Biomedical Beat Blog – National Institute of General Medical Sciences
Follow the process of discovery
Credit: University of Nebraska, Lincoln.We have a new Science Education and Partnership Award (SEPA) webpage, featuring free, easy-to-access, SEPA-funded 
resources that educators nationwide can use to engage their students in science. The SEPA program supports innovative STEM and informal science education projects for pre-kindergarten through grade 12. The program includes tools that teachers, scientists, and parents can use to excite kids about science and research, such as:
Jon Lorsch, from Swarthmore College’s class of 1990, returned to his alma mater in May to accept an honorary Doctor of Sciences degree for his accomplishments as a biochemist and his visionary leadership of NIGMS. During the university’s 147th commencement, he spoke to the 2019 graduating class, offering advice and examples of how we can look for opportunities in the least likely places.
Watch the 5-minute video to hear Lorsch’s advice to the graduates—and all future scientists—to venture into the unknown in search of the next big advance in biomedical research.
Continue reading “Don’t Be Afraid to Search in the Dark: NIGMS Director Jon Lorsch Encourages College Grads to Consider New Perspectives”
Why do math lovers around the world call March 14 “Pi Day”? Because Pi, the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter, is 3.14. Pi is a Greek letter (π) that represents a constant in math: All circles have the same Pi, regardless of their size. Pi has been calculated out to as many as 1 trillion digits past the decimal, and it can continue forever without repetition or pattern.
In honor of Pi Day, we asked several biomedical researchers in the field of computational biology to tell us why they love math and how they use it in their research. Continue reading “On Pi Day, Computational Biologists Share What They Love About Math”
Nitin Phadnis and Harmit Malik set out to conduct an experiment that could solve a century-old evolutionary puzzle: How did two related fruit fly species arise from one? Years after they began their quest, they finally have an answer.
The existence of a gene that helps make each of these fruit fly species unique and separate from each other had been guessed at since 1940, following experiments decades earlier in which geneticists first noticed that the two types of flies, when mated, had only daughters—no sons.
Scientists had previously discovered two other genes involved in driving the fruit fly species apart, but they knew those two genes weren’t the full story.
Continue reading “Another Piece to a Century-Old Evolutionary Puzzle”Studying some of the most well-tread territory in science can turn up surprising new findings. Take, for example, the cell. You may have read in textbooks how the cell’s parts look and function during important biological processes like cellular movement and division. You may have even built models of the cell out of gelatin or clay. But scientists continue to learn new facts that require those textbooks to be updated, and those models to be reshaped. Here are a few examples.
Nuclear Envelope: More Than a Protective Barrier
Like a security guard checking IDs at the door, the nuclear envelope forms a protective barrier around the cell’s nucleus, only letting specific proteins and chemical signals pass through. Scientists recently found that this envelope may also act as a repair center for broken strands of heterochromatin, a tightly packed form of DNA.
Irene Chiolo of the University of Southern California and Gary Karpen of the University of California, Berkeley, and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory were part of a team that learned that healthy fruit fly cells mend breaks in heterochromatin by moving the damaged DNA strands to the inner wall of the nuclear envelope. There, proteins embedded in the envelope make the necessary repairs in a safe place where the broken DNA can’t accidentally get fused to the wrong chromosome. Continue reading “New Views on What the Cell’s Parts Can Do”
This year marks the 150th anniversary of Gregor Mendel’s publication that—after sitting ignored for a few decades—helped launch the field of modern genetics. Mendel didn’t know about DNA. But after painstakingly cross-fertilizing tens of thousands of pea plants over the course of 8 years, this Austrian monk came very close to describing genes.
By picking a species with a handful of visible characteristics that occur in two easily identifiable forms, Mendel was able to pinpoint what he called “factors.” These factors determine traits like a pea’s shape or color, for instance, and are passed down from parents to offspring. He also observed that factors can be dominant or recessive.
Today, we know that inheritance is far more complex than what Mendel saw in his pea plants. Here are some of the things scientists have learned about how traits are passed from one generation to the next. Continue reading “Four Ways Inheritance Is More Complex Than Mendel Knew”
Last summer, we shared findings from Gürol Süel 
and colleagues at the University of California, San Diego, that bacterial cells in tight-knit microbial communities called biofilms expand in a stop-and-go pattern. The researchers concluded that this pattern helps make food at the nutrient-rich margin available to the cells in the starved center, but they didn’t know how. They’ve now shown that the cells use electrochemical signaling to communicate and cooperate with each other.
Because nutrients and other signals cells use to sense each other and their environment move rather slowly, the researchers looked for a faster, more active communication system in biofilms of the bacterium B. subtilis. They focused on electrical signaling via potassium, a positively charged ion that, for example, our nerve and muscle cells use to send or receive signals. Continue reading “Bacterial Biofilms: A Charged Environment”
Like the features of a cat in a dark alley, those of an important enzyme called telomerase have been elusive. Using a combination of imaging techniques, a research team led by Juli Feigon of the University of California, Los Angeles, has now captured the clearest view ever of the enzyme.
Telomerase maintains the DNA at the ends of our chromosomes, known as telomeres, which act like the plastic tips on the ends of shoelaces. In the absence of telomerase activity, telomeres get shorter each time our cells divide. Eventually, the telomeres become so short that the cells stop dividing or die. On the other hand, cells with abnormally high levels of telomerase activity can constantly rebuild their protective chromosomal caps. Telomerase is particularly active within cancer cells. Continue reading “Seeing Telomerase’s ‘Whiskers’ and ‘Toes’”
If a picture is worth a thousand words, what’s a video worth? For cell biologist Ron Vale, it’s priceless.
“discovery talk,” Ron Vale describes the twists and turns that led him to unexpected findings, including a motor protein involved in important cellular processes.In 2006, Vale started a video-based science outreach project called iBiology to give people around the world broader access to research seminars. The free online videos, which cover a range of biomedical fields and career-related topics, take viewers behind the scenes of scientific findings and convey the excitement of the discovery process.
While geared mostly for undergraduate students, graduate students and postdoctoral researchers, the videos are also a rich resource for anyone who wants a better understanding of many biomedical areas, including those we cover on this blog. Continue reading “Sharing ‘Behind the Scene’ Stories About Scientific Discoveries”
By showing that our immune and nervous systems are connected, Kevin J. Tracey of the North Shore-LIJ Health System’s Feinstein Institute for Medical Research helped launch a new discipline called bioelectronic medicine. In this field, scientists explore how to use electricity to stimulate the body to produce its own disease-fighting molecules.
I spoke with Tracey about his research, the scientific process and where bioelectronic medicine is headed next.
How did you uncover the connection between our immune and nervous systems?
My lab was testing whether a chemical we developed called CNI-1493 could stop immune cells from producing inflammation-inducing molecules called TNFs in the brain of rats during a stroke. It does. But we were surprised to find that this chemical also affects neurons, or brain cells. The neurons sense the chemical and respond by sending an electrical signal along the vagus nerve, which runs from the brain to the internal organs. The vagus nerve then releases molecules that tell immune cells throughout the body to make less TNF. I’ve named this neural circuit the inflammatory reflex. Today, scientists in bioelectronic medicine are exploring ways to use tiny electrical devices to stimulate this reflex to treat diseases ranging from rheumatoid arthritis to cancer. Continue reading “From Basic Research to Bioelectronic Medicine”