Preventing infection, facilitating healing New biomaterials developed at the University of Bayreuth prevent colonization by bacteria and fungi, but at the same time proactively assist in the regeneration of human tissue. These nanostructured materials are based on spider silk proteins. New biomaterials developed at the University of Bayreuth eliminate risk of infection and facilitate healing processes. A research team led by Prof. Dr. Thomas Scheibel has succeeded in combining these material properties which are highly relevant to biomedicine. These nanostructured…

Imagine working on a jigsaw puzzle with so many pieces that even the edges seem indistinguishable from others at the puzzle’s centre. The solution seems nearly impossible. And, to make matters worse, this puzzle is in a futuristic setting where the pieces are not only numerous, but ever-changing. In fact, you not only must solve the puzzle, but “un-solve” it to parse out how each piece brings the picture wholly into focus. That’s the challenge molecular and cellular biologists face…

Nerve cells are particularly dependent on mitochondria for their activity and decreased mitochondrial function is seen in both inherited and more common age-associated forms of degenerative diseases. A long-standing view has been that neurons, in contrast to other cell types, cannot adjust their metabolism to compensate for mitochondrial dysfunction, and therefore irreversibly degenerate. In a new study, researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Biology of Aging in Cologne, Germany, and the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden, challenge this dogma…

Patients with newly diagnosed atrial fibrillation (AF) benefit from early rhythm control therapy, according to results of EAST – AFNET 4, an AFNET/EHRA trial presented in a Hot Line session today at ESC Congress 2020. [1,2] Early rhythm control therapy with antiarrhythmic drugs and/or AF ablation reduced a composite of cardiovascular death, stroke, and hospitalization for worsening heart failure or acute coronary syndrome in 2789 patients with early AF and cardiovascular risk factors compared to usual care over a 5-year…

New EU-funded Research Project “HCA|Organoid” The HCA|Organoid project is one of six pilot actions funded by the European Commission to contribute to the worldwide Human Cell Atlas initiative An “Organoid Cell Atlas” will combine single-cell profiling and organoid technology HCA|Organoid is a new EU research project that combines single-cell profiling and organoid technology to validate organoids as faithful models of human biology. The project seeks to kickstart the development of an open access “Organoid Cell Atlas”. By creating well-characterized in…

Researchers have revealed a new molecular mechanism by which bacteria adhere to cellulose fibers in the human gut. Thanks to two different binding modes, they can withstand the shear forces in the body. Scientists of the University of Basel and ETH Zurich published their results in the journal “Nature Communications”. Cellulose is a major building block of plant cell walls, consisting of molecules linked together into solid fibers. For humans, cellulose is indigestible, and the majority of gut bacteria lack…

Understanding the skin damage caused by rubbing could lead to better topical skin treatments and help prevent the formation of new routes for viral and bacterial infection. Tohoku University biomechanical engineers have developed a better understanding of the damage that can be caused by something rubbing against the skin. The study was published in the International Journal of Pharmaceutics. Kenji Kikuchi, who was involved in the study, says their findings suggest that damaged skin from rubbing face masks and coverings…

A protein that’s common throughout the body plays a key role in regulating glucose levels, says new research conducted in the Cell Signal Unit at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University (OIST) and Riken Center of Integrative Medical Sciences. Called CNOT3, this protein was found to silence a set of genes that would otherwise cause insulin-producing cells to malfunction, which is related to the development of diabetes. Diabetes is a common disorder that causes very high blood…

Stem cell technologies are revolutionizing the biomedical field. Scientists at the University Medical Center Göttingen (UMG) in collaboration with research partners of the Cluster of Excellence “Multiscale Bioimaging” (MBExC) and the German Center for Neurodegenerative Disease (DZNE) combined induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSC) and their deep knowledge in the bioengineering of human organoids to for the first time bioengineer the human brain at the macroscale level with comprehensive network function. The so called Bioengineered Neuronal Organoids (BENOs) recapitulate important morphological…

Researchers from Kiel and Düsseldorf use the freshwater polyp Hydra as an example to investigate how environmental factors and microorganisms influence individual development All multicellular living beings are colonized by an unimaginably large number of microorganisms and have developed together with them from the very beginning of multicellular life. The natural microbiome, i.e. the totality of these bacteria, viruses and fungi that live in and on a body, is of fundamental importance for the entire organism: it supports, for example,…

Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD) is the most common muscle disease in children and is passed on by X-linked recessive inheritance. Characteristic is a progressive muscular atrophy. The disease often results in death before the third decade of life. Researchers of the Universities of Maynooth (Ireland) and Bonn have found a connection between dystrophic muscles and the lymphatic system in mice with Duchenne disease. The results have now been published in the journal “iScience”. The muscular atrophy in Duchenne disease is…

Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Ames Laboratory have discovered a metal-free carbon-based catalyst that has the potential to be much less expensive and more efficient for many industrial concerns, including manufacturing of bio- and fossil fuels, electrocatalysis, and fuel cells. At their most fundamental, these industry processes involve splitting strong chemical bonds, like hydrogen-hydrogen, carbon-oxygen, and carbon-hydrogen bonds. Traditionally this has been accomplished with catalysts that use transition or precious metals, many of them expensive and low in…

POPOVICH gene controlling development of nectar spur in Aquilegia The evolution of novel features – traits such as wings or eyes – helps organisms make the most use of their environment and promotes increased diversification among species. Understanding the underlying genetic and developmental mechanisms involved in the origin of these traits is of great interest to evolutionary biologists. The flowering plant Aquilegia, a genus of 60-70 species found in temperate meadows, woodlands and mountain tops around the world, is known…

Today, the way a physician gets an idea of how many seizures a person with epilepsy has had is through the patient’s own record of seizure activity in his day-to-day life. Despite all the technological advances in devices monitoring the human body, a patient’s seizure diary, as it is often called, remains the only means to record and count epileptic seizures outside the clinic. Any insights that such a diary can provide on the effects of medication, seizure frequency or…

Team of the University of Tübingen studied how plants adapt to increasing drought Certain plant species can evolve very quickly under drought conditions. This means that the modified plant traits are genetically fixed and passed on to the next generation. A research team led by Professor Katja Tielbörger from the Institute of Evolution and Ecology, together with other colleagues from the University of Tübingen and the Universities of Hildesheim, Münster and Cologne, has shown this in a new study. However,…

Researchers from Kanazawa University find that as gastric cancer spreads throughout the peritoneal cavity, inflammatory protein IL-17A induces tissue fibrosis, causing lethal side effects and hampering chemotherapy. Gastric cancer, one of the leading causes of cancer-associated mortality worldwide, is renowned for its ability to disseminate throughout the peritoneal cavity. As well as causing secondary tumors in other organs, metastatic gastric cancer cells trigger extensive stromal fibrosis, or the formation of scar tissue, that can be more deadly than the cancer…