A protein that appears in postsynaptic protein agglomerations has been found to be crucial to their formation. The Kobe University discovery identifies a new key player for synaptic function and sheds first light on its hitherto uncharacterized cellular role and evolution. What happens at the synapse, the connection between two neurons, is a key factor in brain function. The transmission of the signal from the presynaptic to the postsynaptic neuron is mediated by proteins and their imbalance can lead to…

Zika virus vaccine emerges as an unlikely hero in battling brain cancer. The scientists discovered that Zika virus vaccine strains eradicate brain tumour cells while sparing healthy ones. Scientists from Duke-NUS Medical School (Duke-NUS) have developed a new approach using the Zika virus to destroy brain cancer cells and inhibit tumour growth, while sparing healthy cells. Using Zika virus vaccine candidates developed at Duke-NUS, the team discovered how these strains target rapidly proliferating cells over mature cells—making them an ideal…

A new method could help design drugs to treat them. Helicases are enzymes that unwind DNA and RNA. They’re central to cellular life, implicated in a number of cancers and infections—and, alas, extraordinarily difficult to target with drugs. Now, new research provides a powerful platform for designing covalent inhibitors tailored to target helicases. The paper, published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society, describes how researchers used this innovative new platform to design molecules that take aim at helicases involved in…

Discovery of growth cone in migrating neurons involved in promoting neuronal migration and regeneration in the brain after injury. Migrating neurons possess a growth cone that shares functions with axonal growth cones and regulates neuronal migration by interaction with the extracellular environment. The structure and functions of the tip of migrating neurons remain elusive. Here, a research group led by Kazunobu Sawamoto, Professor at Nagoya City University and National Institute for Physiological Sciences, and by Chikako Nakajima and Masato Sawada,…

A research team at the MHH is comparing changes in natural killer cells of the innate immune defence system in chronic hepatitis C sufferers as a risk factor for the later development of hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC). Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is a malignant liver tumour that develops from degenerated liver cells. HCC usually develops in a severely damaged liver, in which the tissue is destroyed and scarred. Such liver cirrhosis is caused, among other things, by an infection with the hepatitis…

A research team from the University of St Andrews and the University of Cologne has developed a new wireless light source that might one day make it possible to ‘illuminate’ the human body from the inside. Such light sources could enable novel, minimally invasive means to treat and better understand diseases that today require the implantation of bulky devices. The study was published under the title ‘Wireless Magnetoelectrically Powered Organic Light-Emitting Diodes’ in Science Advances. The new approach presented by…

… using an evolutionary ‘copy-paste’ tactic. Plasmodium falciparum, a malaria parasite, uses gene conversion to produce genetic diversity in two surface protein genes targeted by the human immune system. By dissecting the genetic diversity of the most deadly human malaria parasite – Plasmodium falciparum – researchers at EMBL’s European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) have identified a mechanism of ‘copy-paste’ genetics that increases the genetic diversity of the parasite at accelerated time scales. This helps solve a long-standing mystery regarding why the…

First-of-its-kind device ‘tags’ an organ to monitor abnormal, life-threatening fluid leaks. Researchers led by Northwestern University and Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have developed a new, first-of-its-kind sticker that enables clinicians to monitor the health of patients’ organs and deep tissues with a simple ultrasound device. When attached to an organ, the soft, tiny sticker changes in shape in response to the body’s changing pH levels, which can serve as an early warning sign for post-surgery complications…

Cancer cells are characterized by their aggressiveness: they grow rapidly and spread to other parts of the body. To enable this, numerous mechanisms come into play, and one of them involves a protein called MYC, which activates certain genes on the cancer cell’s DNA strand, causing the cancer cell to grow and divide. The MYC protein is also present in healthy individuals, where it plays a crucial role in regulating many cell functions. – When cancer occurs, it is due…

How fungi improve their ability to infect insects. Researchers at the Kiel Evolution Center investigate for the first time in detail how a fungus important for biological plant protection can pass on an advantageous chromosome horizontally, using a previously little-studied way of exchanging genetic information. Sustainable plant protection measures that are not based on chemical pesticides rely on various organisms and biological agents to protect crops from pests. Such organisms used for biological plant protection are, for example, microscopic fungi…

MHH researchers place living human heart tissue in a nutrient solution and use it to test new drugs and innovative approaches to combat heart failure. MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are also involved in the development of diseases. These small RNA snippets belong to the so-called non-coding RNAs: although they do not contain any genetic information for the production of a protein, they fulfil an important task in the control of fundamental biological processes in our cells. They therefore offer a new starting…

The mammalian brain is a web of densely interconnected neurons, yet one of the mysteries in neuroscience is how tools that capture relatively few components of brain activity have allowed scientists to predict behavior in mice. It is hard to believe that much of the brain’s complexity is irrelevant background noise. “We wondered why such a redundant and metabolically costly scheme would have evolved,” says Rockefeller’s Alipasha Vaziri. Now, a new study in Neuron—which presents an unprecedented simultaneous recording of the…

Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology in Plön, within the Department of Theoretical Biology, characterized a recently discovered dynamical regime of microbial communities and used it to explain empirical patterns of marine plankton. There, strong and diverse interactions, combined with weak dispersal, fuel a continuous turnover of the small set of very abundant species, such that success is ephemeral and every species is equivalent in alternating between rarity and dominance. Scientists at the Research Group for Dynamics…

Researchers investigated how stress hormones affect the early development of brain cells in the cerebral cortex of fetus. The cortex is the crucial area of the brain for thinking. A team at the Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry was able to demonstrate causal links between stress hormones and altered brain structure which relate to higher level of educational attainment later in life. The hormone group of glucocorticoids is crucial for the regulation of our metabolism and immune response, but also…

A globally distributed single-celled organism that occurs in harmful algal blooms has been found to exhibit an unusual organisation of photosynthesis. Researchers at the University of Oldenburg (Germany) have taken a closer look at the unusual cell biology of the species Prorocentrum cordatum from the group of dinoflagellates. The results of their study, published in the journal Plant Physiology, could help to better understand the role of the species in the environment and the increased occurrence of algal blooms at…

NIH trial reveals need for more accurate screening in Black people and cisgender women. The elevated cardiovascular disease risk among people with HIV is even greater than predicted by a standard risk calculator in several groups, including Black people and cisgender women, according to analyses from a large international clinical trial primarily funded by the National institutes of Health and presented at the 2024 Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections (CROI) in Denver. The risk of having a first major…