Quality standards for looking into the tumor genome

First a letter salad, then a book

24-Sep-2024 - Personalized medicine with individually tailored therapies is becoming more and more a reality in cancer. This requires a precise look into the genetic material of tumors, a molecular diagnostic tumor profile. A research group from the German Network for Personalized Medicine (DNPM) has recorded ...

Complex green organisms emerged a billion years ago

Research team investigates the emergence of multicellularity

25-Jan-2024 - Of all the organisms that photosynthesize, land plants have the most complex bodies. How did this morphology emerge? A team of scientists led by the University of Göttingen has taken a deep dive into the evolutionary history of morphological complexity in streptophytes, which include land plants ...

Sophisticated gene memory: Researchers develop new method to genetically compare hundreds of animal species

02-May-2023 - Thanks to great technological advances, the genetic material of living beings can now be sequenced at a rapid rate. Comparisons of genomes, whether of closely related or completely different species, reveal particularly interesting findings. In this way, information can be obtained on ...

Survival specialists on Mount Everest

Humans are leaving behind a ‘frozen signature’ of hardy microbes

20-Mar-2023 - Almost 5 miles above sea level in the Himalayan mountains, the rocky dip between Mount Everest and its sister peak, Lhotse, lies windswept, free of snow. It is here at the South Col where hundreds of adventurers pitch their final camp each year before attempting to scale the world’s tallest peak ...

Pioneering method for stem cell diagnostics

Leif S. Ludwig receives Paul Ehrlich and Ludwig Darmstaedter Early Career Award

25-Jan-2023 - Biochemist and physician Dr Leif S. Ludwig (40) from the Berlin Institute of Health at Charité and the Max Delbrück Center will receive the 2023 Paul Ehrlich and Ludwig Darmstaedter Prize for Young Researchers, as the Scientific Council of the Paul Ehrlich Foundation announced. Ludwig has ...

Brain metastases in melanoma patients: important molecular mechanisms decoded

Different cell states determine progression of the disease

05-Jan-2023 - The development of brain metastases is a frequent occurrence in melanoma that is associated with a poor prognosis for the affected patients. The effectiveness of existing therapies varies greatly. The reasons for this variability, however, remain largely unknown. An international research team ...

Stem cell identity unmasked by single cell sequencing technology

31-May-2019 - Scientists from The University of Queensland's Diamantina Institute have revealed the difference between a stem cell and other blood vessel cells using gene-sequencing technology. Leading skin cancer and stem cell researcher Professor Kiarash Khosrotehrani said the findings provided evidence of ...

Inherited mutation leads to overproduction of EPO

13-Mar-2018 - A newly-discovered hereditary mutation is responsible for an increased production of erythropoietin (EPO) in the blood. This mutation causes a messenger RNA (mRNA) that is not normally involved in the formation of proteins to be reprogrammed so that it produces EPO, thus abnormally increasing the ...

Mobilization of jumping genes in pluripotent stem cells may affect safety of stem cell-based therapy

12-Jan-2016 - Reprogramming of human cells into induced pluripotent stem cells (hiPSCs) activates normally repressed, endogenous mobile DNA (retrotransposons; jumping genes), which can result in new insertions in the stem cell genome. The function of differentiated cells derived from such stem cells could be ...

'Chromosomal Chaos:' Complex array of mutations found in rare, aggressive leukemia

09-Oct-2015 - Sezary syndrome (SS), an aggressive leukemia of mature T cells, is more complicated at a molecular level than ever suspected, according to investigators from the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. With a poor prognosis and limited options for targeted therapies, ...