Researchers at Université de Montréal have created a nanoantenna to monitor the motions of proteins. Reported this week in Nature Methods, the device is a new method to monitor the structural change of proteins over time – and may go a long way to helping scientists better understand natural and human-designed nanotechnologies. “The results are so exciting that we are currently working on setting up a start-up company to commercialize and make this nanoantenna available to most researchers and the…

Tracing neural circuits to chemotherapy’s ‘constellation of side effects’. Tim Cope and Nick Housley unravel the neural pathways behind complex sensory and motor side effects of chemotherapy. Severe and persistent disability often undermines the life-saving benefits of cancer treatment. Pain and fatigue — together with sensory, motor, and cognitive disorders — are chief among the constellation of side effects that occur with the platinum-based agents used widely in chemotherapy treatments worldwide. A new study by Georgia Tech researchers in the…

Cranial neural crest cells, or CNCCs, contribute to many more body parts than their humble name suggests. These remarkable stem cells not only form most of the skull and facial skeleton in all vertebrates ranging from fish to humans, but also can generate everything from gills to the cornea. To understand this versatility, scientists from the lab of Gage Crump created a series of atlases over time to understand the molecular decisions by which CNCCs commit to forming specific tissues in developing…

Resistant to most monoclonal antibodies but neutralized by a booster dose. The Omicron variant was detected for the first time in South Africa in November 2021 and has since spread to many countries. It is expected to become the dominant variant within a few weeks or months. Initial epidemiological studies show that the Omicron variant is more transmissible than the currently dominant virus (the Delta variant). It is capable of spreading to individuals who have received two vaccine doses and…

Enzymatic hydrolysis of planteose: α-Galactosidase is a promising molecular target for root parasitic weed control. Witchweed (Striga spp.) and broomrapes (Orobanche and Phelipanche spp.) are root parasitic weeds that inflict major losses in agriculture globally. Being obligate parasitic flowering plants in nature, they parasitize other autotrophic plants of agricultural importance. The plants are attached to their host by means of haustoria, which transfer nutrients from the host to the parasite. Weeds reduce crop yield by competing for resources (nutrients, water…

Genetic mechanism found that enables communities of bacterial cells to organize into surprisingly sophisticated segments, revealing a similarity to how plants and animals develop. Over the past several years, research from University of California San Diego biologist Gürol Süel’s laboratory has uncovered a series of remarkable features exhibited by clusters of bacteria that live together in communities known as biofilms. Biofilms are prevalent in the living world, inhabiting sewer pipes, kitchen counters and even the surface of our teeth. A…

Scientists at IST Austria discover a mechanism that helps immune cells to invade tissues. Knowing, when exactly immune cells will try to invade a tumor is difficult. In order to be able to study this cell invasion process in detail, scientists like Professor Daria Siekhaus and her team need something more reliable. That’s why they turn to fruit fly embryos. During the development of these embryos, macrophages, the dominant form of immune cells in the fruit fly, travel from the…

… conventional vs ultrafast 3D MRI sequences. Automated brain volumetry in memory-impaired patients shows significant differences and systematic biases between conventional and ultrafast 3D T1-weighted MRI sequences. According to an article in ARRS’ American Journal of Roentgenology (AJR), brain volume measurements in memory-impaired patients show significant differences and systematic biases between conventional and ultrafast 3D T1-weighted (T1W) MRI sequences. “In patients for whom severe motion artifact precludes use of the conventional sequence, the ultrafast sequence may be useful to enable…

Combination of switches deactivates surplus X chromosome at just the right time. Two X chromosomes are actually one too many. Female mammalian cells hence switch off one of them – but only when the cells start to specialize into tissues. A Berlin research team has now discovered how cells “count” their chromosomes and at the same time sense which stage of development they are in. The cells of female mammals have a dosage problem, because they have twice as many…

Johns Hopkins Medicine researchers have developed a color-coded test that quickly signals whether newly developed nanoparticles — ultra small compartments designed to ferry medicines, vaccines and other therapies — deliver their cargo into target cells. Historically, nanoparticles have a very low delivery rate to the cytosol, the inside compartment of cells, releasing only about 1%–2% of their contents. The new testing tool, engineered specifically to test nanoparticles, could advance the search for next-generation biological medicines. The technology builds upon nanoparticles…

Retrons could revolutionize gene editing for research and medicine. Over the past decade, the CRISPR genome-editing system has revolutionized molecular biology, giving scientists the ability to alter genes inside living cells for research or medical applications. Now, researchers at Gladstone Institutes have fine-tuned an additional system for more efficient gene editing, using molecules called retrons. Retrons, the group reported in the journal Nature Chemical Biology, can be optimized for efficiency and used to edit genes in a variety of cell…

Paper by chemists from Rostock and Olomouc in NATURE CATALYSIS. Hydrogen (H2) is the smallest chemical molecule and a beacon of hope for a more environmentally friendly energy transition in the coming years. In addition, it is already used in a variety of industrial processes – so-called hydrogenations – for the environmentally friendly production of chemical products. For hydrogen to be used both for energy production and in hydrogenations, it is necessary to selectively activate the relatively stable hydrogen-hydrogen bond…

Aggressive and relatively common lymphomas called diffuse large B cell lymphomas (DLBCLs) have a critical metabolic vulnerability that can be exploited to trick these cancers into starving themselves, according to a study from researchers at Weill Cornell Medicine and Cornell’s Ithaca campus. The researchers, whose study was published Dec. 13 in Blood Cancer Discovery, showed that a protein called ATF4, a genetic master-switch that controls the activities of hundreds of genes, has a key role in supporting the fast growth of DLBCLs. The…

Ultrathin nanomaterials, known as MXenes, are poised to make it easier to monitor a person’s well-being by analyzing their perspiration. While they share a similar two-dimensional nature to graphene, MXenes are composed of nontoxic metals, such as titanium, in combination with carbon or nitrogen atoms. With naturally high conductivity and strong surface charges, MXenes are attractive candidates for biosensors that can detect small changes to chemical concentrations. In 2019, Husam Alshareef’s group developed a MXene composite electrode, which they enclosed…

Research team at Göttingen University develops new method to complete genetic data. The use of genetic information is now indispensable for modern plant breeding. Even though DNA sequencing has become much cheaper since the human genome was decoded for the very first time in 2003, collecting the full genetic information still accounts for a large part of the costs in animal and plant breeding. One trick to reduce these costs is to sequence only a very small and randomly selected…

New simulations reveal the mechanism of action and substrate specificity of lipoprotein-associated phospholipase A2, a biomarker for cardiovascular disease. Membrane-associated proteins play a vital role in a variety of cellular processes, yet little is known about the membrane-association mechanism. Lipoprotein-associated phospholipase A2 (Lp-PLA2) is one such protein with an important role in cardiovascular health, but its mechanism of action on the phospholipid membrane was unknown. To address this, researchers at University of California San Diego School of Medicine used state-of-the-art…