Large study in children reveals Selenomonas sputigena as a key partner of Streptococcus in cavity formation. Collaborating researchers from the University of Pennsylvania School of Dental Medicine and the Adams School of Dentistry and Gillings School of Global Public Health at the University of North Carolina have discovered that a bacterial species called Selenomonas sputigena can have a major role in causing tooth decay. Scientists have long considered another bacterial species, the plaque-forming, acid-making Streptococcus mutans, as the principal cause…
Antibiotics affect the composition and dynamics of the gut microbiome. Treatment with antibiotics not only leads to a loss of biodiversity of microorganisms, but also often favours the selection of resistant strains of bacteria. It has been unclear how the microbiome responds to repeated antibiotic therapy. In a preclinical study, an international research team led by two DZIF scientists used metagenome and cultivation analyses to identify evolutionary mechanisms that contribute to the resilience of the microbial community after repeated antibiotic…
Mix and Match: Scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology in Bremen, Germany, have uncovered the molecular secrets of a methane-generating microbe that can transform sulfate into sulfide – a ready-to-use cellular building block. This discovery opens up exciting opportunities in biofuel production. Sulfur, an essential building block of life Sulfur is a fundamental element of life and all organisms need it to synthesize cellular materials. Autotrophs, such as plants and algae, acquire sulfur by converting sulfate into…
Alzheimer’s disease, an irreversible form of dementia, is considered the world’s most common neurodegenerative disease. The prime risk factor for Alzheimer’s is age, although it remains unclear why. It is known that the insulating layer around nerve cells in the brain, named myelin, degenerates with age. Researchers at the Max Planck Institute (MPI) for Multidisciplinary Sciences in Göttingen have now shown that such defective myelin actively promotes disease-related changes in Alzheimer’s. Slowing down age-related myelin damage could open up new…
Missing link explains mRNA delivery in brain cells. Teams from MPI Institutes in Dresden, Dortmund, Frankfurt am Main and Göttingen have joined forces to gain the first evidence of a protein complex responsible for the transport of messenger RNA in neurons. Brain cells manufacture proteins in every corner, including their long branches. Neurons missing this ability cause severe neurological disorders like disability and epilepsy. The groups of Marino Zerial, Max Planck Institute (MPI) of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics in…
What the international team of researchers actually set out to do was to detect a mysterious chemical object: a dielectron in solution. A dielectron is made up of two electrons, but unlike an atom, it has no nucleus. Up to now, scientists have been unable to directly detect such an object. While the researchers led by ETH Zurich Professor Ruth Signorell were experimenting with dielectrons, they accidentally discovered a new process for producing slow electrons. These can be used to…
Do intelligent people think faster? Researchers at the BIH and Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin, together with a colleague from Barcelona, made the surprising finding that participants with higher intelligence scores were only quicker when tackling simple tasks, while they took longer to solve difficult problems than subjects with lower IQ scores. In personalized brain simulations of the 650 participants, the researchers could determine that brains with reduced synchrony between brain areas literally “jump to conclusions” when making decisions, rather than…
How bacteria use electricity and carbon dioxide to produce useful chemicals. In microbial electrosynthesis, microorganisms use CO2 and electricity to produce alcohol, for example. How this process works biologically, however, has only been speculated about until now. Researchers at the Leibniz Institute for Natural Product Research and Infection Biology (Leibniz-HKI) have now been able to confirm experimentally for the first time that the bacteria use electrons from hydrogen and can produce more chemical substances than previously known. Microbial electrosynthesis is…
Scientists uncover cellular process behind oxygen production. One out of 10 breaths contains oxygen generated by cellular mechanism in microscopic algae. Take a deep breath. Now take nine more. According to new research, the amount of oxygen in one of those 10 breaths was made possible thanks to a newly identified cellular mechanism that promotes photosynthesis in marine phytoplankton. Described as “groundbreaking” by a team of researchers at UC San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography, this previously unknown process accounts…
An international team consisting of researchers from Japan and Luxembourg show for the first time that pathological forms of the alpha-synuclein protein present in the blood of patients can be used for the diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease and its differentiation from several other neurodegenerative motor disorders. Their ground-breaking results, recently published in Nature Medicine, constitute a major step towards developing better diagnostics based on a simple blood test. Parkinson’s disease, dementia with Lewy bodies and multiple system atrophy compose a…
… against the important carbapenem antibiotics. In 2050, the number of people dying as a result of infection with antibiotic-resistant bacteria could rise to ten million, according to WHO forecasts. For targeted therapies and to prevent the spread of antibiotic resistance, rapid and accurate diagnosis of resistance is essential. A new rapid test developed by DZIF researchers in cooperation with the company Coris BioConcept now makes it possible to detect over 95 percent of carbapenem resistance in patients infected with…
The cancer gene MYC drives unrestrained growth of most human cancers. It has been called the “Mount Everest” of cancer research because of the difficulty of designing medications that can disable it, and the expectation that an effective MYC drug could help so many cancer patients. Research groups from the The Wertheim UF Scripps Institute in Florida, the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Physiology in Dortmund and the University of Münster have joined forces and climbed that peak by developing…
Ultrastructural changes in brain tissue promote inflammatory processes. Multiple sclerosis (MS) is the most common inflammatory disease of the central nervous system. It is characterized by inflammatory foci and damage in the brain’s so-called white matter, which consists of long nerve fibers and myelin. A German-Dutch research team has now shown that ultrastructural changes in healthy areas in the white matter of MS patients make the tissue more susceptible to inflammation and the formation of lesions. This could promote the…
KRISS demonstrated carrier transport mechanism of photoanode with protective film to optimize green hydrogen production, The development can contribute to the realization of carbon-free green hydrogen and artificial photosynthesis. Hydrogen has been gaining attention as a clean and efficient energy source. However, is hydrogen really environmentally friendly? Most hydrogen commonly used now is “grey hydrogen” derived from fossil fuels. Since its production process accompanies generation of green house gas, it can be said that grey hydrogen is not environmentally friendly…
How inherited neurodegenerative diseases develop. Our cells are crisscrossed by a system of membrane tubes and pockets called the endoplasmic reticulum (ER). It is crucial for the production of biomolecules and is continuously built up and degraded. Degradation, known as ER-phagy, is promoted by the protein ubiquitin, which controls many processes in the cell. If the proteins involved in ER-phagy are defective, neurodegenerative diseases result. This has been discovered by an international research team led by Goethe University Frankfurt (as…
of part of the brain’s protein destruction machine at synapses. A major component of the cell’s protein destruction machine moonlights at brain synapses. A new study by researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research discovered a ‘moonlighting’ function carried out by a complex that normally works to degrade proteins in cells – this protein destruction machine is called the proteasome. The scientists found, by counting and visualizing individual protein complexes, that one part of the proteasome (the 19S…
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