Super temporal-resolved microscopy
Researchers at Rice University in Houston, Texas debuted STReM—super temporal-resolved microscopy—last month (October 24). A phase-manipulation technique, STReM allows the researchers to resolve the dynamics of fast-moving proteins, they reported. The team published its results in The Journal of Physical Chemistry Letters.
This advance “is important because in my lab, for instance, we consider the dynamics of proteins inside living cells with the understood limitation that we are mainly restricted to following membrane-bound or DNA-bound molecules,” Julie Biteen of the University of Michigan, who was not involved in the research, wrote in an email. “A method like this [new one] would allow us to measure and understand the fastest motions of, for instance, free proteins.”
Diet and host-microbiome communication
A team led by researchers at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health has identified metabolites that microbes in the mouse gut use to...
“The gut microbiome influences the host epigenome on a global scale,” coauthor John Denu of the University of Wisconsin told The Scientist. “We discovered key communicators, or key molecules that communicate this information, to the host.”
Diet, host-microbiome communication, and weight regain
The composition of an obesity-associated mouse gut microbiome can persist long after an animal has lost weight on a diet, scientists at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, reported in Nature last week (November 24). And this composition can impact how much weight a mouse regains—and how quickly it does so—once it is fed a high-fat diet.
“It’s a combination of the microbiome and the diet” that contribute to exaggerated post-diet weight regain in mice, coauthor Eran Segal of the Weizmann Institute said during a November 22 press briefing. “More and more, we and others are beginning to understand the interaction between the microbiome and the host, and how that interaction occurs. We, more and more, understand that this is going on—to a very large extent—at the level of molecules that are exchanged between the host and the microbiome.”
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