Feature Channels: Cell Biology

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Wistar and Rockland partner to release a new collection of Wistar's human melanoma cell lines

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The U.S. Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory welcomes two new biologists, Crysten and Ian Blaby, who have been brought to the Lab to explore the many genes that play a role in a plant's ability to harness energy and what those genes could mean for enhancing bioenergy crops. The organism that brought this dynamic duo to Brookhaven: an alga.

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Researchers at Oregon State University announced today that they have essentially stopped the progression of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), or Lou Gehrig's disease, for nearly two years in one type of mouse model used to study the disease - allowing the mice to approach their normal lifespan.

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The finding by Stony Brook University researchers, published in Structure, may be a foundation to better understanding the cellular process and age-related disease.

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Expert can discuss recent advances in the science of bioanalytics and molecular information, that let us identify and characterize the products of all living cells—including proteins, lipids, metabolites and nucleic acids. He can specifically focus on how this technology is becoming a key driver in basic research, pharmaceutical development and clinical medicine.

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Scientists discover a brain circuit that controls walking and identify a new target for treating Parkinson’s disease.

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A pair of studies by a team of scientists has shed new light on the nature of a particular type of DNA sequences—tandem DNA repeat arrays—that play important roles in transcription control, genome organization, and development.

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During an animal’s embryonic development, a chemical chain reaction known as Hippo directs organs to grow to just the right size and no larger. Now Johns Hopkins researchers working with laboratory flies report that this signaling pathway also plays a role in revving up the insects’ immune systems to combat certain bacterial infections.

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Solving a long-standing mystery in cell biology, a team has shown how a key “relief-valve” in cells keeps cells from taking in too much water and swelling excessively. The mechanism has been linked to stroke-induced brain damage, diabetes, immune deficiency and cancer treatment resistance.

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A comprehensive analysis of the molecular characteristics of gliomas—the most common malignant brain tumor—explains why some patients diagnosed with slow-growing (low-grade) tumors quickly succumb to the disease while others with more aggressive (high-grade) tumors survive for many years.

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Three Case Western Reserve University faculty members have received funding to further develop emerging technologies aimed at malaria, cystic fibrosis, and sickle cell anemia.

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Scientists have used a new gene-editing technology called CRISPR, to repair a genetic mutation responsible for retinitis pigmentosa (RP), an inherited condition that causes the retina to degrade and leads to blindness in at least 1.5 million cases worldwide.

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Moths sniff out others of their own species using specific pheromone blends. So if you transplant an antenna – the nose, essentially – from one species to another, which blend of pheromones does the moth respond to? The donor species’, or the recipients’? The answer is neither.

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Published January 27, 2016 in Nature Communications, a team led by researchers at the DOE Joint Genome Institute (JGI), a U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science User Facility, utilized the largest collection of metagenomic datasets to uncover a completely novel bacterial phylum – “Kryptonia.”

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On Tuesday, February 9, at 12:00 noon EST, Global Biological Standards Institute (GBSI) will host its 2016 BioPolicy Summit at the Newseum in Washington, DC. The 2016 Summit—Research Reproducibility: Innovative Solutions to Drive Quality welcomes premiere life science thought leaders as speakers, panelists and guests who will review the complex causes of irreproducibility and focus on tangible solutions to drive greater research quality and accelerate the discovery of life-saving therapies.

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Using real-time recording of cellular movement, biologists at the University of Iowa have discovered how tumors form. Cancer cells reach out and grab other cells, and as little as five percent cancerous cells are needed for tumor formation. Findings could lead to more precise cancer testing.

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Stopping disruptions in cellular “trash removal” brought on by errors in molecular marks on DNA may guard against neurodegenerative diseases like Parkinson’s.

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You wouldn’t think that two Turkish children, some yeast and a bunch of Hungarian fruit flies could teach scientists much. But in fact, that unlikely combination has just helped an international team make a key discovery about how the brain’s “garbage disposal” process works — and how little needs to go wrong in order for it to break down.

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January 22, 2016 - A soy isoflavone derivative that goes by the scientific moniker, (S)-equol, has proven potent for mitigating menopausal symptoms. However, it has been impossible to produce in quantities sufficient for widespread commercial nutraceutical production. But now, a team of Korean researchers reports having constructed a recombinant bacterium which they say can boost production. The research is published January 22nd in Applied and Environmental Microbiology, a journal of the American Society for Microbiology.

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A decades-long mystery of how the cell’s powerhouse, and its energy currency of calcium ion flow, is maintained under different physiological conditions has been solved. The team identified a novel regulatory mechanism that governs levels of calcium inside cells. Without this physiological mechanism, calcium levels can increase uncontrollably, contributing to a variety of neurodegenerative, metabolic, and cardiovascular diseases.

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For the first time ever, scientists studying a mouse model of diabetes have implanted encapsulated insulin-producing cells derived from human stem cells and maintained long-term control of blood sugar — without administering immunosuppressant drugs.

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A new study led by scientists at The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) and the University of California (UC), Berkeley shows how a crucial molecular enzyme starts in a tucked-in somersault position and flips out when it encounters the right target. The new findings give scientists a clearer picture of the process through which cells eliminate proteins that promote diseases such as cancer and Alzheimer’s.

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A gene that is often lost in childhood cancer plays an important role in the decision between life and death of certain cells, according to a new study published in the journal Developmental Cell. Researchers at Karolinska Institutet and Ludwig Cancer Research in Sweden have discovered the process by which that gene, KIF1B-β, kills cells and thereby suppresses tumour development.

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Carnivorous plants such as the Venus flytrap depend on meals of insects to survive in nutrient-poor soil. They sense the arrival of juicy insects, lured by the plants' fruity scent, with the aid of sensitive trigger hairs on the inner surfaces of their traps. Now, researchers reporting in the Cell Press journal Current Biology on January 21 have looked more closely at exactly how the plants decide when to keep their traps shut and begin producing their acidic, prey-decomposing cocktail of enzymes. The short answer is: they count.

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The most commonly mutated gene in cancer, p53, works to prevent tumor formation by keeping mobile elements in check that otherwise lead to genomic instability, UT Southwestern Medical Center researchers have found.

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Researchers at Vanderbilt University Medical Center and the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston (UTMB) reported today in the journal Cell that they have isolated human monoclonal antibodies from Ebola survivors which can neutralize multiple species of the virus.

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Scientists have made a “vitamin mimic” – a molecule that looks and acts just like a natural vitamin to bacteria – that offers a new window into the inner workings of living microbes.

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An international team of researchers has identified and named a new species of dinosaur that is the most complete, primitive duck-billed dinosaur to ever be discovered in the eastern United States.

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Using a new computer science approach, researchers at University of California, San Diego School of Medicine, Columbia University and Stanford University discovered a distinctive molecular feature — a biomarker — that identified colon cancer patients who were most likely to remain disease-free up to five years after surgery. The biomarker, a protein called CDX2, also helped the researchers identify Stage II colon cancer patients who are most likely to benefit from chemotherapy after surgery.

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Drosophila erecta is an African fruit fly with a big problem: The male sexual organ is so rough that sex acts, almost literally, as a two-edged sword — necessary for reproduction, but physically injurious. Because evolution places reproduction as first among equals, females have developed overlapping solutions to their dilemma.

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Cancer cells are normal cells that go awry by making bad developmental decisions. In a study involving the fruit fly equivalent of an oncogene implicated in many human leukemias, a Northwestern University research team has gained insight into how developing cells normally switch to a restricted, or specialized, state and how that process might go wrong in cancer. The researchers were surprised to discover that levels of an important protein start fluctuating wildly in cells during this transition period. If the levels don’t or can’t fluctuate, the cell doesn’t switch and move forward.

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Lab-grown neural networks have the ability to replace lost axonal tracks in the brains of patients with severe head injuries, strokes or neurodegenerative diseases and can be safely delivered with minimal disruption to brain tissue, according to new research from Penn Medicine’s department of Neurosurgical Research. Their work is published in the Journal of Neural Engineering.

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Search for new inflammatory disease drugs may be aided by detailed structure of distinct ubiquitin ligase complex

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A $15.7 million grant from the Atlanta-based Marcus Foundation has helped launch a new Georgia Institute of Technology research center that will develop processes and techniques for ensuring the consistent, low-cost, large-scale manufacture of high-quality living cells used in cell-based therapies.

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Jackie Goordial, a post-doctoral fellow in the Department of Natural Resource Sciences at McGill University has spent the past four years looking for signs of active microbial life in permafrost soil taken from one of the coldest, oldest and driest places on Earth: in University Valley, located in the high elevation McMurdo Dry Valleys of Antarctica, where extremely cold and dry conditions have persisted for over 150,000 years. The reason that scientists are looking for life in this area is that it is thought to be the place on Earth that most closely resembles the permafrost found in the northern polar region of Mars at the Phoenix landing site.

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Plasma cells play a key role in our immune system. Now scientists at the Research Institute of Molecular Pathology (IMP) in Vienna, Austria, and at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute (WEHI) in Melbourne, Australia, succeeded in characterizing a central regulator of plasma cell function. The results of both teams are published in two back-to-back papers in “Nature Immunology” today.

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Touch a hot stove, and your fingers will recoil in pain because your skin carries tiny temperature sensors that detect heat and send a message to your brain saying, "Ouch! That's hot! Let go!"

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Cancers evolve over time in patterns governed by the same natural laws that drive physical and chemical processes as diverse as the flow of rivers or the brightness of stars, a new study reports.

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Using strands of nucleic acid, scientists have demonstrated basic computing operations inside a living mammalian cell. The research could lead to an artificial sensing system that could control a cell’s behavior in response to such stimuli as the presence of toxins or the development of cancer.

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Researchers at the RIKEN Brain Science Institute in Japan have discovered how to reverse the abnormal axonal development characteristic of CFEOM3, a congenital disease that affects the muscles that control eye movements. Published in Nature Communications, the work shows how creating a specific mutation rescued abnormal axonal growth in the developing mouse brain.

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CRISPR/Cas9 gene editing technique can be transiently activated and inactivated using RNA-based drugs, giving researchers more precise control in correcting and inactivating genes.

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Researchers show gene variant causes Hajdu-Cheney syndrome, may illuminate bone loss more generally.

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While scientists have known for years that African trypanosomes cause sleeping sickness, they’ve been left scratching their heads as to how these tiny single-celled organisms communicate. A University of Georgia study, published Jan. 14 in the journal Cell, helps solve this mystery.

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Using optogenetics and other technology, researchers have for the first time precisely manipulated the bursting activity of cells in the brain's thalamus, tying the alerting behavior to the sense of touch.

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Chemists discover how a single enzyme maintains a cell’s pool of DNA building blocks.

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Study funded by Ivy Foundation shows SGEF plays roles in how cancer cells survive and invade brain tissue.

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For the first time, McGill researchers have been able to take a series of 3D images of a large section from one of the medicine-synthesizing enzymes in action. The researchers believe that the images they have generated will not only bring scientists closer to understanding how many antibiotics are made, but could, with further research, lead to the development of much needed next-generation antibiotics.

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New research uses time lapse microscopy to show that bacteria use a hedging strategy to trade off varying degrees of antibiotic resistance even when they are not under threat. This new insight could explain why some infections persist in spite of antibiotic treatment and suggests that a different dosing strategy that would wait out trading off strategy could be effective.

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An uncommon and little-studied type of cell in the lungs has been found to act like a sensor, linking the pulmonary and central nervous systems to regulate immune response in reaction to environmental cues. The cells, known as pulmonary neuroendocrine cells or PNECs, are implicated in a wide range of human lung diseases, including asthma, pulmonary hypertension, cystic fibrosis and sudden infant death syndrome, among others.

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A new study from the Forsyth Institute is helping to shed more light on the important connections among the diverse bacteria in our microbiome.