News by Subject Biology

Scientists today track electrical signals and voltage changes in neurons and muscle cells by labeling individual cells or probing with electrodes. UC Berkeley and Stanford scientists have developed a new type of sensor that employs a sheet of graphene to get a continuous measure of electric field in these tissues. Electric fields change graphene's reflectance. The physicists found a way to amplify and measure the changes caused by action potentials in a beating embryonic chicken heart.

Scientists at Weill Cornell Medicine have developed a computational technique that greatly increases the resolution of atomic force microscopy, a specialized type of microscope that "feels" the atoms at a surface. The method reveals atomic-level details on proteins and other biological structures under normal physiological conditions, opening a new window on cell biology, virology and other microscopic processes.

Researchers from the Nara Institute of Science and Technology have found that plants balance growth and genome maintenance by organizing their responses to damage. Plants can't replace dead cells as animals do, and must deal with DNA damage without halting growth. Combined control of the plant hormones cytokinin and auxin allows plants to organize different DNA damage responses while minimizing cell death. This study will have broad applications to research on plants and other organisms.

A University of Iowa team has found that babies twitch during a sleep stage called quiet sleep, not just during REM sleep. The results may show there's more communication between snoozing infants' brains and motor systems than previously known. Results appear in the journal Current Biology.

The information presented in this study is primarily positioned to benefit scientists and experts in Cellular Physiology and Histochemistry where new tools to discover therapeutic targets for muscle atrophy are needed. The study outlines the development of a new fluorescent reporter mouse line to detect changes in mitophagy activity. These findings could revolutionize treatment strategies and possibly facilitate interventions to reverse disuse-induced muscle atrophy.