– paving the way for future therapies for neurological disorders. Metabolite-induced in vivo fabrication of substrate-free organic bioelectronics. The boundaries between biology and technology are becoming blurred. Researchers at Linköping, Lund, and Gothenburg universities in Sweden have successfully grown electrodes in living tissue using the body’s molecules as triggers. The result, published in the journal Science, paves the way for the formation of fully integrated electronic circuits in living organisms. “For several decades, we have tried to create electronics that…

The untethered soft robot could one day help doctors perform surgery. A tiny robot that could one day help doctors perform surgery was inspired by the incredible gripping ability of geckos and the efficient locomotion of inchworms. The new robot, developed by engineers at the University of Waterloo, utilizes ultraviolet (UV) light and magnetic force to move on any surface, even up walls and across ceilings. It is the first soft robot of its kind that doesn’t require connection to…

Sweat contains biomarkers that help doctors make health diagnoses. Wearable sensors can be used to monitor a person’s perspiration rate and provide information about the skin, nervous system activity and underlying health conditions. But not all sweat is created equal, and some cannot be measured with current sensors. A newly developed superhydrophobic biosensor could be used as a diagnostic tool to detect such types of sweat. The sensor, developed by Huanyu “Larry” Cheng, James L. Henderson, Jr. Memorial Associate Professor of Engineering…

Let’s say you needed to move an individual cell from one place to another. How would you do it? Maybe some special tweezers? A really tiny shovel? The fact is that manipulating individual cells is a difficult task. Some work has been done on so-called optical tweezers that can push cells around with beams of light, but while they are good at moving a single cell around, they are not intended for manipulating larger numbers of cells. New research conducted…

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…

MHH research team analyses genetic and epigenetic regulators. Infection with SARS-CoV-2 leads to severe disease in some people, while others do not get ill or only experience mild disease. But why is this the case? Unfortunately, we do not know exactly. We do know that an overactive innate immune system is causing severe COVID-19 disease, but it is unclear how this is regulated. A team led by Professor Dr. Yang Li from Hannover Medical School (MHH) has come a step…

… developed for gastrointestinal inflammation therapy. Micro/nanorobots with self-propelling and -navigating capabilities have attracted extensive attention in drug delivery and therapy owing to their controllable locomotion in hard-to-reach body tissues. However, developing self-adaptive micro/nanorobots that can adjust their driving mechanisms across multiple biological barriers to reach distant lesions is still a challenge. Recently, a research team led by Prof. CAI Lintao from the Shenzhen Institute of Advanced Technology (SIAT) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences has developed a twin-bioengine yeast micro/nanorobot…

… that could revolutionize health monitoring. Breakthrough in green technology represents a new, biological paradigm in electrical engineering. Scientists at the University of Massachusetts Amherst recently announced the invention of a nanowire, 10,000 times thinner than a human hair, which can be cheaply grown by common bacteria and can be tuned to “smell” a vast array of chemical tracers—including those given off by people afflicted with different medical conditions, such as asthma and kidney disease. Thousands of these specially tuned…

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…

Haematopoietic stem cell transplantation for the treatment of severe blood cancers is the only medical intervention that has cured two people living with HIV in the past. An international group of physicians and researchers from Germany, the Netherlands, France, Spain, and the United States has now identified another case in which HIV infection has been shown to be cured in the same way. In a study published this week in Nature Medicine, in which DZIF scientists from Hamburg and Cologne…

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,”…