Author: Kevin Merchant
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The Intestinal Immune System and Clinical Depression
Over the past two decades, we are growing to recognize the importance of mental health, which has historically been ignored. Today, in many parts of the world, mental health is given almost equal priority to physical health. Clinical depression, also known as major depressive disorder, is one of the most common mental health disorders, affecting…
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Bridging the “gap” between CAR and solid tumors
Picture credit: flickr.com Since first approved by the FDA in 2017, T cells with chimeric antigen receptors (CAR T) have revolutionized the treatment of blood cancers like leukemia and lymphoma. Since then, research has been focused on improving the CARs to treat a wide range of cancers including solid tumors – that have proved to…
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Right Place At The Right Time: Positional Multiomics
Science, especially biology, is all about conducting experiments to arrive at conclusions. Experiments may involve multiple methods and stretch over multiple days/months to make the necessary observations. The nature of methods is always evolving, with scientists inventing newer methods using the technology available at the time. Sequencing the human genome was a landmark, but also…
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The biomechanics of lymph node swelling
At times when we fall sick, barely noticeable lumps can be felt under our skin. These lumps are our swollen lymph nodes, and they indicate the body’s immune system reacting to infectious agents. Historically, while we were trying to figure out the immune system and its fundamental cellular components, the complexity and dynamicity of lymph…
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On the Cutting Edge: The OMICS Generation
The last two decades have seen rapid development in almost every aspect of human life, and the field of biomedicine is no different. By the time the Human Genome Project concluded, the field of genomics had already observed a steady drop in the cost of sequencing. In years that followed, the technology developed rapidly, and…
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Shifting Paradigms: T Cells, FlipFlops, and Reversed T Cells
You must have come across the fundamental concepts of T cell development during your immunology class. Briefly, in the thymus, T cells expressing both CD4 and CD8 coreceptors interact with MHC molecules on thymic epithelial cells to make lineage fate decisions. CD4+ cells interact with MHCII and are called T helper cells while CD8+ cells…
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A Way Through the Crowd: Motility of macrophages in a dense microenvironment
Macrophages – the most versatile and multipurpose cells of the immune system – scavenge away pathogens and sick cells to protect us from diseases. We have previously mentioned how macrophages also happen to be present in almost every tissue to perform this very function. Most of the immune cells continuously circulate in the blood, but in a…
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New Role for Ductal Cells in Type 1 Diabetes
Despite owning the same genetic material, our cells carry out highly specialized functions and vary from each other in many phenotypic aspects. Interestingly, when in troubled times (i.e., under stressful conditions) certain cells change their characteristic protein expression and turn into something completely unexpected, to help us survive. Fasolino and group shed light on such…
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A Song of Marrow and Microbes
Stem cells! Iron! Macrophages! Red blood cells! Butyrate! Gut microbiota! No, we are not just blurting out random terms (stick with us till the end to read the full story). These keywords summarize a study by Zhang and colleagues that was published in Cell Stem Cell earlier this month. However, summarizing the work in a single…
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The Spoils of Epstein-Barr Virus and Its Role in Multiple Sclerosis
Picture source: iStock, Health Central 2022 is off to a great start for Science as Harvard researchers published a study that potentially solves a longstanding question: Can viral infections cause Multiple Sclerosis (MS)? According to their findings, the answer is yes, we can confidently say that Epstein-Barr Virus (EBV), a long-term suspect for causing this…
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