MATTER

BioTech | January 10, 2017

By the time a panel of judges at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office gets around to deciding who owns the biggest biotechnology innovation of the century, CRISPR-Cas9 may have already lost its heavyweight title as the most precise tool for genetic engineering. In the bitter patent battle between the Broad Institute and U.C. Berkeley that reached a courtroom climax last month, both institutions are duking it out for the right to claim that they invented CRISPR-Cas9, along with the right to reap ...

biotech | March 15, 2017

Proteins shake their bodies and wave their limbs, all with the goal of optimizing their interaction with other molecules, including other proteins. These tiny motions, called vibrations, enable the molecules to change shape quickly to bind to one another, which in turn facilitates tasks like absorbing oxygen and repairing cells. ...

Medical Xpress | November 27, 2018

Columbia neuroscientists have discovered why mitochondria, tiny power generators that keep our cells healthy, are often strangely shaped inside the brain. Mitochondria, which exist by the thousands in each of our body's 37 trillion cells, usually look like long interconnected tubes. But inside brain cells called neurons, they adopt two completely different shapes depending on their location within the cell: that same elongated, tubular shape and a substantially smaller, almost spherical shap...

Drug Target Review | January 15, 2020

Scientists have created the first lab-dish models of the cellular clock, where each ‘tick’ stimulates the formation of the vertebra, which uses stem cells derived from adult human tissue. Over 20 years ago, Olivier Pourquié’s lab at Harvard University, US discovered a cellular clock in chicken embryos where each ‘tick’ stimulates the formation of a structure called a somite that ultimately becomes a vertebra. Now, Pourquié has led one of two teams to c...