News by Subject Biology

St. Jude Children's Research Hospital study highlights the power of comprehensive whole genome, whole exome and RNA sequencing to better understand and treat each patient's cancer.

How early is the course of COVID-19, mild or severe, determined? In Cell, researchers examined nasal cells sampled from patients at the time of diagnosis, looking for differences between those who developed severe disease and those who experienced a mild illness. Cells from patients who developed severe COVID-19 exhibited a more muted antiviral response. If the early stages of infection can determine disease severity, it opens a path for scientists to develop early therapeutic interventions.

Similar to the election needle and the stock market index, scientists have developed a new tracking system to detect danger to rainforests around the world. The data to build the index was culled from advanced satellite measurements of climate and vegetation of each tropical region on Earth.

There are many reasons that an intranasal vaccine against the SARS-CoV-2 virus would be helpful in the fight against COVID-19 infections, University of Alabama at Birmingham immunologists Fran Lund, Ph.D., and Troy Randall, Ph.D., write in a viewpoint article in the journal Science.

The body's first encounter with the coronavirus happens in the nose and throat. New work in Cell suggests that responses in this early battleground help determine who will develop severe COVID-19 and who will have only mild or no illness. It used single-cell RNA sequencing of all the cell types recovered from nasal swabs of people with and without COVID-19.

Many species within Kenya's Tana River Basin will be unable to survive if global temperatures continue to rise as they are on track to do - according to new research from the University of East Anglia. A new study published in the journal PLOS ONE outlines how remaining within the goals of the Paris Agreement would save many species. The research also identifies places that could be restored to better protect biodiversity and contribute towards global ecosystem restoration targets.

A new optogenetic tool, a protein that can be controlled by light, has been characterized by researchers at Ruhr-Universität Bochum. They used an opsin - a protein that occurs in the brain and eyes - from zebrafish and introduced it into the brain of mice. Unlike other optogenetic tools, this opsin is not switched on but rather switched off by light. Experiments also showed that the tool could be suitable for investigating changes in the brain that are responsible for the development of epilepsy.