Birds do it. Bees do it. "Even jellyfish have this need," Qinghua Liu told BioWorld. Liu was referring, of course, to sleep, which he called "essentially... a black box, and one of the biggest mysteries of brain science."

ATLANTA – In the search for good antibacterial targets, new sites on validated structures are one sweet spot. Because they are on previously targeted structures, they are in principle validated targets. At the same time, targeting novel sites can turn back the clock in the antibiotic resistance race, particularly if there is no cross-resistance with existing antibiotics that target the same structure.

A team from the Canadian institution The Hospital for Sick Children and the German Cancer Research Center have discovered that antibodies binding to the malaria parasite can interact with each other as well as with their parasite target, and that this interaction improved their affinity for the pathogen. 

Two gene expression signatures in blood samples of pregnant women could accurately assess the gestational age of the fetus, and predict which pregnancies would end in preterm birth, respectively.

Early life complications (ELCs) can double the risk of developing schizophrenia, an effect that is greater than that of any common genetic variant. Researchers from the Lieber Institute for Brain Development have discovered that such ELCs affected gene expression in the placenta, and they did so in different ways in the placentas of male and female fetuses. 

In the quest to bring chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cells to new groups of patients, a lot of work has been focused on engineering the CAR T cells themselves.