Exploring Life at Its Simplest: Scientists Create a "Minimal Cell Membrane" with Just Two Lipids

Surprising Effects of a Two-Lipid Diet

27-Nov-2024 - Lipids, or fats, are essential to life. They form the membranes around cells, protecting them from the outside. In nature, there is an enormous diversity of lipids, with each organism having its own unique combination. But what are the minimum lipid requirements for a cell to survive? A research ...

What triggers the programmed cell death mechanism?

Development and combination of various microscopic and spectroscopic techniques

13-Sep-2024 - How can molecular structures be analysed when the resolution of the techniques available is not sufficient? Researchers from the fields of physics, chemistry and medicine at Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf (HHU) have combined and further developed various microscopic and spectroscopic ...

Poorly insulated nerve cells promote Alzheimer’s disease in old age

The results of the study show, for the first time, that defective myelin in the aging brain increases the risk of Aꞵ peptide deposition

08-Jun-2023 - Alzheimer’s disease, an irreversible form of dementia, is considered the world’s most common neurodegenerative disease. The prime risk factor for Alzheimer’s is age, although it remains unclear why. It is known that the insulating layer around nerve cells in the brain, named myelin, degenerates ...

Under control to the very end – how our cells kill themselves

Using highly sensitive microscopes and NMR spectroscopy, the mechanism has been elucidated down to the level of individual atoms

24-May-2023 - Every day, millions of cells die in our body. Other than generally assumed, cells do not simply burst at the end of their lives but rather, a specific protein serves as a breaking point for cell membrane rupture. Researchers at the University of Basel have now been able to elucidate the exact ...

Alzheimer’s: modulation of cell membrane influences formation of amyloid-β

Adding long-chain fatty acids can thicken cell membranes and alter the activity of a key enzyme

10-May-2023 - A characteristic feature of Alzheimer’s disease are deposits of the amyloid-β protein, which clumps together to form plaques in the brain. The amyloid-β protein is produced by an enzyme which resides in cellular membranes. A team lead by Prof. Harald Steiner and Dr. Edgar Dawkins from the ...

Synthetic cells to interact with living matter

These could be used to study complex biological questions or to develop new concepts in biomedicine

24-Oct-2022 - Scientists at DWI – Leibniz Institute for Interactive Materials have come one step closer to the objective of producing functional synthetic cells. The research group is probing the necessary ingredients for the design and development of materials with the ability to communicate and function with ...

The Power of light: How light can be used to control processes in synthetic cells

10-Oct-2022 - Synthetic – i. e. artificially produced - cells can imitate certain functions of biological cells. These synthetic cells could open up new medical possibilities in the future. In laboratories, such cells can already help in chemical processes on a miniature scale as "mini-reactors". Scientists at ...

Particles from everyday wall paints can harm living organisms

Novel membrane shows high filtering effects

22-Aug-2022 - Dispersion paints are mostly used in households for painting walls and ceilings. An interdisciplinary research team from the University of Bayreuth has now analysed the chemical composition of two typical dispersion paints and discovered a large number of solid particles in them which are only a ...

Bacterial membrane transporter helps pathogens to hide from immune system

"Our results represent a real breakthrough, since attempts to decipher the structure of a TRAP transporter had already been going on for about 20 years"

11-Aug-2022 - The transport of substances across the membrane into the cell is linked to specific membrane transport proteins. Researchers at the University Hospital Bonn (UKB) and the University of Bonn, in collaboration with an international team, have now succeeded in elucidating the molecular structure of ...

Green wave for “gene cabs”

Leap in knowledge of peptide nanofibrils

03-Jun-2022 - Viruses help researchers to introduce genes into cells so that they can produce active pharmaceutical ingredients, for example. Special peptides stimulate the process. Until now, however, the efficiency increase was poorly understood. A team of researchers from the MPI for Polymer Research, the ...