Transplanted organs are more likely to be rejected by the immune system when there is a mismatch between donor and recipient human leukocyte antigens (HLA). A Medical University of South Carolina team reports in Frontiers in Immunology that it has fitted regulatory T-cells, whose job is to suppress immune responses, with an artificial receptor and other genetic machinery that enable them to target and neutralize B-cells producing antibodies against the mismatched HLA.

A new study led by Bhooma Aravamuthan, MD, DPhil, a pediatric movement disorders specialist at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, identifies an objective way to measure leg dystonia, a common complication of cerebral palsy in children.

Omega fatty acids are important to human health. Deviations in their position can signal cell malfunction or disease. Researchers from UC San Diego have presented a new computational method to determine omega positions of lipids that could help with health diagnoses.

Shedding light on what determines how cells become what they are meant to be—nerves, bone, muscles, etc.—can also help researchers understand how diseases develop when these biological programs break down.

Now, researchers at Case Western Reserve University have discovered a key synergistic role for two epigenetic markers—molecules that help tell genes to turn on and off—involved in programming cell fate. Importantly, turning off these two markers causes genes to over-activate, disrupting normal cell development.