Imagine being able to look inside a single cancer cell and see how it communicates with its neighbors. Scientists are celebrating a new technique that lets them study the fatty contents of cancer cells, one by one.
Biochemistry
15 hours ago
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63
In a new study published in Nature Chemistry, UNC-Chapel Hill researcher Ronit Freeman and her colleagues describe the steps they took to manipulate DNA and proteins—essential building blocks of life—to create cells that ...
Biochemistry
21 hours ago
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88
Regenerating damaged tissues or organs has been a dream of scientists for decades. Now, researchers at the FMI and Novartis Biomedical Research have discovered a new molecule that activates a protein involved in regeneration. ...
Biotechnology
21 hours ago
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28
Scientists at UC Santa Cruz have discovered a cellular process in the breast that can increase milk production by pregnant women, revealing a potential path to addressing lactation insufficiency syndrome—the inability of ...
Cell & Microbiology
23 hours ago
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35
An intricate simulation performed by UT Southwestern Medical Center researchers using one of the world's most powerful supercomputers sheds new light on how proteins called SNAREs cause biological membranes to fuse.
Molecular & Computational biology
Apr 23, 2024
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42
Healthy cells respond appropriately to changes in their environment. They do this by sensing what's happening outside and relaying a command to the precise biomolecule in the precise domain that can carry out the necessary ...
Cell & Microbiology
Apr 22, 2024
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30
Several types of conventional cancer therapies, such as radiotherapy or chemotherapy, destroy healthy cells along with cancer cells. In advanced stages of cancer, tissue loss from treatments can be substantial and even fatal. ...
Bio & Medicine
Apr 22, 2024
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51
Observing individual cells through microscopes can reveal a range of important cell biological phenomena that frequently play a role in human diseases, but the process of distinguishing single cells from each other and their ...
Cell & Microbiology
Apr 22, 2024
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55
To study living organisms at ever smaller length scales, scientists must devise new techniques to overcome the so-called diffraction limit. This is the intrinsic limitation on a microscope's ability to focus on objects smaller ...
Biotechnology
Apr 22, 2024
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8
Through years of engineering gene-editing systems, researchers have developed a suite of tools that enable the modification of genomes in living cells, akin to "genome surgery." These tools, including ones based on a natural ...
Cell & Microbiology
Apr 22, 2024
0
35
The cell is the structural and functional unit of all known living organisms. It is the smallest unit of an organism that is classified as living, and is often called the building block of life. Some organisms, such as most bacteria, are unicellular (consist of a single cell). Other organisms, such as humans, are multicellular. (Humans have an estimated 100 trillion or 1014 cells; a typical cell size is 10 µm; a typical cell mass is 1 nanogram.) The largest known cell is an unfertilized ostrich egg cell.
In 1835 before the final cell theory was developed, a Czech Jan Evangelista Purkyně observed small "granules" while looking at the plant tissue through a microscope. The cell theory, first developed in 1839 by Matthias Jakob Schleiden and Theodor Schwann, states that all organisms are composed of one or more cells. All cells come from preexisting cells. Vital functions of an organism occur within cells, and all cells contain the hereditary information necessary for regulating cell functions and for transmitting information to the next generation of cells.
The word cell comes from the Latin cellula, meaning, a small room. The descriptive name for the smallest living biological structure was chosen by Robert Hooke in a book he published in 1665 when he compared the cork cells he saw through his microscope to the small rooms monks lived in.
This text uses material from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA
