News by Subject Biology

Imagine your liver being just a big puddle. Some organelles in your cells are exactly that including prominent ones like the nucleolus. Now a synthetic organelle engineered in a lab at Georgia Tech shows how such puddle organs can carry out complex life-sustaining reaction chains.

New 3D maps of water distribution during cellular membrane fusion are accelerating scientific understanding of cell development, which could lead to new treatments for diseases associated with cell fusion. Using neutron diffraction at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory, researchers have made the first direct observations of water in lipid bilayers used to model cell membrane fusion.

A new study explores the mystery of what drives eating past the point of fullness, at the most basic level in the brain. It shows that two tiny clusters of cells battle for control of feeding behavior -- and the one that drives eating overpowers the one that says to stop. It also shows that the brain's own natural opioid system gets involved -- and that blocking it with the drug naloxone can stop over-eating.

A naturally occurring antibiotic called kanglemycin A is effective against Mycobacterium tuberculosis, the bacteria that cause tuberculosis, even in drug-resistant strains, according to an international team of researchers who used chemistry, molecular biology, microbiology, and X-ray crystallography to show how the compound maintains its activity.

Using a bioinformatics approach, University of California San Diego School of Medicine researchers found that CD4+ T cell's binding partner, a molecule called MHC-II, may have even more influence on emerging tumors than MHC-I, the better known partner of CD8+ T cells. The finding, published September 20 in Cell, may help researchers improve cancer immunotherapies and predict which patients will respond best.

The ability to acquire manganese during infection is essential for the virulence of Enterococcus faecalis in animals, according to a study published Sept. 20, 2018 in the open-access journal PLOS Pathogens by José Lemos of the University of Florida College of Dentistry, and colleagues.

Researchers have made a significant new discovery concerning the signaling mechanisms that enable newts to regrow their tails after injury.

The mood-altering drug MDMA -- which promotes positive, friendly social interactions in humans by inhibiting serotonin uptake in nerve cells -- has a similar behavioral effect in an octopus species, scientists reported today. This indicates that serotonin has been functioning as a regulator of social behavior for at least 500 million years, when the human and octopus lineages evolutionarily diverged.