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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…