The ability to edit the genome by altering the DNA sequence inside a living cell is powerful for research and holds enormous promise for the treatment of diseases. However, existing genome editing technologies frequently result in unwanted mutations or can fail to introduce any changes at all. These problems have kept the field from reaching its full potential.
Researchers at Princeton University have built the world's smallest mechanically interlocked biological structure, a deceptively simple two-ring chain made from tiny strands of amino acids called peptides.
A method that enables the storage and transport of vaccines and life-saving drugs at room temperature, eliminating the need for expensive refrigeration or freezing, is one of 12 technologies selected for development through the Philadelphia-based University City Science Center. The Science Center’s QED Proof of Concept program connects university researchers with experts to transform life-sciences discoveries into products and services that benefit human health.
Princeton’s Forward Fest — a virtual public conversation series and a monthly highlight of the University’s yearlong A Year of Forward Thinking community engagement campaign — was held on Thursday, March 18, at 3:30 p.m., with a focus on Princeton’s growing interdisciplinary power in bioengineering.
Watch the conversation on the University's YouTube channel.
Researchers at Princeton have determined how five cellular proteins contribute to an essential step in the life cycle of hepatitis B virus (HBV). The article describing these findings appeared March 11, 2021 in the journal Nature Communications.
Princeton disease ecologist C. Jessica Metcalf and Harvard physician and epidemiologist Michael Mina say that predicting disease could become as commonplace as predicting the weather. The Global Immunological Observatory, like a weather center forecasting a tornado or hurricane, would alert the world, earlier than ever before, to dangerous emerging pathogens like SARS-CoV-2.
The last million years of Earth history have been characterized by frequent “glacial-interglacial cycles,” large swings in climate that are linked to the growing and shrinking of massive, continent-spanning ice sheets. These cycles are triggered by subtle oscillations in Earth’s orbit and rotation, but the orbital oscillations are too subtle to explain the large changes in climate.
One of the most promising new cancer therapies involves engineering cells from the body's own immune system to attack tumors, but tuning those attackers to spare healthy tissues has been challenging. Now a collaboration of computer scientists and bioengineers has produced a way to select targets with the same kind of logic that drives computers, promising treatments that are both safer and more broadly effective.
A new recipe for patterning cells on a surface holds promise for the repair of damaged nerve tissue.
Are obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular illnesses and more the result of a “mismatch” between the meals we eat and the foods our bodies are prepared for?
The “mismatch hypothesis” argues that each of our bodies has evolved and adapted to digest the foods that our ancestors ate, and that human bodies will struggle and largely fail to metabolize a radically new set of foods.
