Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS)

Researchers in the Mina Gouti lab show in “Advanced Science” that electrical pulse stimulation helps human neuromuscular organoids mature. This non-invasive approach may make it possible to use organoid models to study adult-onset diseases and to gain a better understanding of how tissues mature.

Mina Gouti has been awarded a professorship at Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin. The appointment will strengthen her pioneering organoid research at the Max Delbrück Center and deepen collaboration with clinicians to advance personalized medicine.

Therapy that is tailored to patients’ diseases is largely unaffordable. Three Max Delbrück Center postdocs have won GO-Bio Initial grants to simplify and improve personalized therapies. They aim to bring down costs to enable more widespread access.

In neuromuscular diseases, neurons and muscle cells stop communicating properly. Researchers led by Mina Gouti can now model this in 2D in a culture dish. Writing about their findings in “Nature Communications”, they say the new model promises to revolutionize high-throughput drug screening studies.

RNA molecules travel long distances through nerve cells. To reach their destination, they need one thing more than any other – a long life – as a research team led by Marina Chekulaeva from MDC-BIMSB reports in the journal “Molecular Cell.”

Researchers suspect that neurodegenerative diseases occur when messenger RNA (mRNA) goes astray in the neuron. With a new method, Marina Chekulaeva is able to identify “zipcodes” that assign a destination to mRNAs. She has now presented her method in the journal Nature Neuroscience.

Organoids have to be fed and cared for continuously so that they can mature. So far, it is mostly a manual process – not suitable for industrial drug screening. Now, the European Research Council (ERC) has awarded Mina Gouti a Proof of Concept Grant to tackle scalability and reproducibility.

Errors in cellular RNA metabolism are dangerous for nerve cells. For her work in this area, Marina Chekulaeva has now been accepted into the DFG Heisenberg program.

Mina Gouti uses stem cells to create three-dimensional cell structures called organoids that closely resemble some aspects of real human tissues. The organoids are well suited for testing new drugs to combat neuromuscular diseases and for developing personalized therapies to treat severely ill patients.

A team led by MDC researcher Ana Pombo has deciphered the 3D structure of the genome in three cell types of the mouse brain. They not only discovered specific folding patterns but also found that very long genes almost completely lose their compact folded structure when most at work, as they report in “Nature”.