– organoid emulates the development of the human heart. A team at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) has induced stem cells to emulate the development of the human heart. The result is a sort of “mini-heart” known as an organoid. It will permit the study of the earliest development phase of our heart and facilitate research on diseases. The human heart starts forming approximately three weeks after conception. This places the early phase of heart development in a time…

Human tissue models instead of animal experiments? What is already possible for some questions still faces major hurdles for more complex contexts and applications. In a joint project of the Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research, Mainz, and the Translational Center for Regenerative Therapies at the Fraunhofer Institute for Silicate Research ISC, Würzburg, scientific principles and biomaterials for the standardized production of valid tissue models are to be developed. Modern medicine increasingly relies on three-dimensional human tissue models in preclinical…

Human Frontier Science Program (HFSP) Research Grant for Fred Wolf and Pawel Burkhardt. The first brains in the world of animals marked a decisive step in evolution. Living beings could now process information and identify opportunities as well as dangers. But how did the first brains evolve and what form did they take? Pawel Burkhardt from the Michael Sars Centre at the University of Bergen, Norway, and Fred Wolf from the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization at the University…

A lower body temperature is one of the most effective mechanisms to prolong the lifespan of animals. Writing in ‘Nature Aging’, a working group at the University of Cologne’s CECAD Cluster of Excellence in Aging Research has now described precisely how this works. The scientists show that cold can prevent the pathological aggregation of proteins typical for two aging-associated neurodegenerative diseases. Cold activates a cellular cleansing mechanism that breaks down harmful protein aggregations responsible for various diseases associated with aging….

For more than 50 years, it has been suspected that fat cells constantly remodel the lipids they store. Researchers at the University of Bonn have now demonstrated this process directly for the first time using culture cells. Among other things, the study shows that the cells quickly eliminate harmful fatty acids. They refine others into molecules that can be used more effectively. In the long term, this turns the components of palm fat into the building blocks of high-quality olive…

Worldwide, only a handful of patients are known to suffer from episodic ataxia type 6, a neurological disease that causes transient loss of muscle control. The cause lies in a mutation that changes a single amino acid in a protein that transports the neurotransmitter glutamate across the membrane of neural cells. Researchers from the University of Groningen (the Netherlands) have elucidated how the mutation causes these cells to malfunction. Their results will appear in Nature Communications. Patients with ataxia lose…

In certain molecules, the so-called photoacids, a proton can be released locally by excitation with light. There is a sudden change in the pH value in the solution – a kind of fast switch that is important for many chemical and biological processes. Until now, however, it was still unclear what happens at the moment of proton release. This is exactly what researchers in the Cluster of Excellence Ruhr Explores Solvation RESOLV at Ruhr University Bochum, Germany, have now been…

It sounds like something from science fiction: Don a specialized, electronic headband and control a robot using your mind. But now, recent research published in ACS Applied Nano Materials has taken a step toward making this a reality. By designing a special, 3D-patterned structure that doesn’t rely on sticky conductive gels, the team has created “dry” sensors that can measure the brain’s electrical activity, even amidst hair and the bumps and curves of the head. Physicians monitor electrical signals from…

New design rules for capturing a stable, chiral oxygen atom. Colorado State University chemists have achieved a new feat in the realm of chemical design and synthesis: They’ve helped create the first example of a synthetic molecule, with an asymmetric oxygen atom as its centerpiece, that remains stable and nonreactive – despite this type of molecule’s tendency in nature to be touchy and short-lived. What makes this feat unique is that the new molecule is chiral, which means it has a non-superimposable…

Neuroscientists at the University of Zurich have developed innovative objectives for light microscopy by using mirrors to produce images. Their design finds correspondence in mirror telescopes used in astronomy on the one hand and the eyes of scallops on the other. The new objectives enable high-resolution imaging of tissues and organs in a much wider variety of immersion media than with conventional microscope lenses. Some species of mussels can see. Scallops, for example, have up to 200 eyes that help…

Researchers are developing a new method. The human body contains more than 30 trillion cells. Until recently, the sheer number of cells in the organism meant that approaches to understanding human diseases and developmental processes based on the analysis of single cells were a futuristic vision. The development of new sequencing methods is currently revolutionising our understanding of cellular heterogeneity. These technologies can detect rare or even new cell types by extracting and sequencing the genetic information from the cells…

Scientists at EPFL’s Blue Brain Project have developed a groundbreaking computational model of the thalamic microcircuit in the mouse brain, offering new insights into the role this region plays in brain function and dysfunction. The thalamus and thalamic reticular nucleus are situated at the heart of the mammalian brain and are known to play a key role in a wide range of functions, including the transmission of sensory information to the cortex and the transition between brain states such as…

MSK researchers identified a key role for the STING signaling pathway in preventing dormant metastatic cancer cells from progressing to active metastases. Treating laboratory mice with a STING activator helped eliminate lingering metastatic cells and stop the development of aggressive tumors. The study suggests further investigation of STING activation as a new approach to prevent cancer from recurring or spreading to other organs after successful treatment of a primary tumor. A team of scientists at the Sloan Kettering Institute have…

Head and neck cancer may not be as common as breast or prostate cancer, but it’s one of the most challenging to treat. Its five-year survival rate can be as low as 25%, while its recurrence rate can be as high as 43%. West Virginia University researcher Raymond Raylman has developed a new technology to improve the treatment of head and neck cancers. The scanner that he and his team prototyped — which combines positron emission tomography and X-ray computed tomography — showed…

can be reused in biodegradable plastic precursor using artificial photosynthesis. Poly-3-hydroxybutyrate—a biodegradable plastic—is a strong water-resistant polyester often used in packaging materials, made from 3-hydroxybutyrate as a precursor. In previous studies, a research team led by Professor Yutaka Amao from the Research Center for Artificial Photosynthesis at Osaka Metropolitan University, found that 3-hydroxybutyrate can be synthesized from CO2 and acetone with high efficiency, but only demonstrated this at higher concentrations of CO2 or sodium bicarbonate. This new study aimed to…

A method developed in the TransEvo research training group saves time and costs when analysing complex microbiological samples. In medical research and diagnostics, the microbiome, i.e. the microbial colonisation of the intestine, is increasingly gaining attention. A stool sample can be used to precisely analyse the complex microbial ecosystem of the gut. There are basically two methods for this: traditional cultivation on plates with specific culture media or the quite expensive DNA analysis of the stool sample. Both methods on…