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.

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.

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

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.