How one fern can soak up so much arsenic—and not die

Arsenic-contaminated soil and groundwater pose risks to millions of Americans and hundreds of millions of people worldwide. Cleaning up the toxic metal is a laborious and expensive process, with some remediations of arsenic ...

A protein provides stress relief for cells

German researchers have shown a new mechanism via which cells defend themselves against stress. Dr. Kathrin Thedieck and Birgit Holzwarth from the Institute of Biology III and the Cluster of Excellence BIOSS Centre for Biological ...

New, more sensitive sensor for evaluating drug safety

A new technique for evaluating drug safety can detect stress on cells at earlier stages than conventional methods, which mostly rely on detecting cell death. The new method uses a fluorescent sensor that is turned on in a ...

A protein that can mean life or death for cells

Each cell in an organism has a sensor that measures the health of its "internal" environment. This "alarm" is found in the endoplasmic reticulum (ER), which is able to sense cellular stress and trigger either rescue responses ...

Quantum-assisted nano-imaging of living organism is a first

In science, many of the most interesting events occur at a scale far smaller than the unaided human eye can see. Medical researchers might realize a range of breakthroughs if they could look deep inside living biological ...

A chaperone for the 'guardian of the genome'

The protein p53 plays an essential role in the prevention of cancer by initiating the controlled death of a cell with damaged genes which is in danger to transform into a cancerous cell. The heat shock protein Hsp90, in turn, ...

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