Unpacking the smart way

How Incoming adenoviruses change their chromatin structure for efficient gene expression

05-Sep-2023 - Adenoviruses, known for their low pathogenicity and technological approachability, have become instrumental in many therapeutic applications, including as vaccination vector platform during the recent SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. Central to their efficacy is the remarkably efficient delivery and ...

Programmable DNA hydrogels for advanced cell culture and personalized medicine

21-Aug-2023 - The team of Dr. Elisha Krieg at the Leibniz Institute of Polymer Research Dresden has developed a dynamic DNA-crosslinked matrix (DyNAtrix) by combining classical synthetic polymers with programmable DNA crosslinkers. DNA’s highly specific and predictable binding gives researchers unparalleled ...

New findings could pave the way to detecting the building blocks of life in our solar system

Detecting biomolecules on ocean moons

07-Dec-2022 - It would be technically possible for future space missions to detect DNA, lipids, and other bacterial components on ocean moons in our solar system – provided that these building blocks of life do exist beyond Earth. This is the conclusion that has now been reached by an international team of ...

1 million-year-old marine DNA found in Antarctic sediment

New technique helps decipher ‘who’ has lived in the ocean in the past and ‘when’

06-Oct-2022 - A new study led by the University of Tasmania – with the participation of the University of Bonn – discovered the oldest marine DNA in deep-sea sediments of the Scotia Sea north of the Antarctic continent. The material could be dated to one million years. Such old material demonstrates that ...

Moss repair team also works in humans

"If we could correct faulty sites in the genetic code with RNA editing methods, this would potentially also offer starting points for the treatment of hereditary diseases"

21-Sep-2022 - If everything is to run smoothly in living cells, the genetic information must be correct. But unfortunately, errors in the DNA accumulate over time due to mutations. Land plants have developed a peculiar correction mode: they do not directly improve the errors in the genome, but rather ...

Point-of-care diagnostics: New methods for detecting single molecules

Pathogen-specific detection: Even one single DNA molecule is enough

04-Nov-2021 - Resistance to antibiotics is on the rise worldwide. Researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Physical Measurement Techniques IPM alongside the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich have developed a process for rapidly detecting multidrug-resistant pathogens. The unique feature: Even one ...

New tool helps to ‘spot the difference’ in genome organisation

This enables scientists to track down causes of diseases more quickly

22-Oct-2020 - The way DNA is organized in the cell nucleus is very important for the normal development and function of the cell. A mutation that affects the packaging of the genetic material in the cell nucleus can lead to developmental disorders or diseases such as cancer. A team of scientists from the Max ...

DNA dominos on a chip

Carriers of genetic information packed together on a biochip like in nature

11-Aug-2016 - Normally, individual molecules of genetic material repel each other. However, when space is limited DNA molecules must be packed together more tightly. This case arises in sperm, cell nuclei and the protein shells of viruses. An international team of physicists has now succeeded in artificially ...

A relative from the Tianyuan Cave

Ancient DNA has revealed that humans living some 40,000 years ago in the area near Beijing were likely related to many present-day Asians and Native Americans

28-Jan-2013 - An international team of researchers including Svante Pääbo and Qiaomei Fu of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology sequenced nuclear and mitochondrial DNA that had been extracted from the leg of an early modern human from Tianyuan Cave near Beijing, China. Analyses of this ...