To perform coordinated movements, we rely on special sensory neurons in our muscles and joints. Without them, the brain wouldn’t know what the rest of our body was doing. A team led by Niccolò Zampieri has studied their molecular markers to better understand how they work and describes the results in Nature Communications. Sight, hearing, smell, taste, touch: We’re all familiar with the five senses that allow us to experience our surroundings. Equally important but much less well known is…
A team led by Prof. Frank Glorius at the University of Münster presents a new, direct way to produce unsymmetrically constructed vicinal diamines. These structures are relevant for the function of biologically active molecules, natural products and pharmaceuticals. Among the most common structures relevant to the function of biologically active molecules, natural products and drugs are so-called vicinal diamines – in particular, unsymmetrically constructed diamines. Vicinal diamines contain two functional atomic groups responsible for the substance properties, each with a…
Modern eukaryotic cells contain numerous so-called organelles, which once used to be independent bacteria. In order to understand how these bacteria were integrated into the cells in the course of evolution and how they are controlled, a research team from the Institute of Microbial Cell Biology at Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf (HHU) has examined the single-celled flagellate Angomonas deanei, which contains a bacterium that was taken up relatively recently. In the journal Current Biology, the biologists now describe how certain…
… and help COVID-19 patients. Scientists from the Berlin Institute of Health at Charité (BIH), together with colleagues from Germany and the UK, have found that a commonly used liver drug also affects infection with the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus. It causes the number of ACE-2 receptors on the cells to decrease, which makes it harder for the virus to enter the cells. The researchers were able to demonstrate this in various cultured organoids in the laboratory, as well as in living…
For the first cell to develop into an entire organism, genes, RNA molecules and proteins have to work together in a complex way. At first, this process is indirectly controlled by the mother. At a certain point in time, the protein GRIF-1 ensures that the offspring cut themselves off from this influence and start their own course of development. A research team from Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg (MLU) details how this process works in the journal “Science Advances”. When a…
New method lets researchers detect proteins in close proximity in single cells. Today, most methods to determine the proteins inside a cell rely on a crude census—scientists usually grind a large group of cells up before characterizing their genetic material. But just as a population of 100 single people differs in many ways from a population of 20 five-person households, this kind of description fails to capture information about how proteins are interacting and clumping together into functional groups. Now,…
When cancer is detected at an early stage, the rates of survival increase drastically, but today only a few cancer types are screened for. An international study led by researchers from Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden, shows that a new, previously untested method can easily find multiple types of newly formed cancers at the same time – including cancer types that are difficult to detect with comparable methods. Cancer is one of the deadliest diseases in the world and is…
Proteins that emit longer wavelengths of near-infrared light help create detailed, hi-res biomedical images. Biomedical and genetic engineers at Duke University and the Albert Einstein College of Medicine have designed a small fluorescent protein that emits and absorbs light that penetrates deep into biological tissue. Tailored to wavelengths in the near-infrared (NIR) spectrum, this protein can help researchers capture deeper, cleaner, more precise biomedical images. This work appeared Dec. 1 in the journal Nature Methods. Imaging deep tissues with light…
New Collaborative Research Center combines life sciences and polymer research. German Research Foundation has approved new CRC 1551 “Polymer Concepts in Cellular Function” under the aegis of Mainz University. The researchers of the new Collaborative Research Center (CRC) 1551, funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG), intend to apply findings of polymer research to molecular processes in order to better understand what happens in body cells. The CRC entitled “Polymer Concepts in Cellular Function” will be initiated in January 2023…
Detective work by molecular biologists and bioinformatics researchers. Basic researchers at Leipzig University have solved a puzzle in the evolution of bacterial enzymes. By reconstructing a candidate for a special RNA polymerase as it existed about two billion years ago, they were able to explain a hitherto puzzling property of the corresponding modern enzymes. Unlike their ancestors, they do not work continuously and are thus significantly more effective – these pauses in activity constitute evolutionary progress. The reconstruction of the…
… anywhere you want. Columbia researchers discover that the cationic charged P-G3 reduces fat at targeted locations by inhibiting the unhealthy lipid storage of enlarged fat cells. Researchers have long been working on how to treat obesity, a serious condition that can lead to hypertension, diabetes, chronic inflammation, and cardiovascular diseases. Studies have also revealed a strong correlation of obesity and cancer–recent data show that smoking, drinking alcohol, and obesity are the biggest contributors to cancer worldwide. The development of…
Photochemistry… Rather than being released into the atmosphere and exacerbating the problem of climate change, CO2 can also be used as a raw material for substances required in industrial processes, such as formic acid or methanol. The conversion of CO2 has already been investigated in detail in laboratory studies, with nanodiamonds serving as an environmentally friendly photocatalyst. Researchers from the Fraunhofer Institute for Microengineering and Microsystems IMM are now working with partners to turn this reaction into a contin-uous process…
Precise therapeutics testing — preventing animal testing. To prevent testing on animals and create even more precise ways of testing therapeutics, the pharmaceutical industry is increasingly turning to human immune cells. However, the availability of cells like these has been limited to date. Now, Fraunhofer researchers have succeeded in scaling the production of customized immune cells from laboratory up to industrial level. Human immune cells and immune cell preparations are gaining an increasingly prominent role in modern medicine – in…
New research helps explain the progression of Alzheimer’s disease and predicts its severit. Alzheimer’s disease has always had its puzzles and contradictions. For Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) researcher Vladislav Petyuk, whose research on the progressive, age-related disease spans over a decade, some of the struggles have come from studies where “we can only connect the dots a pair at a time.” Petyuk’s research touches multiple areas in biological and computational science at PNNL. He has produced dozens of publications…
Thanks to laboratory produced human mini-retinas, researchers were able to observe complex changes in the retina as they occur in macular degeneration. This enabled them to discover the so-called cell extrusion as a potential mechanism for neurodegenerative diseases. Visual cells in the human retina may not simply die in some diseases, but are mechanically transported out of the retina beforehand. Scientists from DZNE and the Center for Regenerative Therapies Dresden (CRTD) at TU Dresden have now discovered this. For their…
Automated reaction path search method predicts accurate stereochemistry of pericyclic reactions using only target molecule structure. Researchers at the Institute for Chemical Reaction Design and Discovery (WPI-ICReDD) have demonstrated the expanded use of a computational method called the Artificial Force Induced Reaction (AFIR) method, predicting pericyclic reactions with accurate stereoselectivity based only on information about the target product molecule. The accurate prediction of a molecule’s stereochemistry—i.e., the 3D arrangement of its constituent atoms—is unprecedented for such an automated reaction path…
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