Leukemias involving reshuffling or rearrangement of the mixed lineage leukemia (MLL) gene, known as MLL-rearranged or MLL-r leukemias, account for 70 to 80 percent of acute leukemias in infants under one year old. In these blood cancers, a subset of acute myeloid and acute lymphoid leukemias (AML and ALL), the MLL gene breaks and reattaches to the wrong section of the chromosome. Such…
The distance from the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) to Stanford, California can be measured in miles or kilometers, but Harvard undergraduate student Esther Elonga measures that journey in adventures. “I like the fact that life is like a Choose Your Own Adventure,” said Elonga, who is also a researcher at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. “Just go.…
Macromolecular transport across the nuclear envelope depends on facilitated diffusion through nuclear pore complexes (NPCs). The interior of NPCs contains a permeability barrier made of phenylalanine-glycine (FG) repeat domains that selectively facilitates the permeation of cargoes bound to nuclear transport receptors (NTRs). FG-repeat domains in NPCs are a major site of O-linked N-acetylglucosamine (O-GlcNAc) modification, but the functional role of this modification…
Speech problems such as stammering or stuttering plague millions of people worldwide, including 3 million Americans. President Biden himself struggled with stuttering as a child and has largely overcome it with speech therapy. The cause of stuttering has long been a mystery, but researchers at Tufts University are beginning to unlock its causes and a strategy to develop potential treatments…
Researchers from Brigham and Women’s Hospital have designed a 3D lung-on-a-chip model of the distal lung and alveolar structures. The goal is to better understand respiratory diseases, including asthma, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, influenza, pneumonia and, most recently COVID-19. The team currently is studying how COVID-19 viral particles travel through airways and impact pulmonary cells. This new chip model enables…
Dr. Angela Ho and Christina Gallo (PhD in Pharmacology student and member of the Ho/Beffert lab) recently received grants from the National Institute on Aging the National Institutes of Health. Dr. Ho received a R21 grant from NIA/NIH. The project’s goal is to determine the specificity of the cell-permeable APP mimetic peptide to disrupt the APP-Mint interaction and reduce Ab…
New research led by a team at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) points to a promising strategy to boost tumors’ intake of cancer drugs, thereby increasing the effectiveness of chemotherapy treatments. The group’s findings are published in Nature Nanotechnology. Getting enough anticancer drugs into a tumor is often difficult, and a potential strategy to overcome this challenge involves binding the medications to…
Antibodies are a vital part of our immune system, but they don’t just appear when they’re needed. They are made in immune cells called B cells. Most B cells, known as B2 cells, produce antibodies in response to a pathogen or a vaccine, providing defense and immunity against infections. But a small subset of long-lived B cells, known as B1…
As people weary of being cooped up during a pandemic winter look forward to a summer outside, residents across the northeastern United States are once again confronted with a familiar virulent pathogen lurking in the woods and fields. Unlike coronavirus, however, this dangerous microorganism doesn’t float through the air—it enters the body through the bite of a tick. Lyme disease…
This week we profile a recent publication in Nature Genetics from Dr. Divya Vinjamur in the laboratory of Dr. Daniel Bauer. Their lab is interested in understanding how our genome encodes blood cell potential, how this can go wrong in disease, and how rational treatment strategies could intervene.
