News & HighlightsNews
This technique for studying cell receptors could have sweeping implications for drug development
...While this work is the culmination of a team effort over a long period of time, Kotliar made herculean efforts to drag it across the finish line—shuttling samples and scarce reagents back and forth from Sweden in rare travel windows during COVID. It paid off. The results provide a handf...
Lonely flies, like many humans, eat more and sleep less
COVID-19 lockdowns scrambled sleep schedules and stretched waistlines. One culprit may be social isolation itself. Scientists have found that lone fruit flies quarantined in test tubes sleep too little and eat too much after only about one week of social isolation, according to a new study...
A third vaccine dose may increase protection from Omicron
The mRNA vaccines used against COVID were never designed to battle the Omicron variant, a now dominant strain of the coronavirus that recently claimed 18,000 lives in a single week. Yet individuals who receive their third dose appear to be protected from the worst of Omicron, and a new stu...
Scientists trace severe COVID-19 to faulty genes and autoimmune condition
More than 10 percent of people who develop severe COVID-19 have misguided antibodies that attack not the virus, but the immune system itself, new research shows. Another 3.5 percent, at least, carry a specific kind of genetic mutation. In both groups, the upshot is basically the same: The ...
How toothless mock viruses could advance research on COVID-19
In more ways than one, antibodies could be the key to alleviating the COVID-19 crisis.  Hundreds of labs around the world are studying the antibodies people produce in response to SARS-CoV-2 infection in hopes of developing treatments, predicting the efficacy of vaccines, and understanding...
Synthetic “micro lungs” could take COVID-19 research to the next level
...Research aimed to understand how COVID-19 wreaks havoc in the lungs, for example, has often been done with miscellaneous lung cancer cells that show crucial differences with the cells targeted by the virus. “There has been too much shifting ground for precise work,” says Ali H. Brivanlo...
The gene hunt to explain why some young, healthy people die from COVID-19
...Casanova, along with Helen Su at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases are leading an international project, the COVID Human Genetic Effort, to comb through the genomes of many COVID-19 outliers in search of any rare gene variant that they may share, and that ...
Lab-grown mini lungs could accelerate the study of respiratory diseases  
...Our understanding of how infectious diseases like COVID affect human lungs has been similarly confounded by noise. Data from patient lung tissues greatly varies from person to person, obscuring the basic mechanisms of how, exactly, SARS-Co-V2 first infects lung cells. It’s also an after...
Intriguing science discoveries of 2023
...Efforts to combat COVID, Hepatitis B, and other infections bore fruit, and countless papers shed light on basic research, answering questions that have long baffled biologists. Here are some of the intriguing discoveries that came out of Rockefeller in 2023. Old sperm, new mutations As ...
A unique window into "original antigenic sin"
...Scientists call this original antigenic sin (OAS)—the body's first blush with a virus like influenza or COVID being the "original sin" that forever biases its immune response against newer strains. According to the OAS theory, no matter how many flu vaccines or COVID boosters we ...
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