Feature Channels: Biotech

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Enhanced software tools will accelerate gene discovery and characterization, vital for new forms of fuel production.

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Scientists at The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) have discovered why some cancers may reoccur after years in remission.

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Nonalcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) — a condition that can lead to liver cirrhosis and cancer — isn’t typically detected until well advanced. Even then, diagnosis requires a biopsy. To more easily detect NAFLD, UC San Diego School of Medicine researchers and their collaborators report that the microbial makeup of a patient’s stool — gut microbiome — can be used to predict advanced NAFLD with 88 to 94 percent accuracy. The study is published May 2 in Cell Metabolism.

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Columbia University researchers have created a new tool, based on the principles of topology, to generate a roadmap of the many possible ways in which a stem cell may develop into specialized cells.

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Spider silks, ounce for ounce, can be stronger than steel, and much more tough and flexible. They tend not to provoke the human immune system and some even inhibit bacteria and fungi, making them potentially ideal for surgery and medical device applications. Exploitation of silks has been slow, due to challenges with identifying and characterizing their genes, but researchers have now made a major advance with the largest-ever study of spider silk genes.

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Ferroelectric tunnel junctions show ability to make strong or weak connections and learn pattern recognition

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An ASU research project is pursuing a method of brain stimulation that may improve learning and retention and boost the performance of troops, athletes, students, and musicians.

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Jason H. Moore, PhD, the Edward Rose Professor of Informatics and director of the Penn Institute for Biomedical Informatics at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, has been elected as a fellow of the American Statistical Association, the primary professional organization for statisticians and related professionals in the United States.

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The U.S. Defense Department is looking for ways to speed up cognitive skills training — the types of skills useful for specialists such as linguists, intelligence analysts and cryptographers — and is awarding University of Florida engineers and neuroscientists up to $8.4 million over the next four years to investigate how to do that by applying electrical stimulation to peripheral nerves as a means of strengthening neuronal connections in the brain.

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BioSNTR researchers are investigating how antibodies recognize their targets, activate immune cells and clear influenza from the body. What they learn will result in technologies that biotechnology companies can use to evaluate the effectiveness of their antibody therapeutics.

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UW-Madison researchers are part of an effort to develop a low-cost, easy-to-use system that aims to accelerate learning by stimulating nerves in the head and neck to boost neural activity in the brain.

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In a preclinical study in mice and human cells, researchers report that selectively removing old or 'senescent' cells from joints could stop and even reverse the progression of osteoarthritis.

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In a first for the Virginia Tech Carilion partnership, a medical school student has been awarded with a Howard Hughes Medical Institute fellowship to devote a year to epilepsy research at the Virginia Tech Carilion Research Institute.

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The Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s (HHMI) Medical Research Fellows Program has selected 79 talented medical and veterinary students to conduct in-depth, mentored biomedical research. Each fellow will spend a year pursuing basic, translational, or applied biomedical research in the U.S.

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Scientists from the Florida campus of The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) have shown that a protein helps balance nerve cell communication.

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A new computer modeling study from Los Alamos National Laboratory is aimed at making epidemiological models more accessible and useful for public-health collaborators and improving disease-related decision making.

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Professor Klaus Ley, M.D., has been selected as this year’s winner of the Eugene M. Landis Award, the Microcirculatory Society’s top honor, in recognition of his pioneering work in vascular biology and microcirculation. The microcirculation comprises all the small blood vessels in all tissues and organs and their contents (blood plasma and blood cells).

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New discoveries tied to how food affects our body and why we make certain food choices could help inform nutrition plans and policies that encourage healthy food choices. The Experimental Biology 2017 meeting will showcase groundbreaking research in food policy, nutrition and the biochemistry of food.

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A study from Indiana University published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences has found evidence that extremely small changes in how atoms move in bacterial proteins can play a big role in how these microorganisms function and evolve.

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Deprived of oxygen, naked mole-rats can survive by metabolizing fructose just as plants do, researchers report this week in the journal Science – a finding that could lead to treatments for heart attacks and strokes.

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It all started when a high school chemistry teacher encouraged Amy Cordones-Hahn to leapfrog her regular classroom assignments and do experiments in his lab.

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Researchers at Sandia National Laboratories just received recognition from the Secretary of Energy for their work to mitigate the effects of the 2014 Ebola epidemic. Reducing the amount of time Liberians who suspected they had Ebola spent waiting in large, open waiting rooms called Ebola treatment units was critical to controlling the outbreak. Sandia modeled and analyzed the West Africa nation’s blood sample transport system from the treatment units to diagnostic labs and made recommendations to improve turnaround time.

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The Electrochemical Society (ECS) is pleased to announce the 11 award winners for the Society’s spring biannual meeting.

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A photo of a cup plant teaming with insects led a better understanding of the biology of Acanthocaudus wasps which inject their eggs into aphids that eat the plant. The adult wasps burst out of the aphids like an alien movie.

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An early-stage researcher at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine is receiving a major grant to help address the problem in an innovative way.

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April 25 is National DNA Day commemorating the day in 1953 when scientists published papers in the journal Nature on the structure of DNA. Now, 64 years later, the concept is much more familiar to the average person and researchers are challenged to keep pace with ever-changing technology.

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The dawn of the Animal Kingdom began with a collagen scaffold that enabled the organization of cells into tissues.

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A University of Wisconsin-Madison professor of bacteriology has shown the first proof that a certain group of amoeba called dictyostelids can penetrate biofilms and eat the bacteria within.

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A multidisciplinary team of biologists, physicists and computer scientists lead by Michel Milinkovitch, professor at the Department of Genetics and Evolution of the UNIGE Faculty of Science, Switzerland and Group Leader at the SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics, realised that the brown juvenile ocellated lizard (Timon lepidus) gradually transforms its skin colour as it ages to reach an intricate adult labyrinthine pattern where each scale is either green or black.

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The San Diego Supercomputer Center at UC San Diego has been awarded a National Science Foundation grant to augment its campus computing cluster with new capabilities for bioinformatics analyses to support researchers across campus – including the ability to conduct de-multiplexing, mapping, and variant calling of a single human genome in less than one hour.

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Our world seems to grow smaller by the day as biodiversity rapidly dwindles, but Mother Earth still has a surprise or two up her sleeve. An international team of researchers were the first to investigate a never before studied species a giant, black, mud dwelling, worm-like animal. The findings will be published online in the Apr. 17 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

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Vanderbilt geneticists have developed an effective method for identifying the plant genes that produce the chemical ammunition plants use to protect themselves from predation and is a natural source of many important drugs.

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A team led by engineers at the University of California San Diego has developed nanowires that can record the electrical activity of neurons in fine detail. The new nanowire technology could one day serve as a platform to screen drugs for neurological diseases and could enable researchers to better understand how single cells communicate in large neuronal networks.

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Binghamton University Assistant Professor of Biomedical Engineering Guy German will continue his research into skin with the help of a new, five-year, $500,000 National Science Foundation (NSF) Early Career Development (CAREER) grant.

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Cancer expert Antonio Giordano, MD, PhD, Director of the Sbarro Institute for Cancer Research and Molecular Medicine at Temple University, describes the recent progress and future possibilities of treating SCLC.

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Researchers from the Mechanobiology Institute, Singapore at the National University of Singapore have discovered the primary mechanism driving the extrusion of dying cells from epithelial monolayers.

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Gene-editing alternative corrects Duchenne muscular dystrophy

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Scientists report a significant step toward combatting two degenerative brain diseases that chip away at an individual’s ability to move, and think. A targeted therapy developed by scientists at University of Utah Health slows the progression of a condition in mice that mimics a rare disease called ataxia. In a parallel collaborative study, led by researchers at Stanford University, a nearly identical treatment improves the health of mice that model Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS), commonly called Lou Gehrig’s disease.

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Engineers funded by the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (NIBIB) have developed glasses with liquid-based lenses that “flex” to refocus on whatever the wearer is viewing.

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Genome mapping complements DNA sequencing, offering insight into huge, intact molecules between 150,000 and 1 million base pairs in length. Obtaining measurements of such large segments is not without its challenges, but new research into the physics of nanochannel mapping published this week in the journal Biomicrofluidics, may help overcome a (literal) knot in the process and advance genome mapping technology.

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Scientists have developed a new system to convert methane into a deep green, energy-rich, gelatin-like substance that can be used as the basis for biofuels and other bioproducts, specialty chemicals – and even feed for cows that create the gas in the first place.

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Scientists at The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) have found a way to tether HIV-fighting antibodies to immune cells, creating a cell population resistant to the virus.

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Two Iowa State research groups are combining their expertise to change stem cells for nerve regrowth. The groups -- one led by a mechanical engineer and the other by a chemical engineer -- just published their findings in Advanced Healthcare Materials.

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Researchers published in Nature Medicine from the George Washington University, the University of Perugia, and the University of Rome have discovered a potential new drug to treat and stop the progression of cystic fibrosis. Thymosin α1 is a novel therapeutic single molecule-based therapy that not only corrects genetic and tissue defects, but also significantly reduces inflammation seen in cystic fibrosis patients.

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St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital study examines origin of blood stem cells during development and offers clues for making “donor blood” in the laboratory for therapeutic use

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A new study published in Nature provides clues that could enhance physicians’ ability to pinpoint, in real-time, which patients are not responding to therapy – and intervene with additional drugs to boost the chances of shrinking tumors.

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Scientists at The Wistar Institute have unveiled part of the protein complex that protects telomeres—the ends of our chromosomes.

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What if a computer model could improve itself over time without requiring additional data? Paul Roebber has made weather forecasting more accurate by repurposing an idea from Charles Darwin.

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Combining theory with experiment, University of Wisconsin–Madison scientists are trying to understand how life can arise from non-life. Researchers at the UW–Madison Wisconsin Institute for Discovery are conducting experiments to test the idea that lifelike chemical reactions might develop readily under the right conditions. The work addresses some of the deepest mysteries in biology, and has implications for understanding how common life might be in the universe.