Feature Channels: Cell Biology

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Developing blood cells are caught in tugs of war between competing gene regulatory networks before finally deciding what type of cell to become, according to a study published Aug. 31 in Nature. Researchers at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center report that as developing blood cells are triggered by a multitude of genetic signals firing on and off, they are pulled back and forth in fluctuating multi-lineage states before finally becoming specific cell types.

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Insoo Hyun has proposed a framework for addressing ethical questions surrounding potentially revolutionary research on part-human, part-animal embryos, which can be produced when human stem cells are transplanted into animal embryos.

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A clinical trial using stem cells to treat people with recent spinal cord injuries has cleared two key safety hurdles, and been given approval to expand the therapy to a larger group of patients with a much higher dose of cells.

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Sanford Burnham Prebys Medical Discovery Institute (SBP), the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, and the University of Michigan will embark on a $15.4 million effort to develop new systems for quickly screening libraries of drugs for potential effectiveness against schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) has announced.

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Berkeley Lab researchers linked the overexpression of 14 genes related to cell division to cancer patients' prognosis and response to specific treatments. The findings could be used to develop a biomarker that doctors and patients use to make better informed decisions in clinical settings.

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Australia is known as a country full of deadly creatures - now people have trapdoor spiders hiding in their backyards.

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Having built their nest over the vertical ventilation pipe of an old nuclear weapon bunker in Poland, every year a large number of wood ants fall down the pipe to never return back to their colony.

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A new study led by the University of Minnesota shows that monkeys in captivity lose much of their native gut bacteria diversity and their gut bacteria ends up resembling those of humans. The results suggest that switching to a low-fiber, Western diet may have the power to deplete most normal primate gut microbes in favor of a less diverse set of bacteria.

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A new study reveals a counterintuitive cellular strategy that may protect insulin-producing cells from destruction during type 1 diabetes.

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A research team at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles has generated functional human and mouse tissue-engineered liver from adult stem and progenitor cells. Tissue-engineered Liver (TELi) was found to contain normal structural components such as hepatocytes, bile ducts and blood vessels.

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Researchers have discovered an enzyme that plays a leading role in the formation of compounds that give aged wines their sought-after aroma.

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Chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) is a mysterious and maddening condition, with no cure or known cause. But researchers at the University of California San Diego School of Medicine, using a variety of techniques to identify and assess targeted metabolites in blood plasma, have identified a characteristic chemical signature for the debilitating ailment and an unexpected underlying biology: It is similar to the state of dauer, and other hypometabolic syndromes like caloric restriction, diapause and hibernation.

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Scientists report that a specialized drug screen test using lab-grown human cells has revealed two classes of compounds already in the pharmaceutical arsenal that may work against mosquito-borne Zika virus infections.

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Breast cancer researchers have discovered that mutations found outside of genes that accumulate in estrogen receptor positive breast tumours throughout their development act as dominant culprits driving the disease.

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WORCESTER, MA - A study in The Journal of Cell Biology by scientists at the University of Massachusetts Medical School reveals important new details about the inner workings of the CRISPR-Cas9 machinery in live cells that may have implications for the development of therapeutics that use the powerful gene editing tool.

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Starting out as a college freshman can be hard.

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New Orleans, LA - Dr. John England, Professor and Chair of Neurology at LSU Health New Orleans School of Medicine, and colleagues in Honduras and Venezuela have reported a new neurological complication of infection with the Zika virus. They described the first confirmed case of Zika-associated sensory polyneuropathy in a paper published online by the Journal of the Neurological Sciences, available at http://www.jns-journal.com/article/S0022-510X(16)30535-4/abstract.

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A new study from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) will help researchers understand the ways that marine animal larvae use sound as a cue to settle on coral reefs. The study, published on August 23rd in the online journal Scientific Reports, has determined that sounds created by adult fish and invertebrates may not travel far enough for larvae --which hatch in open ocean--to hear them, meaning that the larvae might rely on other means to home in on a reef system.

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The USDA's National Institute of Food and Agriculture supports NoroCORE, a multidisciplinary research collaborative of 30 researchers from 25 universities who are joining forces to understand and control food borne virus risks.

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Washington, DC - August 26, 2016 - Several species of bacteria found in smokeless tobacco products have been associated with opportunistic infections, according to a paper published August 26 in Applied and Environmental Microbiology, a journal of the American Society for Microbiology.