Imagine standing in a lumberyard and being asked to build a house — without blueprints or instructions of any kind. The materials are all in front of you, but that doesn’t mean you have the first idea how to get from point A to point B.
That was the situation facing the Princeton biologists who are building microtubules, the skeleton of the cell, from scratch.
Even young children know what typical dogs and fish look like — and they apply that knowledge when they hear new words, reports a team from the Princeton Baby Lab, where researchers study how babies learn to see, talk and understand the world.
Princeton biologists Coleen Murphy and Sabine Petry have won two of the three annual "Women in Cell Biology" awards from the American Society for Cell Biology.
Delicate yet voracious, the sea slug Elysia rufescens grazes cow-like on bright green tufts of algae, rooting around to find the choicest bits.
But this inch-long marine mollusk gains not only a tasty meal — it also slurps up the algae's defensive chemicals, which the slug can then deploy against its own predators.
Princeton University researchers have developed a new, scalable cell culture system that allows for detailed investigation of how host cells respond to infection with hepatitis B (HBV) and delta virus (HDV). The paper describing their findings was published online on June 17, 2019 in the journal Hepatology.
Invading predators can devastate an ecosystem. In fact, a leading cause of extinction is the introduction of predators into an isolated system like an island or a lake. The destruction is usually blamed on the predator’s eating choices, but sometimes the key lies in the prey animals’ responses, according to an international team of researchers led by Princeton’s Robert Pringle.
The enzyme Nocturnin, which governs daily tasks such as fat metabolism and energy usage, works in an entirely different way than previously thought, reported a team of researchers at Princeton University.
The newly discovered mechanism reveals the molecular link between the enzyme's daily fluctuations and its energy-regulating role in the body, according to a study published this week in Nature Communications.
The National Academy of Sciences has elected four Princeton faculty members to join its ranks. They are among 100 new members and 25 foreign associates who were selected in recognition of their distinguished and continuing achievements in original research. Those elected bring the total number of active members to 2,347 and the total number of foreign associates to 487. Foreign associates are nonvoting members of the academy, with citizenship outside the United States.
In a study with implications for efforts to halt the spread of antibiotic-resistant bacteria, researchers at Princeton have identified a new, troubling path that some bacteria take toward resistance.
A Princeton-led team of researchers has discovered a factor that promotes the spread of cancers to bone, opening the way toward treatments that could mitigate cancer’s ability to colonize bone. The study by Mark Esposito, Yibin Kang and colleagues appears in the April 15 issue of Nature Cell Biology.
