The Research

As we age our thymus shrinks and is replaced by fatty tissue, losing its essential ability to grow and develop T cells and leaving us susceptible to infections, immune disorders and cancers. Institute scientists have identified a cell that they believe is involved in the curious disappearance of our thymus; and could be the key to regenerating this vital organ. The aging thymus The thymus is a little organ that sits behind the collarbone, but it performs an important job. The thymus is where essential immune cells called T cells are made and trained to go out into the body and fight infections and cancer. A peculiar feature of the thymus is that it disappears as we get older. The thymus starts deteriorating after birth but the process speeds up after puberty and, by age 65, we are basically unable to make new T cells. As the organ shrinks, the T cell areas are replaced with fatty tissue, in a process called involution. As it is replaced by fatty tissue, the thymus can...

, Credit: Northwestern University Specially programmed stem cells demonstrated the potential to regenerate lost muscle mass in muscular dystrophy, according to a Northwestern Medicine study published in Nature Communications.   Scientists reprogram stem cells to regenerate muscle in muscular dystrophy Images showing MiPs inducing regeneration of both heart and muscle tissue (green), and subsequent destruction of regenerated tissue when the MiPs are turned off by the molecule AP20187.  Elizabeth McNally, MD, Ph.D., the Elizabeth J. Ward Professor of Genetic Medicine, was a co-author on the study and Mattia Quattrocelli, Ph.D., a postdoctoral fellow in McNally's lab, was one of the study's co-senior authors. Muscular dystrophy is a genetic disease characterized by the progressive loss of both skeletal and cardiac muscle mass. While there is no cure, physical therapy or medication can offer relief for symptoms, and recent advancements in induced pluripotent stem c...

Machine learning computer systems, which get better with experience, are poised to transform the economy much as steam engines and electricity have in the past. They can outperform people in a number of tasks, though they are unlikely to replace people in all jobs. So say Carnegie Mellon University’s Tom Mitchell and MIT’s Erik Brynjolfsson in a Policy Forum commentary to be published in the Dec. 22 edition of the journal  Science.  Mitchell, who founded the world’s first Machine Learning Department at CMU, and Brynjolfsson, director of the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy in the Sloan School of Management, describe 21 criteria to evaluate whether a task or a job is amenable to machine learning (ML). “Although the economic effects of ML are relatively limited today, and we are not facing the imminent ‘end of work’ as is sometimes proclaimed, the implications for the economy and the workforce going forward are profound,” they write. The skills people choose to develo...

New research suggests that the micro-organisms known as probiotics, which are normally providing health benefits in the intestines, also have an affect on the brain, or as an actual study at Aarhus University has shown; protect against depression. In the animal study at the Department of Clinical Medicine at Aarhus University, rats were fed with an extra fatty and fiberless compound feed. Some of the rats simultaneously received a mix of micro-organisms, mostly in the form of lactic acid bacteria, in their drinking water. While the rats that lived solely on the fatty diet developed behaviour similar to depression, the rats receiving the probiotics-enriched drinking water remained neutral in their behaviour. In other words, the probiotics offset the consequences of the unhealthy diet, explains medical doctor and PhD Anders Abildgaard. As part of his PhD dissertation, he has investigated the effect of probiotics in combination with an unhealthy diet. The study has been publ...

The biochemist Professor Dr. Dorothee Staiger from Bielefeld University has been studying the biological clock in plants for twenty years. Credit: research_tv   The Americans Jeffrey C. Hall, Michael Rosbash, and Michael W. Young were awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine and Physiology for their research on the biological clock. They discovered the molecular mechanisms controlling biological rhythms. A new 'research_tv' report describes how scientists at Bielefeld are also advancing research on the biological clock. The biochemist Professor Dr. Dorothee Staiger from Bielefeld University explains what the three Nobel Prize winners have achieved and reports on the discoveries her research team has made together with collaborators. 'A Nobel Prize for the biological clock has long been overdue,' says Dorothee Staiger. What is so remarkable is that the prize has been granted to basic research - that is, to studies on fundamental concepts in nature. Whereas the...

Catalog of candidate genes involved in plant-microbe relationships Published Dec. 18, 2017 in Nature Genetics, a team led by researchers at Joint Genome Institute (JGI) and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC) have exploited a catalog of bacterial genomes to identify and characterize candidate genes that aid bacteria in adapting to plant environments, specifically genes involved in bacterial root colonization. This image depicts a phylogenetic tree of over 3,800 high quality and non-redundant bacterial genomes. Outer ring denotes the taxonomic group, central ring denotes the isolation source, and inner ring denotes the root-associated genomes within plant-associated genomes. Taxon names are color-coded based on phylum: green - Proteobacteria, red - Firmicutes, blue -Bacteroidetes, purple - Actinobacteria. Credit: Asaf Levy, JGI As the global population rises, estimated to hit nearly 10 billion by 2050, so does the need to ...