Category Biology/Biotechnology

Whether cells in the human body survive or die under stress depends, among other things, on their mitochondria. Scientists at the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Freiburg have now shown that a sudden stop in energy production in mitochondria prevents normal cell death or so-called apoptosis and instead triggers an inflammatory response. The results of this research were published in the journal Immunity.

“We found that mitochondria provide a kind of decision-making aid: they regulate whether a cell undergoes clean, silent apoptosis or releases pro-inflammatory messenger substances,” explains Prof. Dr...

If you’ve heard of two of the brain’s chemical neurotransmitters, it’s probably dopamine and serotonin. Never mind that glutamate and GABA do most of the work—it’s the thrill of dopamine as the “pleasure chemical” and serotonin as a tender mood-stabilizer that attract all the headlines.

Of course, the headlines mostly get it wrong. Dopamine’s role in shaping behavior goes way beyond simple concepts like “pleasure” or even “reward”...

Discovery suggests broad implications for giving brain a boost. While it’s well known that sleep enhances cognitive performance, the underlying neural mechanisms, particularly those related to nonrapid eye movement (NREM) sleep, remain largely unexplored. A new study by a team of researchers at Rice University and Houston Methodist’s Center for Neural Systems Restoration and Weill Cornell Medical College, coordinated by Rice’s Valentin Dragoi, has nonetheless uncovered a key mechanism by which sleep enhances neuronal and behavioral performance, potentially changing our fundamental understanding of how sleep boosts brainpower.

The research, published in Science, reveals how NREM sleep — the lighter sleep one experiences when taking a nap, for example — fost...

A new “toolkit” to repair damaged DNA that can lead to aging, cancer and motor neuron disease (MND) has been discovered by scientists at the Universities of Sheffield and Oxford.

Published in Nature Communications, the research shows that a protein called TEX264, together with other enzymes, is able to recognize and “eat” toxic proteins that can stick to DNA and cause it to become damaged. An accumulation of broken, damaged DNA can cause cellular aging, cancer and neurological diseases such as MND.

Until now, ways of repairing this sort of DNA damage have been poorly understood, but scientists hope to exploit this novel repair toolkit of proteins to protect us from aging, can...