Latest News Releases 14 September

Scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the Institut Pasteur in France have developed a technique for reconstructing whole genomes, including the human genome, on a personal computer. This technique is about a hundred times faster than current state-of-the-art approaches and uses one-fifth the resources. The study, published September 14 in the journal Cell Systems, allows for a more compact representation of genome data inspired by the way in which words, rather than letters, offer condensed building blocks for language models.

New research published in Stem Cell Reports found that organoid culture-based models for cochlear hair cell formation can be used to identify drugs that promote hair cell regeneration in a high throughput drug library screen.

People often unconsciously synchronize bodily functions like heartbeat and breathing when they share an experience, such as a live performance or have a personal conversation. According to a new study, subjects’ heart rates synchronize even if they are just listening to a story by themselves, and this synchronization only occurs when the subjects are paying attention to the story. The findings from the research are reported September 14 in the journal Cell Reports.

Lymph nodes are hubs of cancer-fighting T cell immune activity, yet are paradoxically the most common site of early cancer spread. A new study co-led by Dartmouth’s and Dartmouth-Hitchcock’s Norris Cotton Cancer Center and Baylor College of Medicine finds a novel population of T cells that remain in lymph nodes to protect against melanoma. These cells have a unique genetic profile differentiating them from circulating T cells and from T cells in other body tissues.

Today’s electronic devices rely on the electron’s negative charge to manipulate electron motion or store information. So-called spintronic devices, which would also exploit the spin of electrons for information processing and storage, may ultimately allow us to reduce energy consumption while increasing information processing capabilities, giving us multi-functional, high-speed, low-energy electronic technologies. An essential first step, however, is finding appropriate high-performance materials and integrating them into devices that allow us to control their properties well. In the paper “Gate Control of Spin-Layer-Locking FETs and Application to Monolayer LuIO,” recently published in Nano Letters, NCCR MARVEL researchers and colleagues identified lutetium oxide iodide (LuIO) as just such a material. They studied how to control its properties with electric gates—simulating for the first time ever the effect of electronic doping—and provided practical guidelines for building and operating associated devices from such material.

Sandia National Laboratories researchers have created a method of processing 3D images for computer simulations that could have beneficial implications for several industries, including health care, manufacturing and electric vehicles.

Researchers from the University of Georgia developed a new indigo dyeing technology that’s kinder on the planet. The new technique reduces water usage and eliminates the toxic chemicals that make the dyeing process so environmentally damaging. And to top it off, the technology streamlines the process and secures more color than traditional methods.

A new study by the University of Bonn and the Leibniz Institute of Plant Genetics and Crop Plant Research (IPK) in Gatersleben sheds light on the mechanism used by plants to monitor how much of the nutrient phosphate is available, and to decide when strategies to mobilize and take up more phosphate from the soil must be activated. The enzyme ITPK1 plays a key role in this process. The researchers were also able to show that a particular group of signaling molecules involved in phosphate sensing respond very sensitively to phosphate and that this regulation takes place not only in plants but also in human cells. In the long term, the results could lead to the breeding of new crop varieties that require less phosphate fertilizer. The final version of the study has now been published in the journal "Molecular Plant".

One of the most promising fields is photovoltaics. Prototype perovskite solar cells have been shown to be more efficient than commercial silicon-based cells.