Vaccines are largely recognized to be the most effective way out of the ongoing coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, caused by the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). By inducing protective neutralizing responses to the virus, vaccines will hopefully allow life to return to a semblance of normality, saving many lives in the process. […]
Understanding cellular metabolism – how a cell uses energy- could be key to treating a wide array of diseases, including vascular diseases and cancer. While many techniques can measure these processes among tens of thousands of cells, researchers have been unable to measure them at the single-cell level. Researchers at the University of Chicago's Pritzker […]
Getting energy and nutrients from the environment – that is, eating – is such an important function that it has been regulated through sophisticated mechanisms over hundreds of millions of years. Some of these mechanisms are only now beginning to be unraveled. A group at the Spanish National Cancer Research Centre (CNIO) has found one […]
As anyone who has ever procrastinated knows, remembering that you need to do something and acting on that knowledge are two different things. To understand how learning changes nerve cells and leads to different behaviors, researchers studied the much simpler nervous system of worms. "In this study, we can now translate neuronal activity to behavioral […]
New insights into how our bodies come into being from a single cell have been generated by researchers at the Wellcome Sanger Institute, the Wellcome-MRC Cambridge Stem Cell Institute and the University of Cambridge. It is the first study of its kind to describe fetal development in humans by retracing how and when mutations are […]
A new cancer vaccine could boost the positive effects of existing immunotherapy drugs, improving the success rate of treatments from 20% to 75% of cases, according to a new study by immunologists from the University of Konstanz. The vaccine, which incorporates a new immunostimulant that is safe for use in humans, was shown to partially […]
Researchers in the United States have conducted a study showing the efficacy of the Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines at eliciting a robust T cell response against variants of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) – the agent that causes coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). The team – from Gladstone Institute of Virology in San Francisco […]
Researchers at the University of California San Diego have laid the groundwork for a potential new type of gene therapy using novel CRISPR-based techniques. Working in fruit flies and human cells, research led by UC San Diego Postdoctoral Scholar Zhiqian Li in Division of Biological Sciences Professor Ethan Bier's laboratory demonstrates that new DNA repair […]
With the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic showing no signs of abating, and some parts of the world displaying meteoric rises in the number of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) infections, the need to achieve herd immunity is as urgent as ever. Though many spike-based vaccines have now been rolled out, their efficacy […]
Skeletal muscles enable voluntary movements and are controlled by a special type of neurons called motor neurons, which make direct contact with skeletal muscles through so-called neuromuscular junctions (NMJs). It is through NMJs that skeletal muscles receive signals making them contract or relax. In certain neurodegenerative diseases, such as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), NMJs are […]
