Design organoids with light

Organoids help researchers understand biological processes in health and disease

01-Nov-2023 - They look like thunderclouds in pinhead format: organoids. The three-dimensional cell cultures play an important role in medical and clinical research because they reproduce tissue structures and organ functions in the Petri dish. Scientists can use them to understand how diseases arise, organs ...

Milestone: Researchers have generated primordial germ cells from stem cells – a world’s first

A big step toward producing rhino gametes

13-Dec-2022 - To save the northern white rhinoceros from extinction, the BioRescue team is racing to create lab-grown egg and sperm cells of the critically endangered subspecies. The team has now reported a milestone in “Science Advances”: they have generated primordial germ cells from stem cells – a world’s ...

Novel method for fast 3D microscopy

03-Aug-2021 - Researchers at the ImmunoSensation2 Cluster of Excellence at the University of Bonn, the University Hospital and the research center caesar have develop a method that allows using multi-focal images to reconstruct the movement of fast biological processes in 3D. In the past, many discoveries ...

Illuminating the genome

RNA-guided endonuclease - in situ labelling, a new CRISPR/Cas9 based molecular visualisation method

12-Mar-2019 - The CRISPR/Cas9 system has been making ripples in the scientific community ever since its mechanisms were proposed in 2012. Commonly referred to as a genome editing tool, many scientists have found different applications for the scissor-like properties of the Cas9-protein. Researchers from the ...

How visual information about females reaches the male brain

LC10 – the neuron that tracks fruit flies

23-Jul-2018 - Many animals rely on vision to detect, locate, and track moving objects. Male Drosophila fruit flies primarily use visual cues to stay close to a female and to direct their courtship song towards her. Scientists from the Max Planck Institute of Neurobiology in Martinsried and the Janelia Research ...

Colorectal cancer risk factors decrypted

Connection between obesity and tumor growth

17-Jul-2018 - According to the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer, colorectal cancer is the third most common cancer type in men and the second most common in women. Eight out of top ten countries in the world with the highest rates of incidence of colorectal cancer are EU ...

How herpesviruses escape from the immune system

06-Jul-2018 - Herpesviruses are the cause of many diseases, such as shingles or mononucleosis ('kissing disease') that compromise our quality of life. While the human immune system can usually prevent the spread of herpesviruses, it cannot entirely eliminate them from our bodies. This is because these viruses ...

Stone age hepatitis B virus decoded

Viral DNA shows the hepatitis B virus has been circulating in Europe for at least 7.000 years

14-May-2018 - An international team of scientists led by researchers at Kiel University in the scope the CRC 1266 “Scales of Transformation” and the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History has successfully reconstructed genomes from Stone Age and Medieval European strains of the hepatitis B ...

On the Track of Nitrogenase

Decisive step towards understanding biological nitrogen fixation taken

03-Apr-2018 - Another step has been taken towards explaining the molecular mechanisms of biological fixation of nitrogen by the enzyme nitrogenase: Dr. Daniel Sippel from Prof. Dr. Oliver Einsle’s work group at the Institute of Biochemistry of the University of Freiburg has shown that the iron-vanadium ...

Biomimetic molecules to program cell mechanics

19-Feb-2018 - Researchers from the Fraunhofer Institute for Cell Therapy and Immunology and Leipzig University are developing a system to enable mechanical cell properties to be precisely modulated and investigated. By drawing on synthetic mimics of proteins in cells, the links between cellular scaffold ...