Culture
Cells are incredibly adept at creating complex molecules, like therapeutics, and can do so much better than many of our best factories.
Synthetic biologists look to re-engineer cells to make these molecules for specific needs, including pharmaceuticals and energy applications. But the trial-and-error process is difficult and time-consuming, and often competes with the cell's other goals and processes, like growth and survival.
More than nine million Americans know the scary feeling: sudden, severe shoulder pain and the sensation that their arm feels stuck, unable to move. "Frozen shoulder" is a common condition that happens when the connective tissues around the shoulder joint become thickened and stiff, often a result of trauma, extended use, immobilization, surgical procedures, or inflammation.
Invading predators can devastate an ecosystem. In fact, a leading cause of extinction is the introduction of predators into an isolated system like an island or a lake. The destruction is usually blamed on the predator's eating choices, but sometimes the key lies in the prey animals' responses, according to an international team of researchers led by Princeton's Robert Pringle.
A new study led by researchers at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) and Swansea University Medical School furthers our knowledge of viruses--in the sea and on land-- and their potential to cause life-threatening illnesses. Their findings, which examine newly-identified genes carried by mysterious "giant" viruses, could represent potential new drug targets for giant viruses linked to human diseases. The work published this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
To treat large gaps in long bones, like the femur, which result from bone tumor removal or a shattering trauma, researchers at Penn Medicine and the University of Illinois at Chicago developed a process that partially recreates the bone growth process that occurs before birth. A bone defect of more than two centimeters is considered substantial, and current successful healing rates stand at 50 percent or less, with failure often resulting in amputation.
Like fishermen, Rice University bioengineers are angling for their daily catch. But their bait, biomolecules in a hydrogel scaffold, lures microscopic stem cells instead of fish.
These, they say, will seed the growth of new tissue to heal wounds.
The team led by Brown School of Engineering bioengineer Antonios Mikos and graduate student Jason Guo have developed modular, injectable hydrogels enhanced by bioactive molecules anchored in the chemical crosslinkers that give the gels structure.
Consumers who get a web-based product or mobile app for free are more likely to give it a word-of-mouth boost than a product they buy, suggesting they feel "one good turn deserves another."
That's according to new research from the McCombs School of Business at The University of Texas at Austin by Wen Wen, an assistant professor of information, risk and operations management. She collaborated with the Georgia Institute of Technology's Samuel Bond and West Virginia University's Stephen He on the study, which was recently published in the Journal of Marketing Research.
Scientists at Harvard University and the Broad Institute's Stanley Center for Psychiatric Research have made a major advance in the development of human brain 'organoids': miniature, 3D tissue cultures that model a patient's own brain cells in a dish. Their new method, published in Nature, consistently grows the same types of cells, in the same order, as the developing human cerebral cortex. The advance could change the way researchers study neuropsychiatric diseases and test the effectiveness of drugs.
In the first days after the tuberculosis (TB) bacteria infect the body, a flurry of immune cells are activated to fight the infection. Now, researchers have identified a master cell that coordinates the body's immune defenses in those crucial early days, according to a new study from Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis and Africa Health Research Institute in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa.
Skin cancer is the most common type of cancer in the United States. If you could visibly see signs of skin cancer on your body, would you be more likely to visit the doctor? A group of professors from BYU and the University of Utah asked that exact question as they looked for the most effective ways to influence people to screen themselves for cancer.
New ALMA observations reveal a never-before-seen disk of cool, interstellar gas wrapped around the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way. This nebulous disk gives astronomers new insights into the workings of accretion: the siphoning of material onto the surface of a black hole. The results are published in the journal Nature.
Scientists from Trinity College Dublin have discovered how the highly infectious and sometimes deadly Hepatitis C virus (HCV) "ghosts" our immune system and remains undiagnosed in many people. They report their findings today [Wednesday June 5th] in the international FASEB journal.
U.S. hemp production is soaring, but government oversight hasn't kept up, according to an article in Chemical & Engineering News (C&EN), the weekly newsmagazine of the American Chemical Society. The industry is scrambling to find common ground between states, which each have a different set of rules for hemp growers and processors.
ANN ARBOR, Mich. -- Nearly a third of birthing moms now deliver babies via caesarean section -- and many of them go home with powerful opioid painkillers.
A new study has surprised the medical world, finding that smoking does not shorten the length of telomeres - a marker at the end of our chromosomes that is widely accepted as an indicator of ageing.
This suggests that adult telomere length should be considered a static biomarker that changes relatively little during adult life.
The meta-analysis of 18 previously collected datasets led by researchers at Newcastle University is published in the Royal Society journal Open Science today.