An Australian research team led by Richard P. Harvey from the Victor Chang Cardiac Research Institute in Darlinghurst, New South Wales, has for the first time discovered stem cells in the heart. The newly discovered stem cells are located in the outer layer of the heart wall and are related to bone marrow stem cells.
This year’s award for replacement and complementary methods for animal experiments was awarded by the state Baden-Württemberg to Dr. Martina Berger from the research laboratory of Prof. Dr. Ulrich Stock, and Martina Zimmermann and Prof. Dr. Ulrich Lauer, all from the University Hospital of Tübingen. The prize includes € 25,000 in funding.
InVitroJobs spoke with Prof. Dr. med. Ulrich Lauer, one of the recipients of this year’s animal welfare research award presented by the state of Baden-Württemberg.
Researchers of the Department of Medical Biotechnology at the Paul Ehrlich Institute led by Prof. Dr. Gerald Schumann have discovered by which mechanism a group of retrotransposons called SVA elements is distributed in the human genome. Their insights are also significant for stem cell research.
Led by Dr. Michael Mühlebach, and in cooperation with international research groups from the USA, Canada, Singapore and France, researchers from the medical biotechnology department at the Paul-Ehrlich Institute have shed light on how measles viruses penetrate epithelial cells, from where they are expelled via the respiratory tract and infect other humans.
Researchers from the Berlin Max Planck Institute of Molecular Genetics led by Markus Ralser have developed a reliable and easy to handle method for analysing proteins in a mass spectrometer. They use an especially sensitive triple-quadrupole mass spectrometer coupled to a high pressure liquid chromatograph.
In a collaborative research project, scientists from the University Hospital Erlangen under the direction of Prof. Dr. med. Jürgen Winkler in the Department of Molecular Neurology, the Salk Institute for Biological Studies under Fred Gage and the University of California San Diego (UCSD) in La Jolla aim to use stem cells and immune cells to find out what part inflammation processes play in Parkinson’s disease.
By screening red blood cell proteins in a protein database (ARVEXIS), Gavin Wright and his team from the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in Hinxton, UK, have identified a receptor-ligand pair which is of fundamental significance regarding the invasion of human red blood cells by Plasmodium falciparum, the malaria pathogen.
Between the 3rd and 4th of November 2011, more than twenty participants from university medical faculties, science and technology institutes, companies and government bodies took part in the first Cultex workshop in Hannover, Germany, devoted to current inhalation toxicity issues.
An experiment conducted by the Institute of Micro and Nanomaterials at the Ulm University demonstrates that it may be possible to develop a new treatment for Alzheimer’s disease using an active agent from green tea in combination with red laser light.