News by Subject Technology & Engineering

An international team of researchers led by Yale University, University of Iowa, and the Translational Genomics Research Institute (TGen), an affiliate of City of Hope, has discovered a new pathway that may improve success against an incurable type of children's brain cancer. The study results, published today in Nature Communications, suggest that scientists have identified a unique way to disrupt the cellular process that contributes to Diffuse Intrinsic Pontine Gliomas (DIPG).

MIT researchers have created a technology called DOMINO to store complex 'memories' in the DNA of living cells, including human cells. This memory storage capacity can form the foundation of complex circuits that trigger a cellular event, such as producing a fluorescent protein, when a specific event or sequence of events occurs.

A team of neuroscientists at the University of Tuebingen and MIT's Picower Institute for Learning and Memory shows how to distinguish four classes of brain cells by their spike waveforms. The advance offers brain researchers the chance to better understand how different kinds of neurons are contributing to behavior, perception and memory, and how they are malfunctioning in cases of psychiatric or neurological diseases.

Cells can be viewed as natural minicomputers that execute programs encoded in their DNA. In a paper appearing Aug. 22, 2019 in the journal Molecular Cell, MIT researchers describe a new technology that uses DNA for information processing and storage in living cells.