Cow mucus provides the basis for a synthetic prophylactic gel developed at KTH Royal Institute of Technology to protect against HIV and herpes transmission. The lubricating gel proved 70 percent effective in lab tests against HIV, and 80 percent effective against herpes. The viral prophylactic tests were conducted in a lab on several types of cells. The results were reported today in the scientific journal, Advanced Science. Hongji Yan, a biomaterials researcher at KTH, says the promising results raise hope…

First, pause and take a deep breath. When we breathe in, our lungs fill with oxygen, which is distributed to our red blood cells for transportation throughout our bodies. Our bodies need a lot of oxygen to function, and healthy people have at least 95% oxygen saturation all the time. Conditions like asthma or COVID-19 make it harder for bodies to absorb oxygen from the lungs. This leads to oxygen saturation percentages that drop to 90% or below, an indication…

EMBL researchers used data from over 300 human faecal microbiota transplants to gain an ecological understanding of what happens when two gut microbiomes clash together. Faecal microbiota transplantation (FMT) – the transfer of lower intestinal fluids and microbes from one individual to another – is sometimes used to treat inflammatory gut diseases, including ulcerative colitis and bacterial infections. Although a form of it was first recorded in 4th century China, it was introduced to western medicine in the 1950s. In…

Malnutrition is a key challenge not only in African countries. As an international study led by Veronika Somoza now shows, egg powder is a food with great potential to improve the nutritional situation of children in deprived areas. Compared to pasteurized whole egg, the powder contains lower amounts of essential fatty acids, but still provides many vitamins, indispensable amino acids and important trace elements. In addition, it has a long shelf life without additional preservatives, is easy to transport over…

When two drugs were delivered in one nanoparticle rather than separately, the treatment worked better in mice. Over the past 30 years, progress in early detection and treatment of cancer has helped reduce the overall death rate by more than 30%. Pancreatic cancer, however, has remained difficult to treat. Only 1 in 9 people survive five years after diagnosis, in part because this cancer is protected by biological factors that help it resist treatment. In hopes of turning the tide,…

Research team investigates reactivity of single molecules under controlled microscopic conditions. Researchers around the world are working to develop efficient materials to convert CO2 into usable chemical substances – work that is particularly pressing in view of global warming. A team from the University of Göttingen, Germany, and the Ulsan National Institute for Science, South Korea, has discovered a new and promising approach: catalytically active molecules are nanoconfined – meaning they are put into an environment that leaves very little space…

New studies by the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology show that competition between different evolutionary developmental stages of multicellular life cycles can be important for the development of an entire population. Without direct competition, only the growth rate of a population determines which life cycle prevails. Ecological competition, on the other hand, can lead to the selection of completely different life cycles. The evolution of multicellular organisms is a central process in the course of the origin of life….

Microbial proteins around a sexually transmitted infection allow pathogen to hide undetected inside host cells. Chlamydia, the leading cause of sexually transmitted bacterial infections, evades detection and elimination inside human cells by use of a cloaking device. But Duke University researchers have grasped the hem of that invisibility cloak and now hope they can pull it apart. To enter the cell and peacefully reproduce, many pathogenic bacteria, including Chlamydia, cloak themselves in a piece of the cell’s membrane, forming an…

Gene augmentation rescues cilia defects in light-sensing cells derived from patients with blinding disease. Researchers from the National Eye Institute (NEI) have developed a gene therapy that rescues cilia defects in retinal cells affected by a type of Leber congenital amaurosis (LCA), a disease that causes blindness in early childhood. Using patient-derived retina organoids (also known as retinas-in-a-dish), the researchers discovered that a type of LCA caused by mutations in the NPHP5 (also called IQCB1) gene leads to severe defects…

High-performance laser offers a new kind of light source for multiphoton microscopy, requiring only 10 mW of power to image tissue at depths of over 600 µm. Two-photon microscopy (2PM) plays a reliably efficient role in noninvasive deep-tissue imaging in biomedical investigation. Since the invention of the two-photon microscope at the end of the 20th century, there has been a steady flow of related research advancing 2PM—from fluorophores to imaging methods and applications—in the fields of biochemistry and medicine. How…

Biomedical engineers and medical researchers at UNSW Sydney have independently made discoveries about embryonic blood stem cell creation that could one day eliminate the need for blood stem cell  donors. The achievements are part of a move in regenerative medicine towards the use of ‘induced pluripotent stem cells’ to treat disease, where stem cells are reverse engineered from adult tissue cells rather than using live human or animal embryos. But while we have known about induced pluripotent stem cells since…

New nanoparticle shape can greatly enhance signals from multiple separate biomarkers at once, accurately detecting head and neck cancers without biopsies to improve global health. Researchers at Duke University have developed a unique type of nanoparticle called a “nanorattle” that greatly enhances light emitted from within its outer shell. Loaded with light scattering dyes called Raman reporters commonly used to detect biomarkers of disease in organic samples, the approach can amplify and detect signals from separate types of nanoprobes without…

A team of researchers from Evonik and the Leibniz Institute for Catalysis (LIKAT) has once again achieved a breakthrough in the field of hydroformylation. Hydroformylation is one of the most important reactions in industrial organic chemistry. Unsaturated compounds are converted with synthesis gas to aldehydes and alcohols. It has now been demonstrated for the first time that the catalyst in this reaction is stable even at low pressures. This opens up a cost-effective and environmentally friendly route to aldehydes and…

The results of the international study involving the Cluster of Excellence PMI also point to a previously unknown process in the development of this chronic inflammatory bowel disease. The special features of the study are its size as well as its methodological approach. In order to detect changes in the genome of patients with Crohn’s disease, an international consortium compared DNA samples from around 30,000 people with Crohn’s disease and a control group of 80,000 people without this disease. The…

Scientists have solved the century-old mystery of a supergene that causes efficient cross-pollination in flowers. The results show that sequence length variation at the DNA level is important for the evolution of two forms of flowers that differ in the length of their sexual organs. The study is published today in Current Biology. Gardeners and botanists have known since the 1500s that some plant species have two forms of flowers that differ reciprocally in the length of their male and…

Cell membranes transition seamlessly between distinct 3D configurations. It is a remarkable feature that is essential for several biological phenomena such as cell division, cell mobility, transport of nutrients into cells, and viral infections. Researchers at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) and their collaborators have recently devised an experiment that sheds light on the mechanism by which such processes might occur in real time. The researchers looked at colloidal membranes, which are micrometre-thick layers of aligned, rod-like particles. Colloidal…