A newly published paper in The Lancet shows that an experimental vaccine against Marburg virus (MARV) was safe and induced an immune response in a small, first-in-human clinical trial. The vaccine, developed by researchers at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the National Institutes of Health, could someday be an … Read more
RNA viruses, such as the coronavirus that causes COVID-19, are in a life-and-death race the moment they infect a cell. These viruses have only minutes to establish their replication machinery inside the host cell before the genetic instructions contained in their vulnerable RNA genomes – which are more fragile than DNA – would otherwise be … Read more
In a recent article published in Nature Materialsresearchers reported a conductance-based organic electrochemical neuron (c-OECN) that mimicked biological signaling in neurons, especially activation/inactivation of their sodium and potassium channels. Studies: Ion-tunable antiambipolarity in mixed ion–electron conducting polymers enables biorealistic organic electrochemical neurons. Image Credit: MattLphotography/Shutterstock Background Neurons crosstalk and process information primarily via the sodium … Read more
Happy New Year! On Wednesday, our home planet will be at its closest distance to the sun — just 91.4 million miles, in contrast to Earth’s average distance of 93.0 million miles and its farthest distance of 94.5 million miles in early July. All planets move fastest when they are closest to the sun, as … Read more
Cryo-electron microscopy by University of Alabama at Birmingham researchers has exposed the structure of a bacterial virus with unprecedented detail. This is the first structure of a virus able to infect Staphylococcus epidermidis, and high-resolution knowledge of structure is a key link between viral biology and potential therapeutic use of the virus to quell bacterial … Read more
A landmark study by researchers at the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and Stanford University reveals how a tiny cellular machine called TRiC directs the folding of tubulin, a human protein that is the building block of microtubules that serve as the cell’s scaffolding and transport system . An illustration of a cellular … Read more
