Every innovative drug starts with the search for an active substance targeting key players in disease-related processes. However, there is no perfect drug that affects the one target in the body: no effect without side effects, as also described in most medicine information leaflets. A group of chemists and biologists led by Prof. Herbert Waldmann and Dr. Slava Ziegler at the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Physiology in Dortmund have now combined different strategies to find bioactive molecules and identified…

Harnessing the combined power of Vitamin C and TET proteins may give scientists a leg up in treating autoimmune diseases. You can’t make a banana split without bananas. And you can’t generate stable regulatory T cells without Vitamin C or enzymes called TET proteins, it appears. Regulatory T cells (Tregs) help control inflammation and autoimmunity in the body. Tregs are so important, in fact, that scientists are working to generate stable induced Tregs (iTregs) in vitro for use as treatments…

Niemann-Pick disease type C, long thought to be tied to cholesterol metabolism, may eventually be treated with immune inhibitors. UT Southwestern researchers have identified an immune protein tied to the rare neurodegenerative condition known as Niemann-Pick disease type C. The finding, made in mouse models and published online in Nature, could offer a powerful new therapeutic target for Niemann-Pick disease type C, a condition that was identified more than a century ago but still lacks effective treatments. “Niemann-Pick disease has…

Drugs must be safe not just for the patients; in the case of pregnant patients, drugs must also be safe for the unborn children still in the womb. Therefore, at an early stage in the development of new medicines, candidate substances are tested in the Petri dish on embryonic stem cells from mouse cell lines. This is to avoid that an embryo-damaging effect would only be noticed at a later stage during tests with pregnant mice. However, these cell culture…

The oil industry, pharmaceutical companies and bioreactor manufacturers all face one common enemy: bubbles. Bubbles can form during the manufacturing or transport of various liquids, and their formation and rupture can cause significant issues in product quality. Inspired by these issues and the puzzling physics behind bubbles, an international scientific collaboration was born. Stanford University chemical engineer Gerald Fuller along with his PhD students Aadithya Kannan and Vinny Chandran Suja, as well as visiting PhD student Daniele Tammaro from the…

A new USC study of a common, yet poorly understood type of white blood cell reveals the immune cell’s response to pathogens differs greatly by sex and by age. In this mouse study, males proved much more susceptible to a condition called sepsis than females. However, the scientists also found that the female disease-defense system is hardly perfect; their system changes with age to become nearly as harmful as the males’. Those are the key findings in a study that…

As multicellular life relies on cell-cell interactions, it is not surprising that this is not always peaceful: cells with higher fitness eliminate cells with lower fitness through cell competition. Cell competition has emerged as a quality control mechanism and occurs when cells differ, genetically or otherwise, from each other. In mammals, the process of cell competition has been observed e.g., in cancer, during organ homeostasis, and during development as a process to select the fittest cells in the embryo and…

Stronger than steel, tougher than Kevlar… Artificially designed, amyloid-silk hybrid protein developed in Zhang lab even outperforms some spider silks. Spider silk is said to be one of the strongest, toughest materials on the Earth. Now engineers at Washington University in St. Louis have designed amyloid silk hybrid proteins and produced them in engineered bacteria. The resulting fibers are stronger and tougher than some natural spider silks. Their research was published in the journal ACS Nano. To be precise, the…

As the world warms, sweeping changes in marine nutrients seem like an expected consequence of increased ocean temperatures. However, the reality is more complicated. New research suggests that processes below the ocean surface may be controlling what is happening above. Plankton are some of the most numerous and important organisms in the ocean. The balance of chemical elements inside them varies and is critical to shaping many marine processes, including the food web and the global carbon cycle. Temperature has…

Scientists collaborate to model the complex protein responsible for SARS-CoV-2 replication, revealing its potential weak spots for drug development. In February 2020, a trio of bio-imaging experts were sitting amiably around a dinner table at a scientific conference in Washington, D.C., when the conversation shifted to what was then a worrying viral epidemic in China. Without foreseeing the global disaster to come, they wondered aloud how they might contribute. Nearly a year and a half later, those three scientists and…

Researchers at the RIKEN Center for Integrative Medical Sciences (IMS) have discovered that acetate, a major metabolite produced by some intestinal bacteria, is involved in regulating other intestinal bacteria. Specifically, experiments showed that acetate could trigger an immune response against potentially harmful bacteria. The findings, published in the scientific journal Nature, will lead to the development of new ways to regulate the balance of intestinal bacteria. You may be surprised to know that 40 trillion important bacteria live in our…

Errors in the metabolic processes of mitochondria are responsible for a variety of diseases such as Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s. Scientists needed to find out just how the necessary building blocks are imported into the complex biochemical apparatus of these cell areas. The TOM complex (translocase of the outer mitochondrial membrane) is considered the gateway to the mitochondrion, the proverbial powerhouse of the cell. The working group headed by Professor Chris Meisinger at the Institute of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at…

There seems no room for new bacteria on sand grains. Whether summer or winter, midnight sun or polar night – the sand on the ocean floor is always inhabited by the same bacteria. Although the microbial communities differ between different ocean regions, they do not change between the seasons. Presumably, there is simply no room for change. Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology in Bremen, Germany, now describe this phenomenon in a study published in the journal…

Representatives of numerous pathogenic fungal species are finding new habitat on microplastic particles in the soil and could thus be one of the possible causes of an increase in fungal infections. Researchers from Bayreuth, Hannover and Munich demonstrated this in a new study. Using high-throughput methods, the scientists analysed fungal communities from soil samples taken from sites near human settlements in western Kenya. The findings of this research have been published in the journal Scientific Reports. This study is the…

RUDN University biologists discovered the way how macrophages (the cells of the “first line” immune response) respond to inflammation and identified how the immune response depends on their origin. It turned out that when exposed to an inflammatory stimulus, two opposing mechanisms are activated in macrophages simultaneously — inducing and inhibiting inflammation. These data can potentially be useful in the treatment of cancer, as targeted activation of macrophages will strengthen the immune response of the organism in the fight against…

Researchers at University of California San Diego School of Medicine and Rady Children’s Institute for Genomic Medicine have produced a stem cell model that demonstrates a potential route of entry of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, into the human brain. The findings are published in the July 9, 2021 online issue of Nature Medicine. “Clinical and epidemiological observations suggest that the brain can become involved in SARS-CoV-2 infection,” said senior author Joseph Gleeson, MD, Rady Professor of Neuroscience at…