Month: November 2014

Cells by the Numbers

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Cells are the basic unit of life—and the focus of much scientific study and classroom learning. Here are just a few of their fascinating facets.

3.8 billion

Nerve Cells
Developing nerve cells, with the nuclei shown in yellow. Credit: Torsten Wittmann, University of California, San Francisco.

That’s how many years ago scientists believe the first known cells originated on Earth. These were prokaryotes, single-celled organisms that do not have a nucleus or other internal structures called organelles. Bacteria are prokaryotes, while human cells are eukaryotes.

0.001 to 0.003

This is the diameter in centimeters of most animal cells, making them invisible to the naked eye. There are some exceptions, such as nerve cells that can stretch from our hips to our toes, sending electrical signals throughout the body.

1665

Red blood Cells
Oxygen-transporting red blood cells. Credit: Dennis Kunkel, Dennis Kunkel Microscopy, Inc.

In that year, British scientist Robert Hooke coined the term cell to describe the porous, grid-like structure he saw when viewing a thin slice of cork under a microscope. Today, scientists study cells using a variety of high-tech imaging equipment as well as rainbow-colored dyes and a green fluorescent protein derived from jellyfish.

200

That’s how many different types of cells are in the human body, including those in our skin, muscles, nerves, intestines, blood and bones.

3 to 5

Believe it or not, that’s the approximate number of pounds of bacteria you’re carrying around, depending on your size. Even though bacterial cells greatly outnumber ours, they’re much smaller than our cells and therefore account for less than 3 percent of our body mass. Scientists are learning more about how our body bacteria contribute to our health.

24

Snapshot of a phase of the cell cycle.
A snapshot of a phase of the cell cycle. Credit: Jean Cook and Ted Salmon, UNC School of Medicine.

This is the typical length in hours of the animal cell cycle, the time from a cell’s formation to when it splits in two to make more cells.

120

That’s the approximate lifespan in days of a human red blood cell. Other cell types have different lifespans, from a few weeks for some skin cells to as long as the life of the organism for healthy neurons.

50 to 70 billion

Each day, approximately this many cells die in the human body as part of a normal process that serves a healthy and protective role. Those that die in the largest numbers are skin cells, blood cells and some cells that line structures like organs and glands.

Field Focus: Asking Our Expert About Modeling Ebola

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Irene Eckstrand
NIGMS’ Irene Eckstrand answers questions about modeling Ebola. Credit: National Institute of General Medical Sciences.

Ebola is the focus of many NIH-supported research efforts, from analyzing the genetics of virus samples to evaluating the safety and effectiveness of treatments and vaccines. Researchers involved in our Models of Infectious Disease Agent Study, or MIDAS, have been using computational methods to forecast the potential course of the outbreak and the impact of various intervention strategies.

Wondering how their work is going, I recently asked our modeling expert Irene Eckstrand a few questions.

How useful are the forecasts?

Forecasts give us a range of possible outcomes. In addition to being a useful public health tool to prepare for an outbreak, they’re an important research tool to test assumptions about how a disease may spread. When we compare the predicted and actual outcomes, we can confirm assumptions, such as the groups of individuals who are more likely to spread the infection to others. Continually doing this helps refine the models and ensure that their forecasts are as accurate as possible.

What are some of the challenges the modelers face?

Ebola virus
Ebola virus particles (green) attached to and budding from a cell (blue). Credit: National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

We need data to build and test models. The data available from this outbreak have been more limited than in most previous outbreaks of Ebola simply because the public health systems are overwhelmed with sick people, and recording information is a secondary priority.

Another issue with forecasting future trends is incorporating information about the deployment of resources and the implementation of interventions that actually slowed the outbreak. We also need to incorporate changes in people’s behavior. If people think an outbreak is leveling off, they may relax the precautions they’ve been taking—and that could lead to another spike in the disease.

What other Ebola-related projects are the MIDAS modelers working on?

The MIDAS researchers are:

  • Modeling logistical factors such as the number and placement of treatment beds and staffing needs.
  • Tracking potential transmission within and between communities and at hospitals and funerals.
  • Developing a method to estimate the amount of underreporting of case data.
  • Applying models of “tipping points” to look for evidence that the disease curve is slowing.
  • Estimating the number of people who are infected but not symptomatic.
  • Creating new resources for Ebola modelers, including standards for using infectious disease data.
  • Calculating the risk of importation of cases for a wide variety of countries based on travel networks.

How are the modelers working together?

The MIDAS modelers conference call 1-2 times a week to discuss results, modeling strategies, data sources and questions amenable to modeling. They also participate in discussions with government and other academic groups, so there’s a sizable number of modelers working on a wide variety of public health, logistical and basic research questions.

If you’re interested in learning more about Ebola, Irene recommends a video overview of the 2014 outbreak from Penn State University Exit icon and a slide presentation on the myths and realities of the disease from Nigeria’s Kaduna State University Exit icon.

Cool Image: Snap-Together Laboratory

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Modular microfluidics system

Modular microfluidics system. Credit: University of Southern California Viterbi School of Engineering.

Like snapping Lego blocks together to build a fanciful space station, scientists have developed a new way to assemble a microfluidics system, a sophisticated laboratory tool for manipulating small volumes of fluids.

Microfluidics systems are used by scientists to perform tasks as diverse as DNA analysis, microbe detection and disease diagnosis. Traditionally, they have been slow and expensive to produce, as each individual “lab on a chip” had to be built from scratch in a special facility.

Now, researchers including Noah Malmstadt of the University of Southern California have harnessed 3-D printing technology to create a faster, cheaper, easier-to-use system Exit icon. The team first identified the smallest functional pieces of a microfluidics system. Each of these pieces performs one simple task like detecting the size of fluid droplets or mixing two fluids together. After 3-D printing individual components, the team showed that they could be snapped together by hand into a working system in a matter of hours. The individual pieces can be pulled apart and re-assembled as needed before use in an actual experiment, which was impossible with the traditional microfluidics systems.

The researchers have created eight block-like components so far. They hope to start an online community where scientists will share designs for additional components in an open-source database, helping to speed further development of the technology.

This work was funded in part by NIH under grant R01GM093279.

How Instructions for Gene Activity Are Passed Across Generations

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C. elegans embryos
Images of C. elegans embryos show transmission of an epigenetic mark (green) during cell division from a one-cell embryo (left) to a two-cell embryo (right). Credit: Laura J. Gaydos.

Chemical tags that cells attach to DNA or to DNA-packaging proteins across the genome—called epigenetic marks—can alter gene activity, or expression, without changing the underlying DNA code. As a result, these epigenetic changes can influence health and disease. But it’s a matter of debate as to whether and how certain epigenetic changes on DNA-packaging proteins can be passed from parents to their offspring.

In studies with a model organism, the worm C. elegans, researchers led by Susan Strome of the University of California, Santa Cruz, have offered new details that help resolve the debate.

Strome’s team created worms with a genetic change that knocks out the enzyme responsible for making a particular methylation mark, a type of epigenetic mark that can turn off gene expression at certain points of an embryo’s development. Then the scientists bred the knockout worms with normal ones. Looking at the chromosomes from the resulting eggs, sperm and dividing cells of embryos after fertilization, the researchers found that the methylation marks are passed from both parents to offspring. The enzyme, however, is passed to the offspring just by the egg cell. For embryos with the enzyme, the epigenetic marks are passed faithfully through many cell divisions. For those without it, the epigenetic mark can be passed through a few cell divisions.

Because all animals use the same enzyme to create this particular methylation mark, the results have implications for parent-to-child epigenetic inheritance as well as cell-to-cell inheritance in other organisms.

This work was funded in part by NIH under grants R01GM034059, T32GM008646 and P40OD010440.

Learn more:

University of California, Santa Cruz News Release
Dynamic DNA Section from The New Genetics Booklet

Stem Cells Do Geometry

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Human embryonic cells
As seen under a microscope, human embryonic cells (colored dots) confined to circles measuring 1 millimeter across start to specialize and form distinct layers similar to those seen in early development. Credit: Aryeh Warmflash, Rockefeller University. View larger image

Each fluorescent point of light making up the multicolored rings in this image is an individual human embryonic cell in the early stages of development. Scientists seeking to understand the molecular cues responsible for early embryonic patterning found that human embryonic cells confined to areas of precisely controlled size and shape begin to specialize, migrate and organize into distinct layers just as they would under natural conditions.

Read the Inside Life Science article to learn more about this research, which has opened a new window for studying early development and could advance efforts aimed at using human stem cells to replace diseased cells and regenerate lost or injured body parts.

Meet Jennifer Doudna

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Jennifer Doudna
Credit: Jennifer Doudna
Jennifer Doudna
Fields: Biochemistry and structural biology
Studies: New genome editing tool called CRISPR
Works at: University of California, Berkeley
Raised in: Hilo, Hawaii
Studied at: Pomona College, Harvard University
Recent honors: Winner of the Lurie Prize in the Biomedical Sciences Exit icon, an annual award that recognizes outstanding achievement by promising scientists age 52 or younger
If she couldn’t be a scientist, she’d like to be: A papaya farmer or an architect

Jennifer Doudna likes to get her hands dirty. Literally. When she’s not in her laboratory, she can often be found amid glossy green leaves and brightly colored fruit in her Berkeley garden. She recently harvested her first three strawberry guavas.

Coaxing tropical fruit plants from her childhood home in Hawaii to grow in Northern California is more than just a hobby—it’s an intellectual challenge.

“I like solving puzzles, I like the process of figuring things out, and I enjoy working with my hands,” says Doudna. “Those things were what really drew me to science in the beginning.”

Since she was a graduate student, Doudna’s professional puzzle has been RNA, a type of genetic material inside our cells. Recently, there has been an explosion of discoveries about the many roles RNA molecules play in the body. Doudna’s work probes into how RNA molecules work, what 3-D shapes they form and how their structures drive their functions.

“I’ve been fascinated by understanding RNA at a mechanistic level,” Doudna says.

While teasing out answers to these fundamental questions, Doudna’s lab has played a leading role in a discovery that is upending the field of genetic engineering, with exciting implications for human health.

Her Findings

The discovery started with bacteriophages—viruses that infect bacteria, just like the common cold infects humans. About 10 years ago, researchers using high-powered computing to sift through bacterial genomes began to find mysterious repetitive gene sequences that matched those from viruses known to infect the bacteria. The researchers named these sequences “clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats,” or CRISPRs for short.

Over the next few years, scientists came to understand that these CRISPR sequences are part of something not previously thought to exist—an adaptive bacterial immune system, which remembers viruses fought off before and raises a response to fight them when exposed again. CRISPRs were this immune system’s reference library, holding records of viral exposure.

Somehow, bacteria with a CRISPR-based immune system (there are three types now known to scientists) use these records to command certain proteins to recognize and chop up DNA from returning viruses.

Wanting to know more about this process, Doudna’s team picked one protein in a CRISPR-based defense system to study. This protein, called Cas9, had been identified by other researchers as being essential for protection against viral invasion.

To their delight, Doudna’s group had hit the jackpot. Cas9 turned out to be the system’s scalpel. Once CRISPR identifies a DNA sequence from the invading virus, Cas9 slices the sequence out of the viral genome, destroying the virus’s ability to copy itself.

Doudna’s lab and their European collaborators also identified the other key components of the CRISPR-Cas9 system—two RNA molecules that guide Cas9 to the piece of viral DNA identified by CRISPR.

Even more importantly, the researchers showed that the two guide RNAs could be manipulated in the lab to create a tool that both recognizes any specified DNA sequence and carries Cas9 there to make its cut.

“That was really where we made the connection between the basic, curiosity-driven research that we were doing and recognizing that we had in our hands something that could be a very powerful technology for genome editing,” remembers Doudna.

She was right. After publication of their 2012 paper, the field of CRISPR-guided genetic manipulation exploded. Labs around the world now use the tool Doudna’s team developed to cut target gene sequences in organisms ranging from plants to humans. The technique is already replacing more time-consuming, less-reliable methods of creating ‘knock-out’ model organisms (those missing a specific gene) for laboratory research. CRISPR-based editing even allows more than one gene to be knocked out at the same time, something that was not possible with previous genome-editing techniques.

The ability of CRISPR systems to recognize DNA sequences with extraordinary precision also holds potential for human therapeutics. For example, a paper from another laboratory published early this year showed that, in a mouse model, CRISPR-based editing could cut out and replace a defective gene responsible for a type of muscular dystrophy. Researchers are testing similar CRISPR-based techniques in models of human diseases ranging from cystic fibrosis to blood disorders.

Doudna is a co-founder of two biotechnology companies hoping to harness the potential of CRISPR-based genome editing. Although the technology holds great promise, she acknowledges that much work needs to be done before CRISPR can be considered safe for human trials. Major challenges include assuring that no off-target cuts are made in the genome and finding a safe way to deliver the editing system to living tissues.

She is also excited to continue working with her research team, advancing the basic understanding of the CRISPR-based system.

“I’m very interested in seeing what we can contribute to the whole question about how you deliver a technology like this, how you can use it therapeutically in an organism. That’s an area where we hope that our biochemical understanding of this system will be able to contribute,” she concludes.

Modifying Bacterial Behavior

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Biofilm
Communication through quorum sensing is key to the formation of biofilms, slimy bacterial communities that can cause infections and are often stubbornly resistant to antibiotics. Credit: P. Singh and E. Peter Greenberg.

Like a person trailing the aroma of perfume or cologne, bacteria emit chemical signals that let other bacteria of the same species know they’re there. Bacteria use this chemical communication system, called quorum sensing, to assess their own population size. When they sense a large enough group, or quorum, the microbes modify their behavior accordingly. Many disease-causing bacteria use quorum sensing to launch a coordinated attack when they’ve amassed in sufficient numbers to overwhelm the host’s immune response.

Chemist Helen Blackwell of the University of Wisconsin-Madison has been making artificial compounds that mimic natural quorum-sensing signals, as well as some that block a natural signal from binding to its protein target—a step needed to produce a change in bacterial behavior. By altering key building blocks in these protein targets one by one, Blackwell’s team found that small changes could convert an activation signal into an inhibitory signal, or vice versa, indicating that small-molecule control of quorum sensing is very finely tuned.

Improved understanding of the molecular basis of quorum sensing could help scientists design more potent compounds to disrupt these signals. Using such compounds to quiet quorum sensing may provide a new way to control disease-causing bacteria that reduces the chances an infection will become resistant to treatment.

This work was funded in part by NIH under grants R01GM109403 and T32GM008505.

Learn more:
University of Wisconsin-Madison News Release Exit icon
Blackwell Lab Exit icon