Longevity science

Led by researchers at Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) and the Institute for Bioengineering of Catalonia (IBEC), investigators found that epithelial cells — the type that form a barrier between the inside and the outside of the body, such as skin cells — move in a group, propelled by forces both from within and from nearby cells — to fill any unfilled spaces they encounter.

The discovery about how cells move inside the body may provide scientists with crucial information about disease mechanisms such as the spread of cancer or the constriction of airways caused by asthma.

Scientists at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have shown they can coax cells to move toward a beam of light. The feat is a first step toward manipulating cells to control factors such as insulin secretion or heart rate using light.

Their research is published April 8 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“We have succeeded in using light as a kind of on-off switch to control cells’ behavior,” says principal investigator N. Gautam, PhD, a professor of anesthesiology. “Much of the way cells behave is due to their ability to sense signals in the environment. In these experiments, what the cells sense is the presence of light.”

If you were a scientist looking at a cell with a microscope, what would you do if you wanted get a look at the far side of that cell? You could try reaching in with a very fine-tipped pair of tweezers, but ... you’d probably be better off using something known as a fiber-optic spanner.

How do they do it?

There are two types of worm that can regenerate their cells indefinitely, leading researchers to question—is this a key to immortality?

What causes a cell to metastasize into a cancerous tumor?

To find out, Corey Neu, an assistant professor in Purdue University‘s Weldon School of Biomedical Engineering, and colleagues have combined an atomic force microscope (AFM) and a nuclear magnetic resonance system.

An AFM uses a tiny vibrating probe called a cantilever with a tip that travels over the surface of a cell to yield information about materials and surfaces at the scale of nanometers, or billionths of a meter.

Stanford University bioengineers have taken computing beyond mechanics and electronics into the living realm of biology by creating the “transcriptor” — a biological transistor made from DNA and RNA.

In electronics, a transistor controls the flow of electrons along a circuit. Similarly, a transcriptor controls the flow of a specific protein, RNA polymerase, as it travels along a strand of DNA.