When Bente Klarlund Pedersen wakes up in the morning, the first thing she does is pull on her trainers and go for a 5-kilometre run — and it’s not just about staying fit. “It’s when I think and solve problems without knowing it,” says Klarlund Pedersen, who specializes in internal medicine and infectious diseases at … Read more
When it comes to single-cell gene-expression data, biologists face an embarrassment of riches. There are thousands of data sets to choose from. Unfortunately, those data sets have not all been processed in the same way; they might use different names for similar or identical cells or tissues; and they are scattered across the Internet — … Read more
Hello Nature readers, would you like to get this Briefing in your inbox free every day? Sign up here. Credit: incamerastock/Alamy Left-handed people are almost three times more likely to have rare variants in the genes for tubulins, proteins that build cells’ internal skeletons. Tubulins assemble into long filaments called microtubules, which control the shapes … Read more
Dozens of genetic factors have been associated with left-handedness, which occurs in roughly one in ever ten people.Credit: incamerastock/Alamy To what extent do genes determine how you pick up your morning cup of coffee? Researchers examined rare genetic variants from a database of more than 350,000 individuals’ genetic data to hunt for clues for what … Read more
Since the 1950s, scientists have had a pretty good idea of how muscles work. The protein at the centre of the action is myosin, a molecular motor that ratchets itself along rope-like strands of actin proteins — grasping, pulling, releasing and grasping again — to make muscle cells contract. The basics were first explained in … Read more
A glioblastoma (green and blue, artificially coloured) grows in the frontal lobe of a person’s brain.Credit: Pr Michel Brauner, ISM/Science Photo Library Two preliminary studies suggest that next-generation engineered immune cells show promise against one of the most feared forms of cancer. A pair of papers published on 13 March, one in Nature Medicine1 and … Read more
Woolly mammoths’ closest living relatives are Asian elephants, which could be genetically engineered to have mammoth-like traits.Credit: Mark Garlick/Science Photo Library via Alamy Scientists have finally managed to put elephant skin cells into an embryonic state. The breakthrough — announced today by the de-extinction company Colossal Biosciences in Dallas, Texas — is an early technical … Read more