There was a moment, eight years ago, that kept Carla Grandori up at night. “Can you use your technology to help me?” a cancer patient had asked her. Grandori, a reluctant researcher at the time, thought she needed to accumulate more data for her technology. “But when I thought deeper … the call of that patient changed my way of thinking and…
Mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI) — commonly known as a concussion — has been a frequent injury among U.S. combatants serving in Afghanistan and Iraq, and blast-related mTBI has been called the “signature injury” from nearly two decades of those military conflicts. Unlike TBI, mTBI can be difficult to diagnose as there often is no observable head injury, even with…
Identification of clinically relevant drivers of breast cancers in intact mammary epithelium is critical for understanding tumorigenesis yet has proven challenging. Here, we show that intra-amniotic lentiviral injection can efficiently transduce progenitor cells of the adult mammary gland and use that as a platform to functionally screen over 500 genetic lesions for functional roles in tumor formation. Targeted progenitors establish…
Researchers said the wavelengths at sunrise and sunset have the biggest impact to brain centers that regulate our circadian clock and our mood and alertness. Their study, “A color vision circuit for non-image-forming vision in the primate retina,” published in Current Biology Feb. 20, identifies a cell in the retina, which plays an important role in signaling our brain centers that…
Against the backdrop of a global health threat from the coronavirus and a political climate in which science competes with rampant misinformation, thousands of educators, policymakers, journalists and others gathered in Seattle Feb. 13-16 to share insights and connect at the American Association for the Advancement of Science annual meeting. Bill Gates delivered a speech to a packed auditorium on Friday, leading with a…
Single-cell transcriptomics has emerged as a powerful means to define the molecular heterogeneity of brain neurons. However, which of the neurons with known transcriptomes interact with each other in specific neural circuits is largely unknown. Here, we devised a strategy, termed “Connect-seq,” which combines retrograde viral tracing and single-cell transcriptomics to determine the molecular identities of individual upstream neurons in…
The authors have demonstrated that the immunological activities of certain epithelial cells, in this case located in the endocervical canal of the human uterus, can trigger HIV reactivation from bystander T cells. This is important because once we have effective HIV eradication therapies in place (which is not yet the case), we will need to prevent HIV reactivation from remaining latently infected cells when such treatment is stopped.
By the time a tumor is detected, it’s riddled with mutations — but which are driving its development and progression, and which are merely along for the ride? That’s the question that scientists from Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center can now answer, thanks to their new method to screen breast cancer-associated mutations for their functional consequences. Previous attempts to distinguish…
Reading science headlines may cause cancer. Not really. But reading headlines alone — particularly misleading or mendacious ones that distort scientific findings — can cause real harm. “There is definitely fallout from misunderstanding science,” said Dr. Ruth Etzioni, a biostatistician with Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. “Policymakers who have to evaluate the evidence and find the truth in all of this noise…
A new study released today in the Journal of Virology gives insights into how the HIV-1 virus, which often persists in the body despite antiretroviral treatment, reemerges when treatment stops. More importantly, the study also gives clues on how to stop this reemergence from occurring. “We wanted to answer the question ‘How does HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, bounce back when treatment is…
