With its fascinating ability to regrow entire limbs and internal organs, the Mexican axolotl is the ideal model for studying regeneration. Scientists from the lab of Elly Tanaka at IMBA now found a factor that tells cells which part of the arm to regenerate - and used it to reprogram the identity of cells as they develop. This breakthrough for the regeneration research field has implications for tissue engineering, including in human tissues. The study was published in the journal Nature today.

Molecular motors package and rearrange the DNA so that the long and tangled strands are safely divided into the daughter cells. A new study describes the rulebook that defines how molecular motors work together. The study, carried out by Anton Goloborodko at the Institute of Molecular Biotechnology (IMBA) of the Austrian Academy of Sciences and international collaborators, was published in Science.

For the first time, scientists have visualized a retrotransposon, a “jumping gene” , inside the cell of a complex organism. Advanced cryo-Electron Tomography allowed this feat at sub-nanometer resolution. The study, published in Cell today, reveals how the retrotransposon copia completes its replication cycle and travels into the nucleus through the nuclear pores. The study is a collaboration between Sven Klumpe, soon starting a research group as Joint Fellow of IMP-IMBA and currently at the MPI of Biochemistry in Martinsried, and, among others, the group of Julius Brennecke at IMBA.

Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Genetics and the Institute of Molecular Biotechnology (IMBA) of the Austrian Academy of Sciences have discovered a potential "pause button" in the earliest stages of human development. Whether humans can control the timing of their development has long been debated. The new study suggests that this “pause button” can be activated in human cells as well. The findings have significant implications for our understanding of early human life and may improve reproductive technologies.

Some of our genes can be expressed or silenced depending on whether we inherited them from our mother or our father. The mechanism behind this phenomenon, known as genomic imprinting, is determined by DNA modifications during egg and sperm production. The Burga Lab at the Institute of Molecular Biotechnology (IMBA) of the Austrian Academy of Sciences uncovered a novel gene regulation process, associated with the silencing of selfish genes, that could represent the first step in the evolution of imprinting. Their discovery, reported in Nature, could begin to solve the mystery of how and why imprinting first evolved. 

Heart disease kills 18 million people each year, but the development of new therapies faces a bottleneck: no physiological model of the entire human heart exists – so far. A new multi-chamber organoid that mirrors the heart’s intricate structure enables scientists to advance screening platforms for drug development, toxicology studies, and understanding heart development. The new findings, using heart organoid models developed by Sasha Mendjan’s group at the Institute of Molecular Biotechnology (IMBA) of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, are presented in the journal Cell on November 28.

Does the human brain have an Achilles heel that ultimately leads to Autism? With a revolutionizing novel system that combines brain organoid technology and intricate genetics, researchers can now comprehensively test the effect of multiple mutations in parallel and at a single-cell level within human brain organoids. This technology, developed by researchers from the Knoblich group at the Institute of Molecular Biotechnology (IMBA) of the Austrian Academy of Sciences and the Treutlein group at ETH Zurich, permits the identification of vulnerable cell types and gene regulatory networks that underlie autism spectrum disorders. This innovative method offers unparalleled insight into one of the most complex disorders that challenge the human brain with implications that bring autism clinical research much-needed hope. The results were published on September 13 in Nature.

Scientists have known for decades that genes can be transferred from one species to another, both in animals and plants. However, the mechanism of how such an unlikely event occurs remained unknown. Now, researchers from Alejandro Burga’s lab at the Institute of Molecular Biotechnology (IMBA) of the Austrian Academy of Sciences identify a vector of horizontal gene transfer (HGT) in worms. The findings, published on June 29 in Science, could lead to the discovery of further vectors of HGT in eukaryotes and might find applications in pathogen control.

Researchers from the Tachibana lab show that the pioneer factor Nr5a2 can awaken the inactive genome in the early embryo. Part of this work was carried out at IMBA before the Tachibana lab moved to the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry (MPIB). The findings are published in Science.

In their latest Nature publication, researchers from the Gerlich Group at IMBA determined the molecular mechanisms that confer special physical properties to mitotic chromosomes to prevent their entanglement with microtubules of the spindle. In this third edition of #ScienceChatIMBA, we talk to Senior Group Leader Daniel Gerlich about the impact of the team’s latest findings.