Neurodegenerative diseases damage and destroy neurons, ravaging both mental and physical health. Parkinson’s disease, which affects over 10 million people worldwide, is no exception. The most obvious symptoms of Parkinson’s disease arise after the illness damages a specific class of neuron located in the midbrain. The effect is to rob the brain of dopamine—a key neurotransmitter produced by the affected neurons. In new research, Jeffrey Kordower and his colleagues describe a process for converting non-neuronal cells into functioning neurons able to take…

Synapses are the contact points in the brain via which nerve cells ‘talk’ to each other. Disturbances in this communication lead to diseases of the nervous system, since altered synaptic proteins, for example, can impair this complex molecular mechanism. This can result in mild symptoms, but also very severe disabilities in those affected. The interest of the two neurobiologists Professor Tobias Langenhan and Professor Manfred Heckmann, from Leipzig and Würzburg respectively, was aroused when they read in a scientific publication…

Tumors can force neighboring cells into supporting cancer growth by releasing lactate into their local environment, according to researchers at Weill Cornell Medicine. The findings pave the way for future drug treatments that thwart that defense mechanism to help cancer patients. In the study, published May 10 in Cell Reports, the researchers determined how tumors, as they develop, recruit nearby cells called fibroblasts to work as their enablers. Fibroblasts are part of the “stroma,” or connective tissue of organs, and normally…

… can be opened and locked with a key. Technique opens new possibilities for smart drug delivery and other applications. Just as countries import a vast array of consumer goods across national borders, so living cells are engaged in a lively import-export business. Their ports of entry are sophisticated transport channels embedded in a cell’s protective membrane. Regulating what kinds of cargo can pass through the borderlands formed by the cell’s two-layer membrane is essential for proper functioning and survival….

To move our bodies, the brain sends messages to muscles via motoneurons which can sometimes be over excitable and cause spasms – but researchers have found two ways to calm them down. Poor sleep, difficulty moving and injuries from hitting something accidentally are just some of the challenges faced by suffers of often-painful involuntary muscle spasms. However, an Edith Cowan University (ECU) study investigating motoneurons in the spine has revealed two methods can make our spinal cords less “excitable” and…

Hypertrophic cardiomyopathy is a heart disease that leads to a stressed, swollen heart muscle. Due to a poor understanding of underlying mechanisms, effective clinical treatments are not available. Patients receive generic heart medication and sometimes need open-heart surgery to remove excess tissue. Researchers at the Hubrecht Institute have now successfully applied a new revolutionary technology (scRNA-seq) to uncover underlying disease mechanisms, including specifically those causing the swelling. The extensive “big data” set is a treasure trove of novel observations that…

The emergence of antibiotic-resistant pathogens and the increasing difficulty in developing new drugs has contributed to global challenges in combating infectious diseases. An extensive bioinformatics survey of around 170,000 bacterial genomes indicates that only three percent of the genomic potential for microbial natural products—chemically diverse bacterial metabolites that form the basis of antibiotic drugs—have been discovered so far. Co-led by Prof Nadine Ziemert of the German Center for Infection Research (DZIF), the survey identified several bacterial genera as producers of…

NIH discovery sheds light on tissue targeted by age-related macular degeneration and other diseases. Researchers have identified distinct differences among the cells comprising a tissue in the retina that is vital to human visual perception. The scientists from the National Eye Institute (NEI) discovered five subpopulations of retinal pigment epithelium (RPE)—a layer of tissue that nourishes and supports the retina’s light-sensing photoreceptors. Using artificial intelligence, the researchers analyzed images of RPE at single-cell resolution to create a reference map that…

It’s often said that a little stress can be good for you. Now scientists have shown that the same may be true for cells, uncovering a newly-discovered mechanism that might help prevent the build-up of tangles of proteins commonly seen in dementia. A characteristic of diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s – collectively known as neurodegenerative diseases – is the build-up of misfolded proteins. These proteins, such as amyloid and tau in Alzheimer’s disease, form ‘aggregates’ that can cause irreversible…

This study is led by Dr. Xingpeng Wen and Dr. Yuxian Zhu (Institute for Advanced Studies, Wuhan University). About 180 billion tons of celluloses are produced by the world’s vegetation annually, making this polysaccharide the most abundant biological macromolecule on earth. It is produced predominantly by vascular plants, by a large number of algae and also by some bacteria, protists and tunicates. Cellulose microfibrils used for cell wall deposition are usually synthesized at the plasma membrane by the cellulose synthase…

Researchers at EMBL Heidelberg found that inversions in the human genome are more common than previously thought, which impacts our understanding of certain genetic diseases. Our DNA acts like a blueprint for the cellular machinery that lets cells, organs, and whole organisms function. Mutations in the DNA can result in genetic diseases. Such genetic variation can include point mutations at a single site, as well as deletions, duplications, and inversions. The term ‘inversion’ describes a piece of DNA flipping its…

Stem cells in the bone marrow keep replenishing us with blood cells until the day we die. They do this by dividing into a daughter cell that becomes a blood cell, and a second cell that remains a stem cell. But every time a cell divides, mistakes can occur that change the cell’s genome and increase the risk of it becoming a cancer cell. A team of researchers from the Berlin Institute of Health at Charité, the Max-Delbrück Center for…

HIV controllers are rare individuals able to control infection naturally without treatment. CD8+ T immune cells play a critical role for these individuals, suppressing viral load in the long term even without antiretroviral therapy. Scientists at the Institut Pasteur are examining key characteristics of these controllers’ CD8+ T cells, with a view to replicating them in other individuals who are incapable of controlling the virus without treatment. They have successfully reprogrammed CD8+ T cells from non-controllers and bestowed them with…

A new software tool makes it easier to study relationships between a host, its microbiome and pathogens like HIV or SARS-CoV-2. Researchers at Texas Biomedical Research Institute and Tulane University have developed a new software tool that makes it easier, faster and more cost effective to analyze genetic information about a host and its microbiome at the same time. The software, called “meta-transcriptome detector” (MTD), can be used by a wide range of microbiologists and drug developers, including those researching…

Research from the University of Warwick sheds new light on a key cause of cancer formation during cell division (or mitosis), and points towards potential solutions for preventing it from occurring. When a cell divides abnormally, it does not share the correct number of chromosomes with the two new cells, and this can lead to cancer New research from Warwick Medical School has discovered why and how this happens, using ‘cell surgery’ Understanding the origin of abnormal cell division and…

Researchers at North Carolina State University have demonstrated that neuron-like cells derived from human stem cells can serve as a model for studying changes in the nervous system associated with addiction. The work sheds light on the effect of dopamine on gene activity in neurons, and offers a blueprint for related research moving forward. “It is extremely difficult to study how addiction changes the brain at a cellular level in humans – nobody wants to experiment on somebody’s brain,” says…