To save the northern white rhino from extinction an international research team around Thomas Hildebrandt and Sebastian Diecke has chosen an unusual approach. They want to facilitate an in vitro fertilisation by transforming the animals’ skin cells into egg cells.
Even an analog synthesizer has to be tuned. As the cables travel from one jack to the next, the artist’s neurons produce a different note each time. On the boundaries of stem cell technology and creating art in a lab.
In mammalian embryos, crucial tissues are produced from a group of cells that are scarce and only exist for a very short time. Now, researchers have deciphered their molecular signature.
The 3D landscapes of the genome have to change all the time. Otherwise genes would not be expressed properly and physiology would be in disarray. Ana Pombo’s group is mapping this genomic regulation.
MDC scientist Francesca Spagnoli reprograms liver cells to become cells of the pancreas, which may one day help diabetics. Here, she describes how European funding helped starting her own lab.
Moving from mitochondrial research to stem cell biology gave Alessandro Prigione new tools and perspectives. Now he has made a model of mitochondrial disease from stem cells with promising results.
Some diseases are untreatable because we lack a model system to fully understand symptoms or test possible drugs. This is the case of mitochondrial disease, a rare condition caused by defects in the “cellular powerhouse.” MDC scientists developed the first human stem-cell based system to find drugs to fight mitochondrial disease.
David H. Gutmann, the US neurologist, and Prof. Maike Sander, a diabetes researcher at the University of California, San Diego, USA, have now been granted the Humboldt Research Award by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.
The same regulatory mechanisms are active in the stem cells of flatworms and humans: The RNA is processed in a similar manner in the cells of both organisms. These mechanisms seem to be at work throughout the whole animal kingdom. Scientists from the MDC showed this in a genome-wide study on flatworms.
Stem cell research at the Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine in the Helmholtz Association (MDC) has received a further boost. Junior Group Leader Dr. Mina Gouti and her research group are developing a novel cell culture system that can be used to model neurodegenerative diseases and develop new therapeutic approaches. The researchers generate parallel […]