Category Biology/Biotechnology

AHR limits microglial pro-inflammatory transcriptional responses during EAE.

A study published this week in Nature sheds new light on the connection between the gut and the brain, untangling the complex interplay that allows the byproducts of microorganisms living in the gut to influence the progression of neurodegenerative diseases. Investigators from Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH) have been using both animal models and human cells from patients to tease out the key players involved in the gut-brain connection as well as in the crosstalk between immune cells and brain cells. Their new publication defines a pathway that may help guide therapies for multiple sclerosis and other neurologic diseases.

The new research focuses on the influence of gut microbes on two types of cells that play...

This is a bird’s eye view of a microwell plate containing kidney organoids, generated by liquid handling robots from human stem cells. Yellow boxed region is shown at higher magnification. Red, green, and yellow colors mark distinct segments of the kidney. Credit: Freedman Lab/UW Medicine

Robotic approach could accelerate regenerative medicine research and drug discovery. An automated system that uses robots has been designed to rapidly produce human mini-organs derived from stem cells. Researchers at the University of Washington School of Medicine in Seattle developed the new system...

American Gut Project, based at UC San Diego School of Medicine, is the world’s largest crowdsourced, citizen science project. Credit: UC San Diego Health

How factors such as diet, antibiotics and mental health status can influence the microbial and molecular makeup of your gut. Researchers at University of California San Diego School of Medicine and collaborators have published the first major results from the American Gut Project, a crowdsourced, global citizen science effort. The project, described May 15 in mSystems, is the largest published study to date of the human microbiome – the unique microbial communities that inhabit our bodies.

This publication provides the largest public reference database of the human gut microbiome, which may help drive many future microbiome studies...

Chiral molecule. Credit: Palitel and Naaman

A new study published in Science by Professors Yossi Paltiel of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Ron Naaman from the Weizmann Institute of Science describes a breakthrough technology with the power to create drugs with fewer unwanted side effects. The most important molecules in biology are chiral molecules. “Chiral,” the Greek word for “hand,” describes molecules that look almost exactly alike and contain the same number of atoms but are mirror images of one another – i.e. some “left-handed” and others are “right-handed.” This different “handedness” is crucial and yields different biological effects.

Understanding chiral differences was made painfully clear by the drug thalidomide...