Category Health/Medical

Design strategy of protein-DNA nanowires. The protein-DNA nanowire is self-assembled with a computationally designed protein homodimer and a double-stranded DNA with the protein binding sites properly arranged. Credit: Yun (Kurt) Mou, Jiun-Yann Yu, Timothy M. Wannier, Chin-Lin Guo and Stephen L. Mayo/Caltech

Synthetic structures made of DNA could one day be used to deliver cancer drugs directly to tumor cells, and customized proteins could be designed to specifically attack a certain kind of virus. Although researchers have already made such structures out of DNA or protein alone, a Caltech team recently created- for the first time -a synthetic structure made of both protein and DNA. Combining the two molecule types into one biomaterial opens the door to numerous applications.

“If your mat...

To operate on the brain, doctors need to see fine details on a small scale. A tiny camera that could produce 3D images from inside the brain would help surgeons see more intricacies of the tissue they are handling and lead to faster, safer procedures.

An endoscope with such a camera is being developed at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. MARVEL, ie Multi Angle Rear Viewing Endoscopic tooL, has been honored this week with the Outstanding Technology Development award from the Federal Laboratory Consortium. An endoscope is a device that examines the interior of a body part.

“With one of the world’s smallest 3D cameras, MARVEL is designed for minimally nvasive brain surgery,” said Harish Manohara, principal investigator of the project at JPL...

It is thus possible to encourage regeneration of the myelin sheath by inhibiting the action of PTPRZ in endogenous oligodendrocyte precursor cells, indicating a new potential treatment for demyelinating diseases. Normally, myelin is repaired, even if damaged, but the mechanism that controls remyelination was not well understood. In addition, in demyelinating diseases eg multiple sclerosis, the myelin sheath does not recover from damage and gets worse, finally leading to symptoms such as vision loss, limb numbness, and movement disorders. The research group of Professor Masaharu Noda and colleagues of the National Institute for Basic Biology, performed a detailed examination of the remyelinating process of damaged myelin using disease model mice...

Mitosis, stage four (stock image). At the start of an individual’s life there is a single fertilized egg cell. One day after fertilization there are two cells, after two days four, after three days eight and so on, until there are billions of cells at birth. The order in which our genes are activated after fertilization has remained one of the last uncharted territories of human development. Credit: © Tatiana Shepeleva / Fotolia

The fertilized egg gene mapping provides an in-depth understanding of early embryonic development in humans – and scientists now hope that the results will help finding for example new therapies against infertility and genetic disease. There are ~23,000 human genes in total...