Reading out RNA structures in real time

The fluorescent blinking of cyanine dye (Alexa Fluor 647, pink star) bound to RNA changes depending on the structure of the RNA. When the RNA is folded like a hairpin, the fluorescent blinking is fast, and when the RNA switches to a G-quadruplex, the blinking is slow
Illustration Credit: Akira Kitamura

A new microscopic technique allows for the real-time study of RNA G-quadruplexes in living cells, with implications for the fight against amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.

Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), commonly known as Lou Gehrig’s disease and Stephen Hawking’s disease, is a neurodegenerative disease that results in the gradual loss of control over the muscles in the body. It is currently incurable and the cause of the disease is unknown in over 90% of all cases — although both genetic and environmental factors are believed to be involved.

The research groups of Dr. Akira Kitamura at the Faculty of Advanced Life Science, Hokkaido University, and Prof. Jerker Widengren at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden, have developed a novel technique that is able to detect a characteristic structure of RNA in real time in live cells. The technique, which is based on fluorescence-microscopic spectroscopy, was published in the journal Nucleic Acids Research.

Combined steroid and statin treatment could reduce ‘accelerated ageing’ in preterm babies, study in rats suggests

Potentially life-saving steroids commonly given to preterm babies also increase the risk of long-term cardiovascular problems, but a new study in rats has found that if given in conjunction with statins, their positive effects remain while the potential negative side-effects are ‘weeded out’.
Photo Credit: Hush Naidoo Jade Photography

Cambridge scientists gave new-born rats, which are naturally born prematurely, combined glucocorticoid steroids and statin therapy. The results, published today in Hypertension, show that the combined treatment led to the elimination of negative effects of steroids on the cardiovascular system while retaining their positive effects on the developing respiratory system.

Preterm birth (before 37 weeks) is one of the greatest killers in perinatal medicine today. One in ten babies are born preterm in high-income countries; this can increase to almost 40% in low- and middle-income countries.

Preterm babies are extremely vulnerable because they miss out on a crucial final developmental stage in which the hormone cortisol is produced and released exponentially into the unborn baby’s blood. Cortisol is vital to the maturation of organs and systems that are needed to keep the baby alive once born.

For example, in the lungs, cortisol ensures that they become more elastic. This allows the lungs to expand so the baby can take its first breath. Without cortisol the new-born lungs would be too stiff, which leads to respiratory distress syndrome (RDS) and could be fatal.

More multi-resistant germs since the beginning of the Ukraine war

Martina Cremadus, Hans-Jörg Berthold and Niels Pfennigwerth (from left) monitor the occurrence of multi-resistant bacteria in the National Reference Center for Gram-negative Hospital Pathogens.
Photo Credit: RUB, Marquard

The pathogens reach German hospitals with refugees and war injuries. Researchers recommend clinics to screen as a precaution.

Since the outbreak of the war in Ukraine, certain hospital pathogens that are resistant to many antibiotics have been detected much more frequently in German hospitals. The pathogen Klebsiella pneumoniae is also resistant to the reserve antibiotics of carbapenems due to a combination of two enzymes. Together with the Robert Koch Institute (RKI), the National Reference Center (NRZ) for gram-negative hospital pathogens located at the Ruhr University Bochum has been able to demonstrate that many of the reported cases are related to patients from Ukraine. The researchers therefore recommend that this group be examined for the germ before being admitted to the hospital. They report in the journal Eurosurveillance.

Avoiding burnout of white blood cells

The immune system (T cell) attacks a human tumor cell.
Image Credit: M. Oeggerli (Micronaut 2019), Marcel Philipp Trefny, and Prof. Alfred Zippelius, Translational Oncology, University Hospital Basel, supported by Pathology University Hospital Basel, and C-CINA, Biozentrum, University of Basel

A research group at the University of Basel has identified a gene that drives T lymphocytes to exhaustion. This finding opens up new approaches for more effective immunotherapies.

A tough battle requires endurance. This is also true for white blood cells as they tackle cancer – or more specifically for T lymphocytes or T cells, a group of white blood cells involved in the immune system’s fight against cancer cells. However, T cells can become exhausted during this fight.

Researchers from the Department of Biomedicine at the University of Basel and University Hospital Basel recently identified a gene that seems to contribute to this exhaustion. The findings of their research project, which was funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation, were published in the journal Nature Communications.

Smart Contact Lens that Diagnoses and Treats Glaucoma

Schematic illustration of a theranostic smart contact lens for glaucoma treatment.
Illustration Credit: Pohang University of Science and Technology

POSTECH research team led by Professor Sei Kwang Hahn proposes a new paradigm for monitoring and control of intraocular pressure in glaucoma patients.

Glaucoma is a common ocular disease in which the optic nerve malfunctions due to the increased intraocular pressure (IOP) caused by drainage canal blocking in the eye. This condition narrows the peripheral vision and can lead to vision loss in severe cases. Glaucoma patients have to manage IOP levels for their lifetime. Automatic monitoring and control of the IOP in these patients would significantly improve their quality of life.

Recently, a research team at POSTECH has developed a smart contact lens by combining an IOP sensor and a flexible drug delivery system to manage IOP measurement and medication administration.

Researchers take a step toward novel quantum simulators

A scanning electron microscope image of the "two-island" device, which researchers hope will pave the way toward a quantum simulator. 
Image Credit: Winston Pouse/Stanford University

Some of the most exciting topics in modern physics, such as high-temperature superconductors and some proposals for quantum computers, come down to the exotic things that happen when these systems hover between two quantum states.

Unfortunately, understanding what's happening at those points, known as quantum critical points, has proved challenging. The math is frequently too hard to solve, and today's computers are not always up to the task of simulating what happens, especially in systems with any appreciable number of atoms involved.

Now, researchers at Stanford University and the Department of Energy's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and their colleagues have taken a step toward building an alternative approach, known as a quantum simulator. Although the new device, for now, only simulates the interactions between two quantum objects, the researchers argue in a paper published in Nature Physics that it could be scaled up relatively easily. If so, researchers could use it to simulate more complicated systems and begin answering some of the most tantalizing questions in physics. 

Engineers invent vertical, full-color microscopic LEDs

MIT engineers have developed a new way to make sharper, defect-free displays. Instead of patterning red, green, and blue diodes side by side in a horizontal patchwork, the team has invented a way to stack the diodes to create vertical, multicolored pixels.
Image Credit: Illustration by Younghee Lee

Take apart your laptop screen, and at its heart you’ll find a plate patterned with pixels of red, green, and blue LEDs, arranged end to end like a meticulous Lite Brite display. When electrically powered, the LEDs together can produce every shade in the rainbow to generate full-color displays. Over the years, the size of individual pixels has shrunk, enabling many more of them to be packed into devices to produce sharper, higher-resolution digital displays.

But much like computer transistors, LEDs are reaching a limit to how small they can be while also performing effectively. This limit is especially noticeable in close-range displays such as augmented and virtual reality devices, where limited pixel density results in a “screen door effect” such that users perceive stripes in the space between pixels.

Now, MIT engineers have developed a new way to make sharper, defect-free displays. Instead of replacing red, green, and blue light-emitting diodes side by side in a horizontal patchwork, the team has invented a way to stack the diodes to create vertical, multicolored pixels.

The moon is too hot and too cold; now it could be just right for humans, thanks to newly available science

Issam Mudawar’s research on heat transfer could enable space habitats to be built in extreme environments like the moon.
Photo Credit: Purdue University / John Underwood

With temperatures on the moon ranging from minus 410 to a scorching 250 degrees Fahrenheit, it’s an understatement to say that humans will need habitats with heat and air conditioning to survive there long term.

But heating and cooling systems won’t be effective enough to support habitats for lunar exploration or even longer trips to Mars without an understanding of what reduced gravity does to boiling and condensation. Engineers haven’t been able to crack this science – until now.

“Every refrigerator, every air conditioning system we have on Earth involves boiling and condensation. Those same mechanisms are also prevalent in numerous other applications, including steam power plants, nuclear reactors and both chemical and pharmaceutical industries,” said Issam Mudawar, Purdue University’s Betty Ruth and Milton B. Hollander Family Professor of Mechanical Engineering. “We have developed over a hundred years’ worth of understanding of how these systems work in Earth’s gravity, but we haven’t known how they work in weightlessness.”

A team of engineers at Purdue led by Mudawar, who is collaborating with NASA’s Glenn Research Center in Cleveland, has spent 11 years developing a facility to investigate these phenomena.

Serious eating disorder ARFID is highly heritable, according to new twin study

Cynthia Bulik, PhD, founding director of the UNC Center of Excellence for Eating Disorders, is senior author of the article published in JAMA Psychiatry.
Photo Credit: Courtesy of University of North Carolina School of Medicine

ARFID is a serious eating disorder that leads to malnutrition and nutritional deficiencies. Researchers estimate that between one to five percent of the population is affected by the eating disorder.

Unlike anorexia, ARFID is not about the patient’s experience of their own body and fear of gaining weight. Instead, the disease is characterized by the avoidance of certain types of food due to a sensory discomfort because of the characteristics or appearance of food, or for example, the fear of choking, a food poisoning phobia or lack of appetite.

17,000 pairs of twins involved in the study

Researchers at Karolinska Institutet and the University of North Carolina School of Medicine have now investigated the importance of genetic factors for developing ARFID. A cohort of almost 17,000 pairs of twins in Sweden born between 1992 and 2010 participated in the study. A total of 682 children with ARFID between the ages of six and twelve years could be identified.

A quasiparticle that can transfer heat under electrical control

Because thermal conductivity in this class of materials can be changed with application of an external electric field at room temperature, they hold promise for use in heat switches for everyday applications, like collection of solar power.
Photo Credit: American Public Power Association

Scientists have found the secret behind a property of solid materials known as ferroelectrics, showing that quasiparticles moving in wave-like patterns among vibrating atoms carry enough heat to turn the material into a thermal switch when an electrical field is applied externally.

A key finding of the study is that this control of thermal conductivity is attributable to the structure of the material rather than any random collisions among atoms. Specifically, the researchers describe quasiparticles called ferrons whose polarization changes as they “wiggle” in between vibrating atoms – and it’s that ordered wiggling and polarization, receptive to the externally applied electrical field, that dictates the material’s ability to transfer the heat at a different rate.

“We figured out that this change in position of these atoms, and the change of the nature of the vibrations, must carry heat, and therefore the external field which changes this vibration must affect the thermal conductivity,” said senior author Joseph Heremans, professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering, materials science and engineering, and physics at The Ohio State University.