF-funded ERA-NET project “NExT” that aims to detect endocrine pancreatic tumors at an earlier stage and to improve therapies in cooperation with international research partners. The consortium is setting up a tissue bank, developing patient-specific cell models and identifying corresponding biomarkers with the aid of a microfluidic chip system. Pancreatic neuroendocrine tumors (PNETs) are rare tumors of the pancreas and…
A research team led by Hokto Kazama at the RIKEN Center for Brain Science (CBS) in Japan has combined brain imaging and models of brain activity to explain how smells can be generalized into categories. The team examined a region of the fly brain that plays a central role in forming olfactory memories and discovered clustered representations of mixtures and groups of odors that are conserved across individual flies. This study, published in Neuron, explains how varying odors are perceived…
The mystery of why zebras have their characteristic stripes has perplexed researchers for over a century. Over the last decade, Professor Tim Caro at the University of Bristol’s School of Biological Sciences has examined and discredited many popular theories such as their use as camouflage from predators, a cooling mechanism through the formation of convection currents and a role in social interactions. Stripes acting to confuse predators is another common explanation, but it too is flawed when looking at the…
Some bacteria become increasingly infectious when they have to move from cell to cell in order to survive In the environment, they are often found inside unicellular organisms. A research team led by Matthias Horn at the Centre for Microbiology and Environmental Systems Science at the University of Vienna has made use of laboratory experiments to gain a better understanding of how these bacteria adapt to their host cell over time. This is due to changes in the genome and…
To combat the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, research has been stepped up in search of new vaccines and treatments. To enter the cells, the virus needs the spike protein on its surface. Researchers of the Paul-Ehrlich-Institut in co-operation with some research groups in Germany (EMBL at Heidelberg, MPI for Biophysics at Frankfurt) have analysed the spike protein in its natural environment using high resolution imaging and computer-assisted methods. In doing so, they have discovered a degree of mobility of the spikes on…
Scientists at Osaka University demonstrate a simple method for inserting high-energy cubane molecules into an existing single-crystal supramolecular framework, work that may lead to next-generation energy storage and engineered catalysts Researchers at Osaka University have discovered a new method to easily add lanthanide cubanes into a previously synthesized metallo-supramolecular framework. By simply soaking a crystal in a cubane-containing solution, the molecules become intercalated via a single-crystal-to-single-crystal transformation. This research may help chemists design cost-effective methods of storing energy or develop…
Bacteria show a wide range of capabilities in withstanding antibiotic treatment or attack by our immune system, which are great challenges in infection research. Scientists at the Würzburg-based Helmholtz Institute for RNA-based Infection Research (HIRI), a site of the Helmholtz Centre for Infection Research (HZI), have developed a novel approach to reading the activity of hundreds of genes in an individual bacterium by sequencing its RNA. This groundbreaking work was just published in the journal Nature Microbiology. Using bacterial single-cell…
Although true “cyborgs” — part human, part robotic beings — are science fiction, researchers are taking steps toward integrating electronics with the body. Such devices could monitor for tumor development or stand in for damaged tissues. But connecting electronics directly to human tissues in the body is a huge challenge. Now, a team is reporting new coatings for components that could help them more easily fit into this environment. The researchers will present their results today at the American Chemical…
Corals growing on the reefs of the Bahamas produce an active agent that kills multi-resistant tuberculosis bacteria. Scientists at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) have managed to produce the antibiotic biotechnologically in the laboratory – fast, cost-efficient and sustainably. Thomas Brück saw the sea whip Antillogorgia elisabethae for the first time 17 years ago while diving on a research trip to the Bahamas. He still remembers this encounter vividly, which took place 18 meters below the water’s surface: “Their…
Does urbanisation drive bumblebee evolution? A new study by Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg (MLU) and the German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv) Halle-Jena-Leipzig provides an initial indication of this. According to the study, bumblebees are larger in cities and, therefore, more productive than their rural counterparts. In “Evolutionary Applications”, the research team reports that differences in body size maybe caused by the increasingly fragmented habitats in cities. Over the last 200 years, the habitat of bumblebees and other insects…
Research team from Kiel University investigates how the application of antibiotics affects the mechanisms of plasmid-mediated inheritance of resistance genes The genetic information of many microorganisms, especially bacteria, is partly available in so-called plasmids. These are genetic elements that consist of only a single DNA ring, are not present on the chromosomes and can multiply independently. Thanks to such plasmids, bacteria are able to transfer genetic information very quickly among themselves and also across the borders of different bacterial species….
Almost all life on Earth, in particular our food and our health, depend on metabolism in plants. In order to understand how these metabolic processes function, researchers at the Institute of the Biology and Biotechnology of Plants at the University of Münster with the participation of the University of Bonn are studying key mechanisms in the regulation of energy metabolism. Now, for the first time, a new method of in vivo biosensor technology has enabled them to monitor in real…
Super-resolution MINFLUX nanoscopy, developed by Nobel laureate Stefan Hell and his team, is able to discern fluorescent molecules that are only a few nanometers apart. In an initial application of this technique to cell biology, researchers led by Stefan Hell and Stefan Jakobs have now optically dissected the distribution of individual proteins in an about 20-nanometer-sized protein cluster within a cellular organelle in 3D using multiple colors. MINFLUX nanoscopy thus proves to be an extremely powerful tool to find out…
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