Category Biology/Biotechnology

A bioinformatics boot camp for high schoolers at Skoltech turned into a venue for the latest chapter in the ongoing contest between humans and artificial intelligence in science. Having earlier resolved a key 50-year-old problem of structural bioinformatics, the breakthrough AI program AlphaFold proved inapplicable to another challenge researchers in this field are faced with.

This finding is reported in a PLOS ONE study, whose authors refute the claims by some AlphaFold enthusiasts that DeepMind’s AI has mastered the ultimate protein physics and is the be-all and end-all of structural bioinformatics.

Structural bioinfor...

Eating lots of fats increases the risk of metabolic disorders, but the mechanisms behind the problem have not been well understood. Now, University of California, Irvine biologists have made a key finding about how to ward off harmful effects caused by a high-fat diet. Their study appears in Nature Communications.

The UC Irvine research centered on a protein complex called AMPK, which senses the body’s nutrition and takes action to keep it balanced. For example, if AMPK detects that glucose is low, it can boost lipid breakdown to produce energy in its place...

Harmful intestinal inflammation might be prevented with a one-two punch. Fresh insights into how our bodies interact with the microbes living in our guts suggest that a two-drug combination may offer a new way to treat inflammatory bowel diseases such as Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis.

The potential treatment pathway emerges from a study led by experts at Cincinnati Children’s published online March 28, 2023, in the Journal of Experimental Medicine. Co-first authors were Garrett Overcast, PhD, and Hannah Meibers, BS. Corresponding author was Chandrashekhar Pasare, DVM, PhD, Division of Immunobiology and co-director, Center for Inflammation and Tolerance.

The research team conducted numerous experiments to learn about how immune cells located in the lining of the intestin...

A team at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) has induced stem cells to emulate the development of the human heart. The result is a sort of “mini-heart” known as an organoid. It will permit the study of the earliest development phase of our heart and facilitate research on diseases.

The human heart starts forming approximately three weeks after conception. This places the early phase of heart development in a time when women are often still unaware of their pregnancy...