Using synthetic biology and cell-free systems, Associate Professor Keith Pardee and his team have developed a protocol to produce research-quality bioreagents without the use of traditional lab infrastructure. Using freeze-dried reagents reactivated by water and purified through a 3D printed, hand-powered centrifuge, Pardee and his team have a developed a way to effectively bypass the cold-chain, increasing accessibility to proteins by researchers in low-resource settings. This process has been tested in remote areas in Canada and around the world, including on the side of a mountain in Whitehorse, Yukon.

Oceans began losing oxygen nearly 8 million years before the end‑Triassic mass extinction, according to new research. The findings could offer a road map for today’s warming oceans.

In a new study published in The EMBO Journal, researchers identified a tick protein that could help block disease transmission before it fully happens. The EMBO Journal, published by the European Molecular Biology Organization, is one of the world’s leading journals in molecular biology.

Researchers at Gladstone Institutes have devised a way to track the exact routes that debris uses when exiting the brain. Their approach, described in Cell, has revealed new details about how the brain clears waste, including how bordering immune cells interact with waste products and how Alzheimer’s disease disrupts this carefully orchestrated system.

An international research team led by Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (IIT Italian Institute of Technology) in Rovereto (Trento, Italy) and the Child Mind Institute in New York (USA), and in collaboration with researchers from the University of Trento, has shown that it is possible to identify at least two distinct subtypes of autism, defined by their patterns of brain connectivity. In the “hyperconnectivity” subtype, brain areas communicate more than usual; in the “hypoconnectivity” subtype, communication between brain areas is reduced. The study aims to develop tools for precise, personalized autism care and support. The research paper was published in the international journal Nature Neuroscience.

β-1,2-Glucans are glucose-based polymers found across a wide range of organisms that play important roles in bacterial infection and symbiosis. However, how bacteria import these sugars remains poorly understood. In a recent study, researchers from Japan identified and characterized Chy400_4166, a novel β-1,2-glucan-binding protein from the bacterium Chloroflexus aurantiacus. This protein exhibits a binding mechanism distinct from any previously described transporter of this kind, expanding our understanding of how bacteria recognize and take up β-1,2-glucans.