News by Subject Biology

Findings from an innovative new study led by researchers at Dartmouth's Geisel School of Medicine and published this week in Nature Microbiology reveal that the way in which human fungal pathogens form colonies can significantly impact their ability to cause disease. Understanding how these colonies form could lead to new therapies that target these infections in critically ill patients.

Scientists are one step closer to discovering the causes of immune diseases such as asthma, multiple sclerosis and arthritis. Research from the Wellcome Sanger Institute, GSK and Biogen, under the Open Targets initiative, has shown that thousands of differences in DNA between individuals, associated with immune diseases, are linked with the switching-on of a specific subtype of immune cells. Published in Nature Genetics, this study could lead to finding drug targets for developing new treatments.

Research led by the University of Michigan Life Sciences Institute has solved a nearly 50-year-old mystery of how nature produces a large class of bioactive chemical compounds.

Researchers from IBEC and CRG in Barcelona use a technique called high-throughput mutagenesis to study Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS), with unexpected results. Results showed that aggregation of TDP-43 is not harmful but actually protects cells, changing our understanding of ALS and opening the door to radically new therapeutic approaches.

Researchers at UC San Diego say they are getting closer to identifying the mechanisms of autism spectrum disorder, revealing a critical gene network that is disrupted and which helps predict severity of symptoms.

Biomedical engineers at Duke University have used a previously unexplored CRISPR technology to accurately regulate and edit target genes in human cells. With this new approach, the researchers hope to dramatically expand the CRISPR-based tools available to biomedical engineers, opening up a new and diverse frontier of genome engineering technologies.