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Macrophages are key cells of our innate immune response. By filling up almost all the tissues in our body, these cells have an important role in keeping our organs in a healthy state, as they are constantly removing dead cells or eliminating microbes invading tissues. As cells that specialize in eating and devouring, macrophages are very well adapted to take in, digest, and destroy foreign materials. However, certain microorganisms and bacteria such as Salmonella have developed strategies to protect themselves from ingesting macrophages, causing severe typhoid infection and inflammation. Scientists from the MPI of Immunobiology and Epigenetics in Freiburg now report in their latest study published in the scientific journal Natural Metabolism how inter-organelle crosstalk between phago-lysosomes and mitochondria limits the growth of these bacteria in macrophages. Signals from digestive cell organelles The interior of a macrophage, like most other cells, is divided into different com

Your gut is an amazing place. The special layer of cells that line the inside of your small and large intestines take nutrients and water from what you eat while keeping anything bad out of your system. This layer is called the intestinal epithelium. It actually renews itself every four to seven days using stem cells. These are special types of cells that can self-renew by dividing and differentiating to produce other types of cells to renew your organs. Scientists still don’t know how exactly they make this decision, or what defines stem cells. Bernat Corominas-Murtra, formerly a postdoc at the Austrian Institute of Science and Technology (ISTA) and now an assistant professor at the University of Graz, and Edouard Hannezo, professor at ISTA, in collaboration with an international experimental research group led by Jacco Van Tim Rheenen in Amsterdam studied cells stems in the intestinal epithelium. They discovered an exciting new mechanism that could change our understanding of w

Heart disease – the leading cause of death in the US – is so deadly in part because the heart, unlike other organs, cannot repair itself after injury. That is why tissue engineering, which ultimately includes the wholesale manufacture of whole human hearts for transplantation, is so important to the future of cardiac medicine. To build the human heart from the ground up, researchers needed to replicate the unique structures that make up the heart. This includes recreating the helical geometry, which creates a circular motion when the heart beats. It has long been theorized that this circular motion is essential for pumping blood at high volumes, but proving it is difficult, in part because creating hearts with different geometries and alignments is a challenge. Now, bioengineers from Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) have developed the first biohybrid model of the human ventricle with helically aligned beating heart cells, and have shown that

People often think that early embryos are fragile and need support. However, in the early stages of development, it has the power to feed the future placenta and command the uterus for nesting. Using the ‘blastoid’, an in vitro embryo model formed with stem cells, Nicolas Rivron’s Lab at IMBA demonstrated that the earliest molecular signals that induce placental development and prepare the uterus come from the embryo itself. The findings, now published in Cell Stem Cell, could contribute to a better understanding of human fertility. Who took care of whom in early life? The placenta and uterus nourish and protect the fetus. But the situation at an early stage of development, when the blastocyst is still afloat in the uterus, is so far unclear. Now, Nicolas Rivron’s group of researchers at IMBA (Institute of Molecular Biotechnology of the Austrian Academy of Sciences) discovered the basic principles of early development using blastoids. The blastoid is an in vitro model of the blas