News by Subject Technology & Engineering

The PIM-2 protein kinase negatively regulates T cell responses in transplantation and tumor immunity, while PIM-1 and PIM-3 are positive regulators, report Medical University of South Carolina investigators in The Journal of Clinical Investigation. Blocking PIM-2 in allogeneic bone marrow transplant dramatically accelerated graft-versus-host disease. In adoptive immunotherapy with autologous T cells, silencing PIM-2 on T cells produced robust tumor immunity, highlighting the importance of PIM-specific inhibition.

For decades, biologists have believed a key enzyme in plants had one function -- produce amino acids, which are vital to plant survival and also essential to human diets. But for Wellington Muchero, Meng Xie and their colleagues, this enzyme does more than advertised. They had run a series of experiments on poplar plants that consistently revealed mutations in a structure of the life-sustaining enzyme that was not previously known to exist.

New study from the University of Copenhagen reports that political discussions about genetically modified foods have ignored concerns among Danes that GM foods are 'unnatural'. This is very regrettable, according to Jesper Lassen, a researcher who has investigated public attitudes about genetic modification for the past 25 years.

Researchers have demonstrated that a novel biocompatible adhesive made of two naturally derived polymers is 15 times stronger than adhesive materials currently used for nerve reconstruction and can support the survival, extension, and proliferation of cells essential for nerve regeneration.

Medication that reaches the spot where it's needed without placing strain on the rest of the body is no longer a vision of the future. Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU) has successfully developed proteins that function like a shuttle and release medication directly in the place in the body where they are actually needed. The study could serve as a model and could enable targeted and tissue-specific administration of medication in future.