news 2022

Many people have felt the sudden and uncontrollable urge to eat a certain food. These urges —known as cravings— are very common, mostly during pregnancy. At this stage, the mother's body undergoes a series of physiological and behavioural changes to create a favourable environment for the embryo's development.

Acute myeloid leukaemia (AML) remains harder to treat therapeutically due to the high existing genetic heterogeneity not only between patients but also between the population of subclones of cancer cells within the same person. Despite the knowledge advances, understanding the metabolic characteristics of altered cells in this pathology is one of the scientific challenges for designing more efficient therapies.

Biodiversity loss has accelerated over the last decade, driven by the impact of global warming, alteration of habitats and the dispersal of invasive exotic species due to human action. The reintroduction of captive-bred animals is one of the potential solutions to cope with this problem.

The laboratory mouse is an experimental model widely used in preclinical biomedical research. Researchers can determine the efficiency of drugs and their possible adverse effects in these animals, and they can mimic human diseases in order to find the mechanisms of their emergence and identify treatments to fight them.

In biophysics, the kinetic states of molecules play a determining role in the metabolic and physiological processes in which they take part. Now, a paper published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences ( PNAS ) specifies for the first time the levels of energy, the entropy and the enthalpy of protein folding.

Intestines have a specific population of cells —with a high glycolytic metabolism— that act as stem cells and would be the cause for the origin and spread of colorectal cancer.

The cellular prion protein (PrPC), a protein in the surface of the neuronal cells, is imbalanced in human patients with neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's or Parkinson's disease. However, the knowledge on the participation of PrPC in these pathologies contrasts with many reported data on its natural and health-promoting role.

Juvenile fibromyalgia is a syndrome characterized by a chronic pain affecting the whole body. It also causes fatigue as well as sleep and mood disorders. It affects children and adolescents —mainly girls— worldwide and it appears during a critical period of the brain development. Analysing the brain changes that occur in the first stages of juvenile fibromyalgia could help to better understand the pathophysiology of this syndrome, which had not been approached from this perspective to date.

The study finds a greater presence of these viruses in people who eat dairy products in their regular diet. New research associates the presence of Caudovirales in gut microbiota to an improvement in cognitive functions and memory in humans, mice and flies.

Researchers of the University of Barcelona and the August Pi i Sunyer Biomedical Research Institute (IDIBAPS) have shown in a study with lung cancer cell lines that the same molecular signals that control the embryonic development can also control the harmfulness of cancer cells. The results of the study, published in the Journal of Experimental & Clinical Cancer Research , can have implications in the development of new therapeutic strategies to fight lung cancer, which is currently the first cause of death worldwide.

Global environmental changes such as those caused by climate warming can have a deep impact on the ecosystems. In this context, it is vital to gather biological and ecological information of the main species to predict and mitigate the potential effects of these changes in the distribution, abundance and interaction of these species.

Obesity or diabetes, among other metabolic disorders, can produce cognitive impairment. Molecular bases and brain areas involved in this relation are not studied enough, but now, a study published in the journal Cell Metabolism reveals the involvement of a molecule and a brain region in this process of cognitive skill loss.

A study published in the journal Nature Plants reveals that the oldest trees are living beings that offer more than a majestic presence and a series of ecosystem services to the forest. These ancient and monumental trees of long-term survival —they can be centennial or millennial trees— are vital to preserve the adaptive capacity of the forests on the long run, in a constantly changing environment.

The increasing salinity in freshwater habitats —rivers, lakes, wetlands, etc.— is a global threat to the conservation of biodiversity and the natural habitats of the world. Human activities such as mining and intensive agriculture, as well as the rise of the sea level caused by the climate change, are placing the concentration of salt in continental waters up to the highest levels to date.

The gene of the brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) is associated with several processes related to memory and brain plasticity. Now, a paper reveals that it is easier to alter the cognitive activity through transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) in people with the genetic variant Val/Val for the BDNF gene.

A team of the UB and the August Pi i Sunyer Biomedical Research Institute (IDIBAPS) identified a mechanism involved in the movement of cholesterol inside the cells. The study, published in the Journal of Cell Biology , shows how the SNX13 protein plays a key role when transporting this lipid outside the liposomes, organelles that conduct cellular digestion.

The Src protein takes part in the regulation of many physiological processes such as the survival, migration or cell adhesion as a response to stimuli received from several receptors of the membrane. Although it is demonstrated that its deregulation is involved in the proliferation of cancer in humans, many aspects of this function are still unknown, especially regarding its disordered region.