Dang et al. use co-fractionation and immunoprecipitation mass spectrometry to map protein interactions conserved across vertebrate brains. This resource, dubbed VerteBrain, offers insights into brain protein function and new links between proteins and disease, identifying candidate genes and pathways involved in epilepsy, deafness, and developmental disorders.
What if the TARDIS isn’t just science fiction… but a glimpse into physics far beyond our understanding?
The TARDIS is one of the most iconic machines ever created. It’s bigger on the inside, travels through time, ignores the speed of light, and somehow arrives exactly where the Doctor is needed.
But could any of this have a scientific explanation?
In this video, we explore the real physics behind Doctor Who’s greatest invention, including:
• Why the TARDIS is bigger on the inside.
• Pocket universes and higher dimensions.
• The Time Vortex explained.
• Could wormholes or extra dimensions make it possible?
• The Eye of Harmony and limitless energy.
• Why the TARDIS appears to be alive.
• Time travel, causality and paradoxes.
• Fixed points in time.
• Could humanity ever build something remotely similar?
Using concepts from modern theoretical physics—including Einstein’s relativity, extra dimensions, wormholes, and causality—we compare real science with one of the greatest fictional technologies ever imagined.
Phage therapy is the use of bacterial viruses, or bacteriophages, as antibacterial agents. It has been in use for over 100 years and is becoming increasingly common clinically. The first steps of phage therapy include identification of bacteria to be targeted and then obtaining phages with appropriate host ranges. This is followed by various approaches to in vitro phage characterization. Increasingly common for phage phenotypic characterization is the use of kinetic microtiter plate readers. They can both decrease workloads and increase throughput, especially relative to analyses that require plating on agar-based media. These colorimetric/turbidimetric/optical density approaches primarily assess phage-induced culture-wide bacterial lysis, in the shorter term, or instead the phage potential to suppress phage-resistance evolution over longer time frames. Considered here are methods relevant to phage characterization especially for phage-therapy purposes. Discussed are turbidity-reduction assays, determinations of phage antibacterial virulence, and related time-kill curve analysis. All are or can be optical density-based approaches to assessing phage-based bacterial reduction. Emphasis is placed on consideration of the utilities, limitations, and intersections of these similar methods. Emphasized is that the start of “Deviation”—where phage-treated culture turbidity diverges from phage-free controls—may represent a superior endpoint for such optical density-based bacterial-reduction protocols.
Modern therapies have transformed care for people with multiple sclerosis (MS). Yet the disease continues to progress in a substantial proportion of patients, even in the absence of relapses. Detecting and treating this gradual worsening of disability remains one of the greatest challenges in MS care. Researchers from the University of Basel, Switzerland, now report on a blood marker that could help track disease progression and monitor treatment response.
Relapses are only part of the disease process in MS. In some patients, physical and cognitive abilities continue to gradually decline even in the absence of relapses. Experts refer to this as progression independent of relapse activity (PIRA). This process develops slowly and is difficult to detect and quantify. A currently available blood test measures neurofilament light chain (NfL), a biomarker that mainly reflects neuroaxonal damage caused by acute inflammatory disease activity. A blood marker that captures the progressive component of the disease has so far been lacking.
“One of the key questions for us was whether progression leaves a different biological fingerprint than inflammation,” says Professor Jens Kuhle from the University of Basel and the Research Center for Clinical Neuroimmunology and Neuroscience (RC2NB) at University Hospital Basel. “If these processes are biologically distinct, we also need biomarkers that reflect different aspects of the disease rather than expecting a single marker to capture everything.”
There are few treatment options available for people with disorders of the esophagus. Delivering drugs directly to this part of the body is difficult, so patients are usually treated with systemic drugs, which can have unwanted side effects.
To overcome that challenge, MIT engineers developed a gel-like oral drug formulation that can coat the mucosal lining of the esophagus after being swallowed, allowing drugs to pass through the tissue.
The formulation, which includes a hydrogel and other key ingredients that promote rapid drug absorption, could be used to deliver antibodies including infliximab, used to treat a number of autoimmune diseases, or other types of antibodies or small-molecule drugs.
Targeted protein degradation has rapidly evolved from a chemical biology concept into a therapeutic modality, with the first proteolysis-targeting chimera (PROTAC) degrader now approved as a medicine. Linkers play a central role in governing ternary complex formation and conferring drug-like properties on bifunctional compounds. However, linker optimisation remains one of the least rationalised steps in degrader design. In this review, we introduce a linkerology framework that integrates a data-driven analysis of PROTAC linker chemotypes with historical context, representative case studies, emerging proximity-based modalities, and clinical-stage trends. We reveal persistent biases in the explored linker space and identify linker features that are preferentially retained in clinical-stage degraders.
