News by Subject Biology

A new auto-commentary looks at how an emerging area of artificial intelligence, specifically the analysis of small systems-of-interest specific datasets, can be used to improve drug development and personalized medicine.

A team led by Van Andel Research Institute (VARI) scientists has revealed for the first time the atomic-level structure of TRPM2, a protein that may be a promising drug target for conditions such as Alzheimer's disease and bipolar disorder.

A breakthrough has been made in the fight against Alzheimer's disease -- researchers have found a new way to target the toxic particles that destroy healthy brain cells. Academics at the University of Cambridge and at Lund University in Sweden have devised the first strategy to 'go after' the cause of the devastating disease, leading to hope that new drugs could be developed to treat dementia.

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 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.

Body organs such as the intestine and ovaries undergo structural changes in response to dietary nutrients that can have lasting impacts on metabolism, as well as cancer susceptibility, according to Carnegie's Rebecca Obniski, Matthew Sieber, and Allan Spradling. 'Children born to malnourished mothers often struggle with obesity later in life and our findings could explain the physiology of why that happens,' Obniski explained.