Urine could be used as a powerful source of brain cells to study some disease, and could even be used one day in therapies to study neurodegenerative diseases. Scientists have found a way to persuade the cells discarded in urine to turn into useful neurons. The scientists published their findings in the journal Nature Methods. [...]

Using a novel technique to analyze simultaneously large numbers of microRNAs in living mice, scientist at Yale University identified and disabled miR-150, allowing mice to more efficiently regenerate white cells and platelets depleted by chemotherapy. Chemotherapy kills blood cells as well as cancer cells, often with fatal results. Now Yale stem cell researchers have identified [...]

Using polymers, scientists at Penn State created primitive cell-like structures that they infused with RNA, demonstrating how the molecules would react chemically under conditions that may have been present on Earth four-billion years ago. Researchers at Penn State University have developed a chemical model that mimics a possible step in the formation of cellular life [...]

Designed by a team of scientists from Harvard, MIT and Boston Children’s Hospital, electronic sensors made of silicon nanowires could be used to monitor electrical activity in engineered tissue and control drug release or screen drug candidates for their effects on the beating of heart tissue. To control the three-dimensional shape of engineered tissue, researchers [...]

In a recently published study, MIT scientists show that implanted cells’ therapeutic properties depend on their shape, which is determined by the type of scaffold on which they are grown, and have identified biomarkers that correlate the cells’ shape, chemokine secretion and behavior. Tissue implants made of cells grown on a sponge-like scaffold have been [...]

Using a microfluidic system for simultaneously measuring single-cell mass and cell cycle progression over multiple generations, a team of researchers from MIT and Harvard Medical School have precisely measured mammalian cell growth rates. It’s a longstanding question in biology: How do cells know when to progress through the cell cycle? In simple organisms such as [...]

By using optogenetics, a new study from a team of scientists is one of the first to use light to regulate metabolic activity in the membranes of cells, which may one day lead to a better understanding of the mechanisms that contribute to the development of disease. With a milliseconds-long flash of blue light, Yale [...]

Using data from more than 900 scientific papers, a team of Stanford researchers produced the first whole-cell computational model of the life cycle of the human pathogen Mycoplasma genitalium, including all of its molecular components and their interactions. In a breakthrough effort for computational biology, the world’s first complete computer model of an organism has [...]

New research data from scientists at USC San Diego suggests that the human exosome maintains progenitor cell function, functioning as a surveillance system in cells to regulate the normal turnover of RNAs as well as to destroy RNAs with errors in them. In the July 6 issue of Cell Stem Cell, researchers at the University [...]

A newly published study from Bioengineers at the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science describes the effects of confined mechanical environments on cellular responses during mitosis, finding that a single cancer cell can produce up to five daughter cells. It’s well known in conventional biology that during the process of mammalian cell [...]

A new study from scientists at the University of North Carolina suggests that previous assumptions regarding the SMN gene, which is linked with spinal muscular atrophy, are wrong. They found that instead of faulty processing, a separate role of the SMN gene is likely responsible for the disease’s manifestations. Chapel Hill, North Carolina – Over [...]

A new study from the Berkeley Lab takes a step forward in the fight against breast cancer, gaining a better understanding of the cellular basis for age-related vulnerability to breast cancer. During the study, researchers found that that aging causes an increase in multipotent progenitors and a decrease in the myoepithelial cells that line the [...]