Press release

Citizen science: Teachers, pupils and scientists work together to measure sitting behavior in young people.

Every year acute renal failure affects over 13 million people and leads to 1.7 million deaths across the globe.It often develops when an insufficient supply of oxygen reaches the kidneys, a condition called ischemia. Working with their colleagues from the MDC, the Charité and FMP in Berlin and Hannover Medical School, Dr Lajos Markó and Emilia Vigolo have traced one of the causes of ischemia-related renal failure to a signaling molecule called NF-κB and a specific type of tissue: tubular epithelial cells. Suppressing NF-κB signaling in these renal cells almost entirely eliminates the fatal tissue damage and inflammatory responses that accompany the disease.

All of the cells in a tumor are the offspring of a single, aberrant cell, but they are not all alike. Only a few retain the capacity of the original cell to create an entire tumor. Such cancer stem cells can migrate to other tissues and become fatal metastases. To fully cure a patient’s cancer, it is crucial to find and eliminate all of these cells because any that escape can regenerate the tumor and trigger its spread through the body.

Capacity for self-renewal Our body is constantly changing: new cells continually replace specialized...

It has now been 15 years since scientists celebrated the completion of the human genome. At that point, scientists had determined the entire sequence of the genetic letters making up our DNA. It is now known that this was only an initial step in a long journey: in addition to the chemical letters, information is also encoded in the manner in which the DNA is packed inside the cell nucleus. A research team led by Ana Pombo from the Max Delbrück Center in Berlin-Buch, in collaboration with international colleagues from Italy, Canada and Great Britain, has now generated comprehensive 3D maps of the spatial organization of the mouse genome, from embryonic stem cells to fully developed neurons. The work has been published in the journal Molecular Systems Biology. In the future such maps might help track down genes that are involved in hereditary diseases.

VONVENDI [von Willebrand factor (Recombinant)]”, the new drug from Baxalta Incorporated, a global biopharmaceutical company recently spun off from Baxter International, has just been approved by the United States Food and Drug Administration. It is the first, and so far the only, recombinant protein for the treatment of von Willebrand disease, and offers those affected a new therapeutic option for the first time in more than 10 years.

A new statistical method could help to clarify the function of unknown genes. A research team under Uwe Ohler of the Berlin Institute for Medical Systems Biology (BIMSB) at the MDC has adapted and tested a filter method from speech signal processing that makes sequencing data more interpretable. First author of the study in Nature Methods is Lorenzo Calviello. “We can use this to watch the ribosome at work”, says group leader Ohler.