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The cells that never sleep: How slumber lets neurons clean up and stay healthy

When HHMI Investigator Amita Sehgal started studying sleep 25 years ago, the topic elicited a yawn from most biologists. “In the year 2000, if I had suggested to my department that we hire people working on sleep, they would have laughed at me,” says Sehgal, a molecular biologist and neuroscientist at the University of Pennsylvania. “The thinking was that sleep is not something that neuroscientists do; psychologists study sleep and dreams.” Now, more than two decades later, sleep science has finally woken up.

Biologists around the world are now studying sleep in everything from fruit flies to jellyfish to understand the fundamental molecular and cellular mechanisms that drive slumber and answer the age-old question of why we sleep.

“Sleep is widely conserved across the animal kingdom and so it must have some basic function that is the same across species, and so what is that?” Sehgal says. “We’re finally getting to a point where we are recognizing a few basic principles about sleep.”

Giant DNA viruses encode their own eukaryote-like translation machinery, researchers discover

In a new study, published in Cell, researchers describe a newfound mechanism for creating proteins in a giant DNA virus, comparable to a mechanism in eukaryotic cells. The finding challenges the dogma that viruses lack protein synthesis machinery, and blurs the line between cellular life and viruses.

Protein production is accomplished in cellular life by decoding messenger RNA (mRNA) sequences in a process referred to as translation. In fact, most genes have some function related to protein synthesis. However, viruses are not and do not contain cells.

“In contrast to living organisms, viruses cannot replicate independently and rely on a host cell to perform many of the biological processes required to reproduce. Although viruses encode proteins involved in DNA replication and transcription, the dogma is that all viruses share a universal dependence on the host cell translation machinery for viral protein synthesis,” explain the authors of the new study.

An inducible multiciliated cell line resolves proteome dynamics and identifies CDK7 as a conserved regulator

Camille Boutin, Laurent Kodjabachian et al. describe an inducible multiciliated cell line well suited for advanced microscopy and proteomic approaches. The study provides a detailed proteomic profiling of MCC during their differentiation.

Boutin et al., describe an inducible multiciliated cell line well suited for advanced microscopy and proteomic approaches. The study provides a detailed pr.

Blood test ‘clocks’ can predict when Alzheimer’s symptoms will start

Researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have developed a method to predict when someone is likely to develop symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease using a single blood test. In a study published in Nature Medicine, the researchers demonstrated that their models predicted the onset of Alzheimer’s symptoms within a margin of three to four years.

This method could have implications both for clinical trials developing preventive Alzheimer’s treatments and for eventually identifying individuals likely to benefit from these treatments.

More than seven million Americans live with Alzheimer’s disease, with health and long-term care costs for Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia projected to reach nearly $400 billion in 2025, according to the Alzheimer’s Association. This massive public health burden currently has no cure, but predictive models could help efforts to develop treatments that prevent or slow the onset of Alzheimer’s symptoms.

A gel for wounds that won’t heal: Oxygen-delivering technology can prevent amputations

As aging populations and rising diabetes rates drive an increase in chronic wounds, more patients face the risk of amputations. UC Riverside researchers have developed an oxygen-delivering gel capable of healing injuries that might otherwise progress to limb loss.

Injuries that fail to heal for more than a month are considered chronic wounds. They affect an estimated 12 million people annually worldwide, and around 4.5 million in the U.S. Of these, about one in five patients will ultimately require a life-altering amputation.

The new gel, tested in animal models, targets what researchers believe is a root cause of many chronic wounds: a lack of oxygen in the deepest layers of the damaged tissue. Without sufficient oxygen, wounds languish in a prolonged state of inflammation, allowing bacteria to flourish and tissue to deteriorate rather than regenerate.

Stopping fatal blood loss with clay

Traumatic injury is the third leading cause of death in the state of Texas, surpassing strokes, Alzheimer’s disease and diabetes, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. A massive number of these deaths are the result of uncontrolled bleeding. “Severe blood loss can rapidly lead to hemorrhagic shock,” said Dr. Akhilesh Gaharwar, a biomedical engineering professor at Texas A&M University. “Many patients die within one to two hours of injury. This critical period is often referred to as the ‘golden hour.’”

Gaharwar and his fellow researchers in the biomedical engineering department have found a way to extend this golden hour—using clay.

Gaharwar, Dr. Duncan Maitland and Dr. Taylor Ware are developing a suite of injectable hemostatic bandages —biomedical materials that stop bleeding and promote blood to clot faster. Their research is specifically targeting deep internal bleeding where traditional methods like compression are not possible.

Immunoglobulin A-producing cells mediate the clinical benefits of metformin via interleukin-10

Guo et al. show that metformin enhances intestinal IgA immunity via gut microbiota and increases gut antigen-specific IgA-producing IL-10+ cells in the liver and VAT. IL-10 from these cells mediates the clinical benefits of metformin.

Can AI build a machine that draws a heart? What automated mechanism design could mean for mechanical engineering

Can you design a mechanism that will trace out the shape of a heart? How about the shape of a moon, or a star? Mechanism design—the art of assembling linkages and joints to create machines with prescribed motion—is one of the quintessential activities of mechanical engineers, but has resisted automation for almost two centuries.

In his seminal 1841 book Principles of Mechanisms, Oxford professor Robert Willis famously noted, “When the mind of a mechanician is occupied with the contrivance of a machine, he must wait until, in the midst of his meditations, some happy combination presents itself to his mind which may answer his purpose.”

Almost 200 years later, we still teach machine design mostly by apprenticeship. While we can simulate machines of almost any complexity, systematic methods for design are known only for the most trivial contraptions.

Machine learning helps solve a central problem of quantum chemistry

Within the STRUCTURES Cluster of Excellence, two research teams at the Interdisciplinary Center for Scientific Computing (IWR) have refined a computing process, long held to be unreliable, such that it delivers precise results and reliably establishes a physically meaningful solution. The findings are published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.

Why molecular electron densities matter

How electrons are distributed in a molecule determines its chemical properties—from its stability and reactivity to its biological effect. Reliably calculating this electron distribution and the resulting energy is one of the central functions of quantum chemistry. These calculations form the basis of many applications in which molecules must be specifically understood and designed, such as for new drugs, better batteries, materials for energy conversion, or more efficient catalysts.

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