How protists crack the walls of algae

Orciraptor agilis produces a number of partly novel enzymes and binding proteins: Such enzymes could potentially be useful in industrial applications

20-Jun-2022 - A team of researchers led by Dr Sebastian Hess from the University of Cologne’s Institute of Zoology has studied the expression of carbohydrate-active enzymes in the unicellular organism Orciraptor agilis by RNA sequencing. Orciraptor is a so-called ‘protoplast feeder’ and lives exclusively from ...

Insights into the cellular and molecular changes in male infertility

14-Sep-2021 - “You can’t see the wood for the trees” is a phrase which we certainly don’t associate immediately with the medical examination and analysis of testicles. But in a certain way it applies here, too: testicles consist of many different types of cells, and up to now this complex quality prevented ...

What social distancing does to a brain

Have you recently wondered how social-distancing and self-isolation may be affecting your brain?

04-Dec-2020 - An international research team led by Erin Schuman from the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research discovered a brain molecule that functions as a “thermometer” for the presence of others in an animal’s environment. Zebrafish “feel” the presence of others via mechanosensation and water movements ...

On the trail of cancer stem cells

What goes on inside and between individual cells during the very earliest stages of tumor development?

24-Feb-2020 - Single cell sequencing technologies and a mouse model have enabled researchers to comprehensively map the cellular diversity of whole salivary gland tumors and trace the path of cancer stem cells. Two research teams from the Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine and their collaborators have ...

FLAM-seq: the full picture of messenger RNA and their tails

19-Aug-2019 - Researchers in MDC’sBerlin Institute for Medical Systems Biology(BIMSB)have developed atoolenablingaccurate sequencing ofmessenger RNA along withtheirtails for the first time.ProfessorNikolausRajewskyand his team described this new tool, called full-length poly(A) and mRNA ...

Researchers visualize the battle between virus and host cells at the single-cell level

An innovative method identifies newly activated genes within individual cells

12-Jul-2019 - Cells are equipped with multiple defense mechanisms to fight off intruders. Genes encode the building blocks of the response that must be activated during an enemy attack in an ordered manner. Scientists at the Helmholtz Institute for RNA-based Infection Research (HIRI) in Würzburg, one of the ...

Circular RNA linked to brain function

16-Aug-2017 - For the first time, scientists have shown that circular RNA is linked to brain function. When a RNA molecule called Cdr1as was deleted from the genome of mice, the animals had problems filtering out unnecessary information – like patients suffering from neuropsychiatric disorders. While hundreds ...

Algorithms Offer Insight into Cellular Development

01-Sep-2016 - Neuherberg, August 31, 2016. Through RNA sequencing, researchers can measure which genes are expressed in each individual cell of a sample. A new statistical method allows researchers to infer different developmental processes from a cell mixture consisting of asynchronous stages. This finding ...