Research network develops digital alarm system for paediatric intensive care medicine. Working in intensive care units poses special challenges for healthcare workers. They have to safely and reliably detect whether the condition of their seriously ill patients is deteriorating in a life-threatening way, and they have to do so under great time pressure because every minute counts. The stress level increases even more when the patients are children and adolescents. In paediatric intensive care, doctors are confronted with the problem…

Frontera, Anton 2 supercomputers simulate holistic model of SARS-CoV-2 virion. The COVID-19 virus holds some mysteries. Scientists remain in the dark on aspects of how it fuses and enters the host cell; how it assembles itself; and how it buds off the host cell. Computational modeling combined with experimental data provides insights into these behaviors. But modeling over meaningful timescales of the pandemic-causing SARS-CoV-2 virus has so far been limited to just its pieces like the spike protein, a target…

When a muscle grows, because its owner is still growing too or has started exercising regularly, some of the stem cells in this muscle develop into new muscle cells. The same thing happens when an injured muscle starts to heal. At the same time, however, the muscle stem cells must produce further stem cells – i.e., renew themselves – as their supply would otherwise be depleted very quickly. This requires that the cells involved in muscle growth communicate with each…

– receptor clusters can direct cell movement Whether we smell, taste or see, or when adrenaline rushes through our veins, all of these signals are received by our cells via a specific group of receptor proteins called G protein-coupled receptors, which transmit signals to the inside of the cell. Biochemists at Goethe University Frankfurt and the University of Leipzig have now discovered that such receptors can also produce signals even in the absence of an external stimulus: It is apparently…

Koalas are facing multiple environmental and health issues which threaten their survival. Along with habitat loss – accelerated by last year’s devastating bush fires – domestic dog attacks and road accidents, they suffer from deadly chlamydial infections and extremely high frequency of cancer. An international team of scientists led by the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research (Leibniz-IZW) now demonstrate that a retrovirus invading the koala germline explains the high frequency of koala cancer. The results are reported in…

An undesirable effect can occur in super-resolution fluorescence microscopy: photoblueing. A new publication in „Nature Methods“ shows how it can be prevented or made useful for research. The latest developments in fluorescence microscopy make it possible to image individual molecules in cells or molecular complexes with a spatial resolution of up to 20 nanometres. However, under certain circumstances, an effect occurs that falsifies the results: the laser light used can cause very reactive oxygen molecules to form in the sample….

New flexible X-ray sensor suitable for next-generation medical and industrial applications. X-ray imaging is widely used in areas such as healthcare and forensic science, but existing X-ray machines are unable to capture curved three-dimensional (3D) objects at high resolution, and they are also relatively expensive. Now, an international team of researchers led by chemists from the National University of Singapore (NUS) has demonstrated a potential solution to overcome these limitations by using nanocrystals that can trap X-rays. The research, which…

In order to infect cells, SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, needs to insert itself into the membrane of human cells; new molecular models show what parts of SARS-CoV-2 are critical for that interaction, revealing new potential drug targets. If the coronavirus were a cargo ship, it would need to deliver its contents to a dock in order to infect the host island. The first step of infection would be anchoring by the dock, and step two would be tethering…

Innovative method provides new insight into molecular processes involving RNA. Ribonucleic acid (RNA) is key to various fundamental biological processes. It transfers genetic information, translates it into proteins or supports gene regulation. To achieve a more detailed understanding of the precise functions it performs, researchers based at Heidelberg University and at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) have devised a new fluorescence imaging method which enables live-cell RNA imaging with unprecedented resolution. The method is based on a novel molecular…

How a single cell slime mold makes smart decisions without a central nervous system. Having a memory of past events enables us to take smarter decisions about the future. Researchers at the Max-Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization (MPI-DS) and the Technical University of Munich (TUM) have now identified how the slime mold Physarum polycephalum saves memories – although it has no nervous system. The ability to store and recover information gives an organism a clear advantage when searching for…

A simple but powerful idea is to improve the health of corals using cocktails of beneficial bacteria. The strategy is being explored as part of global scientific efforts to help corals become stronger, more stress resistant and more likely to survive bleaching events associated with climate change. Corals rely on bacterial and algal symbionts to provide nutrients, energy (through photosynthesis), toxin regulation and protection against pathogenic attacks. This complex and finely balanced relationship underpins the health of the holobiont and…

An international collaboration among researchers from Finland, Sweden, UK and the USA has captured ribosomes translating messenger RNA expressed from the maternally inherited mitochondrial genome. Utilising the latest advances in cryo-electron microscopy, the group discovered a novel mechanism that mitochondrial ribosomes use for the synthesis and delivery of newly made proteins to prevent premature misfolding. Disruptions to protein folding can lead to devastating human diseases. There is a familiar saying, “It’s all in the genes”. As modern archaeology reveals, the…

Like its chemical relative carbon dioxide (CO2), nitrous oxide (N2O) is an important greenhouse gas and the dominant ozone-depleting substance emitted in the 21st Century. Consequently, strategies for limiting its emissions and its catalytic decomposition with metals are being developed. A recent study indicates that nitrous oxide can bind to metals similarly to carbon dioxide, which helps to design new complexes with even stronger bonding. This could allow the use of nitrous oxide in synthetic chemistry or help to degrade…

The ability to turn a gene off only in a specific cell type is essential to modern life science. Thanks to the Cre-Controlled CRISPR it has just became simpler. The new method developed by researchers from the Center for Regenerative Therapies Dresden (CRTD) at TU Dresden with support from the DRESDEN-concept Genome Center (DCGC) offers a fast and easy approach for conditional gene inactivation. The findings were published in the journal “Nature Communications.” To discover the function of a gene…

Home gardens are by far the biggest source of food for pollinating insects, including bees and wasps, in cities and towns, according to new research. The study, led by the University of Bristol and published today in the Journal of Ecology, measured for the first time how much nectar is produced in urban areas and discovered residential gardens accounted for the vast majority – some 85 per cent on average. Results showed three gardens generated daily on average around a…

Carbohydrates of the prion glycoproteins responsible for a group of neurodegenerative diseases were sequenced for the first time thanks to a highly sensitive technique. Prion diseases are a group of rapidly progressive, fatal and infectious neurodegenerative disorders affecting both humans and animals: Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE) or ‘mad cow’ disease is one of the most famous since in 1996 scientists found that the agent responsible for the disease in cows, is the same agent responsible for the so-called variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob…