In an article published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Cornell scientists report that cancellous bone – the spongy foam-like type of bone found near joints and in the vertebrae that is involved in most osteoporosis-related fractures – displays unique material properties that allow it to recover shape after it breaks.
Biomedical informatics, one of the world’s fastest-growing interdisciplinary fields, is the latest graduate degree program offered by the University of Chicago Graham School of Continuing Liberal and Professional Studies.
The substance that provides energy to all the cells in our bodies, Adenosine triphosphate (ATP), may also be able to power the next generation of supercomputers.
A bit of mystery has enshrouded the type of specialized mechanotransducers—force sensors—underlying the process of converting a mechanical force into a biological function—mechanotransduction—and how they’re able to sense a force and, subsequently, transduce to downstream biological functions. During the BPS 2016 annual meeting, Bailong Xiao will share a discovery made while exploring how newly identified mechanotransducers function at the molecular level.
New treatments and diagnostics for Alzheimer’s and cancer dominate the 2016 research awards recently announced by the Minnesota Partnership for Biotechnology and Medical Genomics. The state-supported funding was distributed among seven research teams, based on competitive applications. Each team represents researchers from Mayo Clinic and the University of Minnesota.
A team of national laboratory and university researchers led by the Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Argonne National Laboratory is growing large test plots of switchgrass crops with the farmer in mind. For the first time, researchers have mixed different genetic varieties of switchgrass on production-size plots, hypothesizing this could increase yield by extending the growing season, varying the size of the switchgrass plants to produce a fuller crop and potentially reducing the crop’s vulnerability to weather fluctuations. A seven-year study showed the switchgrass variety mixture was, most consistently, the highest yielding crop, as measured by the harvested dry weight from each plot.
New research from the University of Southampton shows that copper can destroy MRSA spread by touching and fingertip contamination of surfaces.
A squid has more in common with a spider than you may think. The razor-sharp 'teeth' that ring the suckers found on some squid tentacles are made up entirely of proteins remarkably similar -- and in some ways superior -- to the ones found in silks. Those proteins, called suckerins, give the teeth their strength and stretchiness, and could one day be used as the basis for biomaterials with many potential biomedical applications.
In the February 18, 2016 issue of Science, researchers from UCSB and including a DOE JGI team report that anaerobic gut fungi perform as well as the best fungi engineered by industry in their ability to convert plant material into sugars that are easily transformed into fuel and other products.
A new optogenetic technology developed at UMass Medical School, called optogenetic immunomodulation, is capable of turning on immune cells to attack melanoma tumors in mice. Using near-infrared light, UMMS researchers have shown they can selectively activate an immune response by controlling the flow of calcium ions into the cell. This breakthrough could lead to less invasive, and more controlled and selective, immunotherapies for cancer treatment.
Database searches for DNA sequences that can take biologists and medical researchers days can now be completed in a matter of minutes, thanks to a new search method developed by computer scientists at Carnegie Mellon University.
Using a sophisticated, custom-designed 3D printer, regenerative medicine scientists at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center have proved that it is feasible to print living tissue structures to replace injured or diseased tissue in patients.
An assistant research specialist at the Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center (GLBRC) has designed a new strain of yeast that could improve the efficiency of making fuel from cellulosic biomass such as switchgrass. Both the yeast strain and the method of its design could help overcome a significant bottleneck in the biofuels pipeline — namely, that the powerful solvents so good at breaking down biomass also sometimes hinder the next critical step of the process, fermentation.
Often the most difficult step in taking atomic-resolution images of biological molecules is getting them to form high-quality crystals needed for X-ray studies of their structure. Now researchers have shown they can get sharp images even with imperfect crystals using the world’s brightest X-ray source at the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory.
Iowa State's Zengyi Shao and Jean-Philippe Tessonnier are combining the tools of biology and chemistry to create new biorenewable products. Their hybrid conversion technology is described in the journal Angewandte Chemie International Edition.
Scientists have for the first time reengineered a building block of a geometric nanocompartment that occurs naturally in bacteria. The new design provides an entirely new functionality that greatly expands the potential for these compartments to serve as custom-made chemical factories.
Researchers at Mayo Clinic have shown that senescent cells – cells that no longer divide and accumulate with age – negatively impact health and shorten lifespan by as much as 35 percent in normal mice. The results, which appear today in Nature, demonstrate that clearance of senescent cells delays tumor formation, preserves tissue and organ function, and extends lifespan without observed adverse effects.
Caltech biologists have modified a harmless virus in such a way that it can successfully enter the adult mouse brain through the bloodstream and deliver genes to cells of the nervous system. The virus could help researchers map the intricacies of the brain and holds promise for the delivery of novel therapeutics to address diseases such as Alzheimer's and Huntington's. In addition, the screening approach the researchers developed to identify the virus could be used to make additional vectors capable of targeting cells in other organs.
Researchers, including Carnegie Mellon University President Subra Suresh and collaborators Tony Jun Huang from the Pennsylvania State University and Ming Dao from MIT, have demonstrated that acoustic tweezers can be used to non-invasively move and manipulate single cells along three dimensions, providing a promising new method for 3-D bioprinting.
A team of biologists and biomedical researchers at UC San Diego has developed a new method to determine if bacteria are susceptible to antibiotics within a few hours, an advance that could slow the appearance of drug resistance and allow doctors to more rapidly identify the appropriate treatment for patients with life threatening bacterial infections.
The latest video in NIBIB's 60 Seconds of Science video series explains what tissue engineering is and how it works.
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.
Researchers at University of California, San Diego School of Medicine and collaborators developed GenomeSpace, a cloud-based, biologist-friendly platform that connects more than 20 bioinformatics software packages and resources for genomic data analysis. The team is now developing and crowdsourcing “recipes” — step-by-step workflows — to better enable non-programming researchers to interpret their genomic data. The work is described in a paper published January 18, 2016 in Nature Methods.
Columbia Engineering Professor Elisa Konofagou won a $3.33 million DARPA grant to develop a new way to use focused ultrasound for stimulation of peripheral nerves that will ultimately be able to control organ function. The grant is part of DARPA’s new Electrical Prescriptions program aimed at developing novel technologies to improve physical and mental health using targeted stimulation of the peripheral nervous system to exploit the body’s natural ability to quickly and effectively heal itself.
Researchers are looking beyond the usual suspects in the search for microbes that can efficiently break down inedible plant matter for conversion to biofuels. A new comparative study from the Oak Ridge National Laboratory-based center finds the natural abilities of unconventional bacteria could help boost the efficiency of cellulosic biofuel production.
A research team from the National University of Singapore has developed a new lightweight and smart rehabilitation device called EsoGlove to help patients who have lost their hand functions due to injuries or nerve-related conditions to restore their hand movements.
Research conducted by members of the Colorado School of Mines Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering demonstrates microscale biomedical devices shaped like wheels can be injected into the body and effectively “roll” to treat areas in need – such as arterial blockages.
Simple consumer-grade equipment was used to study the combat flight behaviors of carpenter bees right at the researcher’s home.
Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) visited Northwestern University's Chicago campus on Jan. 4 to announce the $32.08 billion in federal funding for the National Institutes of Health in fiscal year 2016 -- a 6.64 percent year-over-year increase.
A technique to combine the ultrasensitivity of surface enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) with a slippery surface invented by Penn State researchers will make it feasible to detect single molecules of a number of chemical and biological species from gaseous, liquid or solid samples.
University of Louisville researchers recently received a patent on a synthetic biochemical compound and its variants, moving science closer to a treatment for gum disease.
A research team including NIBIB-funded scientists have developed a sunscreen that encapsulates the UV-blocking compounds inside bio-adhesive nanoparticles, which adhere to the skin well, but do not penetrate beyond the skin’s surface. These properties resulted in highly effective UV protection in a mouse model, without the adverse effects observed with commercial sunscreens, including penetration into the bloodstream and generation of reactive oxygen species, which can damage DNA and lead to cancer.
Cardiovascular diseases are among the most frequent causes of death worldwide. The ability to repair a damaged heart is one of the grand visions of medical science. Cardiac regeneration is possible in fish and in newborn mice. But so far it has not been known whether human hearts can regenerate as well. Scientists at IMBA – Institute of Molecular Biotechnology of the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna and the Innsbruck Medical University have described the first complete clinical and functional repair of a human heart following an acute heart attack in an infant. This astonishing discovery nourishes hope that cardiac repair in humans might be possible in the future.
A team of researchers at Kansas State University, the University of Missouri and global agricultural biotechnology company Genus plc has developed pigs that are resistant to the most devastating disease in the swine industry.
Led by Columbia Engineering professor Ken Shepard, researchers have, for the first time, harnessed the molecular machinery of living systems to power an integrated circuit from ATP, the energy currency of life. They achieved this by integrating a conventional solid-state complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) integrated circuit with an artificial lipid bilayer membrane containing ATP-powered ion pumps, opening the door to creating entirely new artificial systems that contain both biological and solid-state components. (Nature Communications 12/7)
Linda Chelico and her team are learning more about how an ancient “error correction” system in the human genome helps protect the body against HIV.
Biomedical informatics, one of the world’s fastest-growing interdisciplinary fields, is the latest graduate degree program offered by the University of Chicago Graham School of Continuing Liberal and Professional Studies.
Researchers at University of California, San Diego School of Medicine, Ludwig Cancer Research and Isis Pharmaceuticals demonstrate a commercially feasible way to use RNA to turn the CRISPR-Cas9 system on and off as desired — permanently editing a gene, but only temporarily activating CRISPR-Cas9. The study is published November 16 by Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Katherine Lau used her biomedical engineering know-how to help create a prosthesis for a 4-year-old girl using 3-D printing.
Cornell biomedical engineers have developed specialized white blood cells – dubbed “super natural killer cells” – that seek out cancer cells in lymph nodes with only one purpose: destroy them.
Scientists from Nanyang Technological University (NTU Singapore) have successfully used dead bacteria to kill colorectal cancer cells.
Building on wireless technology that has the potential to interfere with pain, scientists have developed flexible, implantable devices that can activate -- and, in theory, block -- pain signals in the body and spinal cord before those signals reach the brain. The researchers, at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, said the implants one day may be used in different parts of the body to fight pain that doesn't respond to other therapies.
Findings published in national journal
Scientists at Mount Sinai create immune cells that visibly kill cancer and pathogen infected cells
Scientists aspire to build nanostructures that mimic the complexity and function of nature’s proteins. These microscopic widgets could be customized into incredibly sensitive chemical detectors or long-lasting catalysts. But as with any craft that requires extreme precision, researchers must first learn how to finesse the materials they’ll use to build these structures. A discovery by Berkeley Lab scientists is a big step in this direction. The scientists discovered a design rule that enables a recently created material to exist.
A team of scientists at the University of Washington and the biotechnology company Illumina have created an innovative tool to directly detect the delicate, single-molecule interactions between DNA and enzymatic proteins.
Public and private entities that fund biomedical research face difficult choices on how to allocate a finite level of capital, and scientists often take risks in selecting research topics multiple times in their academic careers. UNC Charlotte data scientist Lixia Yao, in a recently published article in Nature Biotechnology titled “Health ROI as a Measure of Misalignment of Biomedical Needs and Resources,” suggests a better method for those funding agencies and scientists.
researchers from the University of Zurich, Switzerland have made a breakthrough by obtaining the first nanometer (one billionth of a meter) resolved image of individual tobacco mosaic virions, a rod-shaped RNA virus that infects a wide range of plants, especially tobacco. The work demonstrates the potential of low-energy electron holography as a non-destructive, single-particle imaging technique for structural biology. The researchers describe their work in a paper published this week on the cover of the journal Applied Physics Letters, from AIP Publishing.
Researchers from the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and Princeton University have designed a new online tool that predicts the role of key proteins and genes in diseases of the human immune system.
The findings of Virginia Tech’s Biomedical and Engineering Mechanics Associate Professor Sunghwan “Sunny” Jung and his students on somersaulting single-cell organisms could impact the study of how the containment affects the behavior of organisms, used in a wide variety of engineering and scientific applications.
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