Research news

Researchers at the Institute for Bioengineering of Catalonia and their collaborators reveal that they’re a step closer to optimizing cells able to guide regeneration of the spine

The olfactory system is an area of the body that can renew itself, and it does this by using olfactory ensheathing cells (OECs) to guide newly formed axons – long projections of nerve cells – towards the body’s central nervous system. Naturally, researchers have already tried transplanting OECs to the spine, to see if this ability also works to promote axonal regeneration in spinal cord injuries and neural diseases.

In an article published in the journal Nature Materials, researchers at the IBEC and the UPC describe their discovery that ‘fracking’takes place in the body at a cellular level.

The work describes how hydraulic fracturing, or ‘fracking’ – most commonly known as the controversial technique to extract gas and petroleum from shale rock layers – also plays an important role in the epithelial tissues that lining the internal and external surfaces of our bodies.

Researchers at IBEC reveal in a Nature Communications paper some surprising mechanics that drive epithelial gap closure in the absence of underlying layers

In a collaboration with their colleagues at the Mechanobiology Institute in Singapore, IBEC researchers have demonstrated that a kind of ‘tug-of-war’ takes place after our skin or other epithelial layer is damaged, particularly in cases where the tissue is chronicly or deeply injured.

Researchers in Barcelona discover more potential candidates on the route to tailored, photo-switchable therapies by disproving design limitation

Last year, scientists at the Institute for Bioengineering of Catalonia (IBEC), IRB Barcelona and the UB announced that they had achieved photo-switchable, or light-regulated, molecules to control protein-protein interactions – key determinants in biological processes, and therefore highly promising therapeutic targets – in a remote and non-invasive way.

A group at IBEC has identified a important factor in E. coli infection, opening the way to developing targeted drugs against the potentially deadly condition.

Most E. coli bacterial strains occur naturally in the human gut and pose no harm to health, except for the one particular serotype that always hits the news, O157:H7, which can cause food poisoning and can become life-threatening in certain patients.

– The EU-funded MySpine project completes its goal of developing prognosis technology for spinal problems

– Consortium now looking for a transfer opportunity to bring its technology into the healthcare system

Even though lower back pain and spinal disorders are the leading cause of disability in western countries, their treatment still leaves a lot to be desired.

We all know how emotive smells can be; just the mere whiff of candy floss or plasticine can transport you back decades in a moment.

But how does our olfactory system recognise odours even at very low doses?

Two groups working together at IBEC demonstrate the potential of electrical studies of single bacterial cells in a paper published in ACS Nano.

Gabriel Gomila’s Nanoscale Bioelectrical Characterization group and that of Antonio Juárez, Microbial Biotechnology and Host-pathogen Interaction, combined their expertise on microscopic electrical measurements and bacteria respectively to come up with a way to study the response to external electrical fields of just a single bacterial cell.

Researchers in IBEC’s Nanoprobes and Nanoswitches group and their collaborators have announced the development of the first ever light-controlled therapeutic agent whose effects focus specifically on the largest, most important class of drug target proteins – G protein-coupled receptors.

In the journal Nature Chemical Biology this week, the scientists reveal Alloswitch-1, the latest advance in their research into photoswitchable (or light-operated) drugs. Controlling drug activity with light means that the therapeutic effects can be accurately delivered locally, thus reducing their effect on other areas and the resultant side effects, and helps reduce the dosage required.

The electric polarizability of DNA is a fundamental property that directly influences its biological functions. Despite the importance of this property, however, its measurement has remained elusive so far.

In a study published in PNAS today, researchers at Barcelona’s Institute for Bioengineering of Catalonia (IBEC) led by Laura Fumagalli, senior researcher at IBEC and lecturer at the University of Barcelona, and their collaborators at the Institute for Research in Biomedicine (IRB) and at Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC), and at Centro Nacional de Biotecnologia (CNB-CSIC) and IMDEA Nanociencia in Madrid, describe how they have found a way to directly measure DNA electric polarizability – represented by its dielectric constant, which indicates how a material reacts to an applied electric field – for the first time ever.