Gabriele Sorci on unexpected mate choices in an isolated bird population
Choosing a mate is key to the evolution and survival of a species, contributing to whether the most attractive and beneficial traits are passed on to future generations. It is generally thought that...
View ArticleMatthew Blurton-Jones on neural stem cells for treating Alzheimer’s
Dementia affects over 35 million people worldwide, with figures set to double by 2030 according to the World Health Organization. Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is the leading cause of dementia, however...
View Articlesno-lncRNAs: a story of splicing across humans, rhesus and mice
Convention tells us that ‘DNA makes RNA makes protein’, but the function of the majority of RNA that does not code for protein has, historically, been less clear. The recent advent of high-throughput...
View ArticleKathryn Maitland on treating severe anaemia in sub-Saharan Africa
Anaemia, either due to insufficient numbers of red blood cells or an impaired ability of these cells to carry oxygen, can result in weakness, fatigue, and dizziness, and in its most severe form can be...
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Epigenomic clues to human inflammatory disease from comparative primate analyses
Genome wide analyses have brought new insights to the genetic basis of chronic inflammatory diseases, which have seen a significant rise in numbers during the 21st century. This increase in prevalence...
View ArticleThe twisted leukemia genome: a third dimension to cancer genomics
Studies that use the genome sequence or gene expression patterns to draw biological conclusions are ten-a-penny, especially in the field of cancer. For example, specific gene expression signatures and...
View ArticleJuliana Chan on unravelling the link between diabetes and cancer risk
An improved understanding of risk factors for cancer has helped reduce cancer incidence. However, much is yet to be clarified about how the complex pathways that contribute to increased risk can be...
View ArticleA 1000 human genomes…and some mycoplasma too
The revolution in rapid and cost-effective, high-throughput sequencing technologies have set a new trend in large-scale biomedical research. With such vast amounts of data being produced, the control...
View ArticleRodolphe Thiebaut and Laura Richert on how to accelerate HIV vaccine development
Over 35 million people worldwide are known to be infected with HIV, according to the World Health Organization. With such a heavy global burden, research into vaccines against HIV are underway in order...
View ArticleHow PP4 plays a part in protective gut immunity
Inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), encompassing ulcerative colitis and Crohn’s disease, arises as a result of an abnormal response by the immune system to antigens in the gut, including food and...
View ArticleProbing the aetiology of renal disease: Ming-hui Zhao & Jing Huang on FSGS
Focal Segmental Glomerulosclerosis (FSGS) is a major cause of primary glomerular disease in adults. The resulting glomerular damage can lead to generalised oedema, protein leakage into urine, and in...
View ArticleTranslation from the heart of connexin-43
How many times have you dismissed a UFO (unidentified fluor-/chemiluminescent object) on your western blot as an uninteresting, accidental degradation product – focusing only on the band running at the...
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Amazonian giants: discovery of the novel giant mimivirus Samba
Over the last decade, discoveries of extremely large and complex viruses have challenged our concepts of what viruses are and how they evolved. These giant viruses are often comparable in dimension and...
View ArticleMichael Speicher and Ellen Heitzer on tracking cancer with ‘liquid biopsies’
Understanding the molecular nature of cancer is key to administering the most effective treatments. Cancer patients are therefore often subject to invasive tissue biopsies to discern the dominant...
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Does the battle of the sexes start in the oviduct?
For many years, the gender of mammalian offspring was regarded as a matter of chance, resulting in an equal ratio of males and females in each generation. But growing evidence suggests that sex ratios...
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Why the Pantoea pathogen persists in a multitude of environments
Bacteria were the first forms of life on Earth and are the most prevalent biomass on the planet; their success is perhaps unsurprising given their rapid evolutionary rates and remarkable adaptive...
View ArticleMoshe Oren on taking transcriptomics to the next level with 4sUDRB-seq
Transcriptomics is generally associated with efforts to probe gene expression levels within total mRNA samples, an area of research that has yielded significant insights into processes such as...
View ArticleRobert Vassar and Lokesh Kukreja on mitochondrial mutants in Alzheimer’s
Mitochondrial dysfunction is associated with several neurodegenerative conditions, from those with known causative mitochondrial mutations such as Kearns–Sayre syndrome and Leber’s Hereditary Optic...
View ArticleHand on heart: microRNA regulation of Hand1 for cardiomyocyte differentiation
Damage to cardiac muscle cells, for which the heart has a limited ability to repair or replace, can ultimately lead to heart failure. Stem cell therapy is emerging as a potential regenerative treatment...
View ArticleJohn Laterra on targeting lipid metabolism in malignant brain tumours
When cancer takes hold, the cellular metabolism of malignant tissues reaches new heights as larger amounts of energy are needed to generate lipids for membrane biosynthesis and tumour signal...
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