The signaling molecule interleukin-2 (IL-2) has long been known to have powerful effects on the immune system, but efforts to harness it for therapeutic purposes have been hampered by serious side effects. Now researchers have worked out the details of IL-2's complex interactions with receptor molecules on immune cells, providing a blueprint for the development of more targeted therapies for treating cancer or autoimmune diseases.
An international team of scientists led by a graduate student at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) has demonstrated the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI), the same computing concept that will empower self-driving cars, to predict and avoid disruptions -- the sudden release of energy stored in the plasma that fuels fusion reactions -- that can halt the reactions and severely damage fusion facilities.
Risk of disruptions
A new laboratory method allows researchers to create compartments within a liquid that, like drops of oil in water, are separate but have no physical barrier between them. The method could help researchers understand how human cells use similar "membraneless compartments" to segregate and concentrate components for important cellular processes, chemical reactions, or other biological functions.
Researchers at the University of Georgia's Regenerative Bioscience Center and their colleagues have found that "natural killer" white blood cells could guard against the cascade of cellular changes that lead to Parkinson's disease and help stop its progression.
Natural killer (NK) cells are white blood cells that can kill tumors without being "told" from the body to do so. NK cells provide the first line of defense against invasion or a virus and are equipped with activating receptors that can sense cellular stress and identify cells that have been altered due to infection.
Botulinum toxins -- a.k.a. botox -- have a variety of uses in medicine: to treat muscle overactivity in overactive bladder, to correct misalignment of the eyes in strabismus, for neck spasms in cervical dystonia, and more. Two botulinum toxins, types A and B, are FDA-approved and widely used. Although they are safe and effective, the toxins can drift away from the site of injection, reducing efficacy and causing side effects.
A University of Massachusetts Amherst biostatistician who directs the UMass-based Flu Forecasting Center of Excellence was invited by the White House Coronavirus Task Force to participate Wednesday morning in a coronavirus modeling webinar.
The four-hour, virtual gathering will include 20 of the world's leading infectious disease and pandemic forecasting modelers, from researchers at Harvard, Johns Hopkins and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in the U.S. to those based at institutions in England, Hong Kong, South Africa and the Netherlands.
Botulinum toxin (BoNT) is used for a range of applications from treating chronic pain to reducing the appearance of wrinkles, but when injected it can diffuse into the surrounding tissue and give rise to adverse effects. A new study publishing March 17 in the open-access journal PLOS Biology by Linxiang Yin and Min Dong of Boston Children's Hospital, USA and colleagues shows that a subtle modification of an FDA-approved form of BoNT enhances binding to the nerve cells and improves the drug's potency and safety.
Perovskite solar cells have developed quickly in the past decade. But like silicon solar cells, the efficiency of perovskite solar cells is highly dependent upon the quality of the perovskite layer, which is related to its crystallinity.
Unfortunately, the aging process of the perovskite solution used to fabricate solar cells makes the solution unstable, thus leading to poor efficiency and poor reproducibility of the devices. Reactants and preparation conditions also contribute to poor quality.
WASHINGTON, March 17, 2020 -- Proteins are the building blocks of life, and consequently, scientists have long studied how they can improve proteins and design completely new proteins that perform new functions and processes.
Traditionally, new proteins are created by either mimicking existing proteins or manually editing the amino acids that make up the proteins. This process, however, is time-consuming, and it is difficult to predict the impact of changing any one of the amino acid components of a given protein.