Dementia with Lewy bodies (DLB), one of the most common forms of dementia, has no cure. Previous studies suggested that gut bacteria, the microorganisms that live in the human digestive tract, play a role in Parkinson’s disease, another neurodegenerative disorder, but the bacteria involved in DLB had not been identified. Now, a group led by researchers at the Nagoya University Graduate School of Medicine in Japan has identified three bacteria involved in DLB: Collinsella, Ruminococcus, and Bifidobacterium. Their findings, reported…
RNA nanosatellite leads researchers at Aarhus University and Berkeley Laboratory to the discovery of rules and mechanisms for RNA folding that will make it possible to build more ideal and functional RNA particles for use in RNA-based medicine. The RNA molecule is commonly recognized as messenger between DNA and protein, but it can also be folded into intricate molecular machines. An example of a naturally occurring RNA machine is the ribosome, that functions as a protein factory in all cells….
By monitoring the body’s molecular response to a viral attack, the new method developed by Flatiron Institute researchers and their colleagues can diagnose even asymptomatic patients with 98.4 percent accuracy. By inspecting the body’s immune response at a molecular level, a research team has developed a new way to test patients for COVID-19. Their method can potentially catch infections a matter of hours after exposure — far earlier than current COVID-19 tests can detect the virus — with near-perfect accuracy….
New cell therapy offers potential treatment option for patients with chronic heart failure. Physician-scientists at The Texas Heart Institute announced today the results of the largest cell therapy trial to date in patients with chronic heart failure due to low ejection fraction. The therapy benefited patients by improving the heart’s pumping ability, as measured by ejection fraction, and reducing the risk of heart attack or stroke, especially in patients who have high levels of inflammation. Also, a strong signal was…
Scientists at Open Targets, EMBL’s European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI), and GSK are revealing the shared basis of diseases using a map of interacting human proteins. By helping to understand how biological processes affect human traits and diseases, this work will prioritise new targets for drug discovery and identify drug repurposing opportunities. Proteins are molecules that do most of the work in our cells and are made following blueprints encoded in genes. They are essential for the structure, function, and regulation…
Study on mice shows male-specific effects on health. Insulin is not only a regulator of blood sugar, but also has an influence on life expectancy. If the insulin signalling pathway is inhibited, animals live longer. But which tissue is crucial for this? And do males and females react in the same way? Researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Biology of Ageing in Cologne have specifically lowered insulin pathway levels in different tissues of male and female mice. Their study…
When one travels through rough terrain, maps come in handy. They also help researchers to study the complex organization of the brain. Scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Intelligence have created a new set of maps for the zebrafish brain. They determined the activity of hundreds of genes with single-cell resolution and assembled the maps into an interactive atlas. The online resource supports researchers in finding their way around the brain of this vertebrate and provides new insights…
School of Veterinary Medicine researchers teamed with scientists at the University of Texas at San Antonio to transform blood cells to regain a flexible fate, growing into a precursor of sperm cells. Different cell types—say, heart, liver, blood, and sperm cells—possess characteristics that help them carry out their unique jobs in the body. In general, those characteristics are hard-wired. Without intervention, a heart cell won’t spontaneously transform into a liver cell. Yet researchers from the University of Pennsylvania School of…
MHH gastroenterologist Dr. Bernd Heinrich is seeking new therapies against hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC), a malignant liver tumor. The German Cancer Aid has awarded him the Max Eder Young Investigator Program for this work and is supporting his research with 800,000 euros. Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is one of the most common cancers worldwide. Although viral hepatitis and heavy alcohol consumption are important risk factors, non-alcoholic fatty liver (NAFLD) is now one of the main causes of this form of liver cancer…
Fine-tuning stimulation doses to deficiencies in patient-specific CAR-T cells, using artificial antigen-presenting scaffolds, enables manufacturing of more potent CAR-T cell products. New adoptive T cell therapies — in which T cells, the immune system’s natural hunters patrolling the body for foreign adversaries, are retrieved from cancer-riddled patients, super-charged and amplified outside the body, and then infused back into the same patient — are changing the prospects of cancer patients. Since 2017, when CAR (chimeric antigen receptor)-T cells were green-lighted as…
CO2 hydrogenation with green hydrogen is one of the best processes to combat climate change and can provide a single solution to three challenging problems, i) excessive CO2 levels, ii) the temporal mismatch between solar electricity production and demand, and iii) hydrogen gas storage. However, the CO2 hydrogenation reaction needs very high temperatures, causing quick deactivation of the catalyst. In this work, researchers at Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR), Mumbai, asked the question, whether this high-temperature CO2 hydrogenation can be…
In recent years, researchers have highlighted the presence of sensory receptors in unexpected areas of the human body. In lung tissue, for example, taste receptors cause the airways to relax in the presence of a bitter substance. Sweet taste receptors have been found in the brain, heart, kidneys, bladder, or nasal epithelium. But their function is not always clear. “Studies at Harvard University have shown that sensory cells in the skin can help fight infection when bacteria invade subcutaneous tissue,”…
UNC School of Medicine researchers Jack Griffith, PhD, and Taghreed Al-Turki, PhD, found that telomeres at the tips of chromosomes contain sufficient genetic information to produce two small proteins with potentially potent biological properties. Once thought incapable of encoding proteins due to their simple monotonous repetitions of DNA, tiny telomeres at the tips of our chromosomes seem to hold a potent biological function that’s potentially relevant to our understanding of cancer and aging. Reporting in the Proceedings of the National…
Scientists at the Paul Scherrer Institute PSI have used the Swiss X-ray free-electron laser SwissFEL and the Swiss Light Source SLS to make a film that could give a decisive boost to developing a new type of drug. They made the advance in the field of so-called photopharmacology, a discipline that develops active substances which can be specifically activated or deactivated with the help of light. The study is being published today in the journal Nature Communications. Photopharmacology is a…
Electrocatalysis is an interface-dominated process, in which the activity of the catalyst highly relates to the adsorption/desorption behaviors of the reactants/intermediates/products on the active sites. From the perspective of catalyst design, the chemical functionalization on noble metal surfaces will inevitably affect the reaction process, which is considered to be one of the effective strategies to tune the electrocatalytic performance of noble metal nanocrystals. Recently, a research team led by Prof. Yu Chen from Shaanxi Normal University, China published the latest…
Knowledge of the cell-type specific make-up of the brain is useful to understand the role of each cell type as part of the network, is necessary to tackle any large scale neural circuit simulation, and is key to Blue Brain’s long term goal of accurately building a digital model of the whole mouse brain. Nonetheless, obtaining a global understanding of the cellular composition of the brain is an excessively complex task, not only because of the great variability inherent in…
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