By sequencing the bacterial mRNA that bacteria break down (the degradome) during protein synthesis, a novel approach called 5PSeq was able to analyze how environmental exposure stress, including that of antibiotics, affected bacterial translational dynamics. This is what researchers from the Karolinska Institutet led by Vicent Pelechano have discovered in their study published on May 22, 2023, in Nature Microbiology.

Implanting brain organoids into the brains of mice may allow the more realistic study of microglial cells during both healthy and disease states. This is what researchers from the Salk Institute and their collaborators found in a study published on May 11, 2023, in Cell.

A rare cell type in the gut, the enterochromaffin (EC) cell, drove both gut discomfort and anxiety symptoms in animal models of gastrointestinal pain. Furthermore, the cells reacted differently in male and female mice, opening up new ways to understand and investigate the higher prevalence of gut disorders in women.

The intended use of gene editing tools on pre-implantation human embryos would be to avoid the development of congenital diseases in the upcoming baby. But it may have its own risks. Those risks were illustrated in a publication in the March 7, 2023, issue of Nature Communications, where researchers from the Center for Embryonic Cell and Gene Therapy, Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU) showed that the method that is most frequently used for evaluating the effects of gene editing zygotes did not always result in an accurate picture of those edits.

Cancer both imitates and hijacks the nervous system, to the extent that some researchers consider tumor-neuronal interactions a new hallmark of cancer. Unsurprisingly, the parallels are particularly strong in brain cancers. Glioblastomas form electrically interconnected networks, similar to neuronal-glial gap junctions, that help them grow. Now, researchers have identified key players in these networks, as well as ways to target them and possibly take down the networks.