Mechanics of breast cancer metastasis discovered, offering target for treatment

A human breast cancer cell, adenocarcinoma MDA-MB-231, demonstrates metastatic-like adhesion, spreading and migrating in a collagen matrix designed to mimic soft tissue. New research led by Penn State reveals for the first time the mechanics behind how breast cancer cells may invade healthy tissues. The discovery, showing that a motor protein called dynein powers the movement of cancer cells in soft tissue models, offers new clinical targets against metastasis and has the potential to fundamentally change how cancer is treated. 
Image Credit: Erdem Tabdanov / Pennsylvania State University
(CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 DEED)

The most lethal feature of any cancer is metastasis, the spread of cancer cells throughout the body. New research led by Penn State reveals for the first time the mechanics behind how breast cancer cells may invade healthy tissues. The discovery, showing that a motor protein called dynein powers the movement of cancer cells in soft tissue models, offers new clinical targets against metastasis and has the potential to fundamentally change how cancer is treated.

“This discovery marks a paradigm shift in many ways,” said Erdem Tabdanov, assistant professor of pharmacology at Penn State and a lead co-corresponding author on the study, recently published in the journal Advanced Science. “Until now, dynein has never been caught in the business of providing the mechanical force for cancer cell motility, which is their ability to move themselves. Now we can see that if you target dynein, you could effectively stop motility of those cells and, therefore, stop metastatic dissemination.”

The project began as a collaboration between Penn State’s Department of Chemical Engineering and Penn State’s College of Medicine, before growing into a multi-institution partnership with researchers at the University of Rochester Medical Center, Georgia Institute of Technology, Emory University, and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

Spinaron: A Rugby in a Ball Pit. New Quantum Effect Demonstrated for the First Time

The cobalt atom (red) has a magnetic moment (“spin,” blue arrow ), which is constantly reoriented (from spin-up to spin-down) by an external magnetic field. As a result, the magnetic atom excites the electrons of the copper surface (gray), causing them to oscillate (creating ripples). This revelation by the Würzburg-Dresden Cluster of Excellence ct.qmat was made possible thanks to the physicists’ inclusion of an iron tip (yellow) on their scanning tunneling microscope.
Illustration Credit: © Juba Bouaziz/Ulrich Puhlfürst

For the first time, experimental physicists from the Würzburg-Dresden Cluster of Excellence ct.qmat have demonstrated a new quantum effect aptly named the “spinaron.” In a meticulously controlled environment and using an advanced set of instruments, they managed to prove the unusual state a cobalt atom assumes on a copper surface. This revelation challenges the long-held Kondo effect – a theoretical concept developed in the 1960s, and which has been considered the standard model for the interaction of magnetic materials with metals since the 1980s. These groundbreaking findings were published today in the esteemed journal Nature Physics.

Ultra-Cold & Ultra-Strong: Pushing Boundaries in the Lab

Extreme conditions prevail in the Würzburg laboratory of experimental physicists Professor Matthias Bode and Dr. Artem Odobesko. Affiliated with the Cluster of Excellence ct.qmat, a collaboration between JMU Würzburg and TU Dresden, these visionaries are setting new milestones in quantum research. Their latest endeavor is unveiling the spinaron effect. They strategically placed individual cobalt atoms onto a copper surface, brought the temperature down to 1.4 Kelvin (–271.75° Celsius), and then subjected them to a powerful external magnetic field. “The magnet we use costs half a million euros. It’s not something that’s widely available,” explains Bode. Their subsequent analysis yielded unexpected revelations.

Binghamton computer scientists program robotic seeing-eye dog to guide the visually impaired

Associate Professor of Computer Science Shiqi Zhang and his students have programmed a robot guide dog to assist the visually impaired. The robot responds to tugs on its leash.
Photo Credit: Stephen Folkerts

Last year, the Computer Science Department at the Thomas J. Watson College of Engineering and Applied Science went trick-or-treating with a quadruped robotic dog. This year, they are using the robot for something that Assistant Professor Shiqi Zhang calls “much more important” than handing out candy, as fun as that can be.

Zhang and PhD students David DeFazio and Eisuke Hirota have been working on a robotic seeing-eye dog to increase accessibility for visually impaired people. They presented a demonstration in which the robot dog led a person around a lab hallway, confidently and carefully responding to directive input.

Zhang explained some of the reasons behind starting the project.

“We were surprised that throughout the visually impaired and blind communities, so few of them are able to use a real seeing-eye dog for their whole life. We checked the statistics, and only 2% of them are able to do that,” he said.

Meltwater Flowing Beneath Antarctic Glaciers May Be Accelerating Their Retreat

An aerial view of the Denman Glacier ice tongue in East Antarctica.
Photo Credit: Jamin S. Greenbaum

A new Antarctic ice sheet modeling study from scientists at UC San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography suggests that meltwater flowing out to sea from beneath Antarctic glaciers is making them lose ice faster. 

The model’s simulations suggest this effect is large enough to make a meaningful contribution to global sea-level rise under high greenhouse gas emissions scenarios. 

The extra ice loss caused by this meltwater flowing out to sea from beneath Antarctic glaciers is not currently accounted for in the models generating major sea-level rise projections, such as those of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). If this process turns out to be an important driver of ice loss across the entire Antarctic ice sheet, it could mean current projections underestimate the pace of global sea-level rise in decades to come.

“Knowing when and how much global sea-level will rise is critical to the welfare of coastal communities,” said Tyler Pelle, the study’s lead author and a postdoctoral researcher at Scripps. “Millions of people live in low-lying coastal zones and we can’t adequately prepare our communities without accurate sea-level rise projections.”

Sheffield astronomers help to confirm heaviest elements in the Universe are formed in kilonovae

The Gamma-Ray Burst (GRB) 230307A and its associated kilonova explosion.
Image Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, A. Levan (Radboud University and University of Warwick)

Astrophysicists are one step closer to understanding how the heaviest chemical elements are created in the universe, thanks to a camera designed and built at the University of Sheffield.

Scientists from the Astrophysics Group at the University of Sheffield observed the merger of two dense neutron stars, known as a kilonova, in a spiral galaxy a billion light years away

The discovery of the kilonova, only the second one to be observed, was made possible thanks to observations with the University of Sheffield’s camera ULTRACAM mounted on the New Technology Telescope at the European Southern Observatory in Chile

Kilonovae are important because their explosions are believed to form the heaviest elements in the periodic table, including most of the gold, platinum and uranium found on Earth

Astrophysicists are one step closer to understanding how the heaviest chemical elements are created in the universe, thanks to a camera designed and built at the University of Sheffield.

Senescent Cells Key to Axolotl Limb Regeneration

Axolotl – the Mexican salamander with unique regenerative abilities helps scientists uncover the molecular mechanisms of regeneration.
Photo Credit: © TUD/CRTD

Senescent cells have been implicated in a variety of processes typically connected with deterioration and aging. Recent studies suggest that the short-term presence of senescent cells can actually be beneficial. A new comprehensive study by the Yun group shows that cellular senescence plays a critical role during axolotl limb regeneration. Senescent cells in the regenerating structure use the Wnt pathway to signal to surrounding cells and create a microenvironment that favors regeneration and growth. The results were published in the journal Developmental Cell.

Senescent cells, often referred to as “zombie cells”, are no longer dividing but also not dying. Their buildup is considered one of the hallmarks of aging however recent studies suggest that they also play a role in positive processes such as wound healing and tumor suppression.

‘‘Our understanding of the role that senescent cells play in regenerative processes is very limited. Since most of the current knowledge relies on in-vitro studies, it was clear to us that to get new insights we need to find a way to study senescent cells in-vivo, i.e., analyze them within the animal during the process of regeneration,” says Dr. Maximina Yun, research group leader at the Center for Regenerative Therapies Dresden (CRTD) and the Cluster of Excellence Physics of Life at TUD Dresden University of Technology as well as the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics (MPI-CBG) in Dresden.

Long COVID most prevalent in the most seriously ill

Image Credit: Scientific Frontline

A collaborative study involving researchers from Karolinska Institutet has charted the prevalence of severe physical symptom burden amongst Scandinavians for up to two years after a SARS-CoV-2 infection. Most affected were people who had a severe COVID-19 infection, while the researchers found no elevated prevalence of long COVID in those who had never been bedridden. The study is published in The Lancet Regional Health – Europe.

By mid-October 2023, over 771 million cases of COVID-19 had been reported to the World Health Organization (WHO). An estimated 10 to 20 per cent of the affected have persistent symptoms.

Close to 65,000 participants

In the present study, researchers examined the prevalence of persistent physical symptoms in people with different degrees of COVID-19 severity and compared them with people who had not had a confirmed COVID-19 diagnosis. The study comprised 64,880 adults from Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Iceland with self-reported physical symptoms between April 2020 and August 2022.

Over 22,000 of the participants were diagnosed with COVID-19 during the period, almost 10 per cent of whom were bedridden for at least seven days. The prevalence of chronic symptoms such as shortness of breath, chest pain, dizziness, headaches, and low energy/ fatigue, was 37 per cent higher in those who had had a COVID-19 diagnosis than in those who had not.

Carbon copy: new method of recycling carbon fiber shows huge potential

UNSW Canberra researcher Di He with a sample of carbon fiber recycled using a method he developed.
 Photo Credit: UNSW Canberra

Ultra-light cars made from recycled carbon fiber are a step closer, thanks to a new method of recycling developed at UNSW Canberra. 

As manufacturing and technology continually take steps forward, products are using more advanced materials and becoming more sophisticated, but also more complicated.

This presents a problem when these products reach the end of their useable life, because they’re either difficult or expensive to recycle, or both.

For example, as the world transitions to electric vehicles, disposing of their used batteries, some made with highly toxic materials, will be a challenge.

As it stands, many advanced products either end up in landfill or incinerated, which is a waste of valuable resources and harmful to the planet.

One material that has been difficult to recycle is carbon fiber.

Alpine rock reveals dynamics of plate movements in Earth’s interior

Professor Lucie Tajčmanová, Heidelberg University, examines the whiteschist sample from the Dora Maira Massif of the Western Alps.
Photo Credit: Sebastian Cionoiu, Heidelberg University

Examining how plates move in Earth's mantle and how mountains form is no easy feat. Certain rocks that have sunk deep into Earth's interior and then returned from there can deliver answers. Led by the Department of Geosciences at Goethe University Frankfurt, an international team of geologists has now succeeded in analyzing whiteschist from the Alps so precisely by means of computer modeling that it calls a previous theory about plate movement into question. 

Geoscientists analyze rocks in mountain belts to reconstruct how they once moved downwards into the depths and then returned to the surface. This history of burial and exhumation sheds light on the mechanisms of plate tectonics and mountain building. Certain rocks that sink far down into Earth's interior together with plates are transformed into different types under the enormous pressure that prevails there. During this UHP metamorphosis (UHP: Ultra High Pressure), silica (SiO2) in the rock, for example, becomes coesite, which is also referred to as the UHP polymorph of SiO2. Although it is chemically still silica, the crystal lattices are more tightly packed and therefore denser. When the plates move upwards again from the depths, the UHP rocks also come to the surface and can be found in certain places in the mountains. Their mineral composition provides information about the pressures to which they were exposed during their vertical journey through Earth's interior. Using lithostatic pressure as a unit of measurement, it is possible to correlate pressure and depth: the higher the pressure, the deeper the rocks once lay. 

Cancer's sweet Achilles heel

Weakly immunogenic and strongly immunogenic tumor cells were subcutaneously transplanted into B4GALT3 knockout and wild-type mice. Tumor cell growth was significantly suppressed in knockout mice.
Illustration Credit: KyotoU Jake Tobiyama/Heng Wei

An old campaign slogan for cough syrup, "It tastes awful. And it works," seemed to imply that any sweet content might have diminished the medicinal effect.

Sweetness, in the case of cancer, appears as a chain of sugar molecules attached to proteins by beta1,4-galactosyltransferase-3, or B4GALT3. According to the Cancer Genome Atlas, a high expression of this enzyme is associated with noticeably shortened survival rates in several types of immunotherapy cancers, such as neuroblastoma, cervical, and bladder cancer. However, the specific role of B4GALT3 in the tumor immune microenvironment -- or TIME -- was still unknown.

Now, a team of researchers at Kyoto University and Yokohama City University has found that B4GALT3 deficiency in mice TIME inhibits tumor growth. The study shows that a significant reduction of glycosylation -- a type of protein modification -- on T cell surfaces correlates with increases in CD8+ immune cells infiltrating tumors.