News by Subject Biology

'What has been missing in clinical trials may just be the timing of the treatments,' says first author Lynsey Fettig.

Researchers from Genethon, the AFM-Telethon laboratory, Inserm (UMR 1089, Nantes) and the University of London (Royal Holloway) demonstrated the efficacy of an innovative gene therapy in the treatment of Duchenne muscular dystrophy. Indeed, after injecting microdystrophin (a 'shortened' version of the dystrophin gene) via a drug vector, the researchers managed to restore muscle strength and stabilise the clinical symptoms in dogs naturally affected by Duchenne muscular dystrophy.

The group of Doctor Myriam Calonje Macaya have recently published a study in Genome Biology that means an advance in the knowledge of epigenetic regulation by means of Polycomb-group proteins in plants.

Textbooks tell us that, in arbuscular mycorrhizal symbioses, the host plant supplies its fungal symbionts solely with sugars, in return for inorganic nutrients. New findings by Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitaet (LMU) in Munich researchers now show that lipids are also on the menu.

Using cheese as a novel way to study microscopic communities, researchers have found that bacteria living on artisanal cheese varieties have transferred thousands of genes between each other. They also identified regional hotspots where such exchanges take place, including several genomic "islands" that host exchanges across several species of bacteria. Microbiome communities are known to play a key function in many areas, including human health, protecting us from some diseases and amplifying others.

A research team from the Schepens Eye Research Institute of Massachusetts Eye and Ear has successfully prevented mice from developing angiogenesis of the retina--the sensory tissue at the back of the eye--using gene-editing techniques with CRISPR-Cas9.

Researchers at North Carolina State University have found a specific gene in corn that appears to be associated with resistance to two and possibly three different plant leaf diseases.