Editor’s Picks

The ground beneath our feet is teeming with microbial life—approximately 10 billion organisms in an average handful of soil. Now, thanks to modern genetic sequencing methods, researchers are getting surprising insights into the vibrant world of dirt.

The gut microbiome has been linked to a wide range of health indicators over recent years and, according to a recent study published in Genome Medicine, may help predict prognosis of patients with colon cancer. In this study, the microenvironment of colon cancer tumors had an abundance of Fusobacterium and Providencia species, perhaps identifying a microbiome signature that predicts patient prognosis.

An eye-like structure called the ocelloid, found in warnowiid dinoflagellates, has long puzzled biologists. This structure resembles the eye of higher organisms to such a degree, that is was first assumed to be part of an animal the warnowiid had eaten. Now this small eukaryotic plankton has surprised scientists again – the warnowiid eye’s building blocks are mitochondria and plastids.

A ubiquitous but rare DNA base, previously thought to be a transitional chemical modification of cytosine, has now been shown to be stably incorporated in mammalian DNA. 5-formylcytosine (5fC) is found in all tissues, with the highest levels being found in the brain. Its exact function is unknown, but its physical position in the genome suggests that it plays a key role in gene expression.

Brain tumors such as glioblastomas are exceptionally difficult to treat since, irrespective of how they were treated, they find a way to regenerate. This ability can be attributed to cancer stem cells that circumvent treatment and trigger the expansion of new tumor cells. Recently, scientists at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis discovered a way to disrupt the regeneration of brain tumors by disrupting a key player in the brain tumor stem cell maintenance process.

Researchers often use two-dimensional cell culture studies to study cancer biology. However, a recent group of researchers, led by Dr. Christina Scheel at the German Research Center for Environmental Health, has advanced this experimental model by creating three-dimensional “mini-breasts”— organoid structures derived from human breast epithelial cells.

In all but the best-preserved fossils, researchers have assumed that intact soft tissues did not survive longer than about 4 million years. A few protein fragments might persist; however, full proteinaceous structures that could tell us about soft tissues and animal physiology would not.

The social amoeba Dictyostelium discoideum has two life stages. When nutrients are plentiful, Dicty live as individuals but when starvation sets in, thousands of Dicty come together to form a fruiting body. This fruiting body is made up of a stalk that holds up a ball of spores, and this is where the cheating comes in — only cells that make it to the top of the fruiting body and become a spore get to live and pass on their genetic information.

Researchers have made significant progress recently in the development of personalized cancer genomics and therapies through analysis of characteristic variations of single base pairs and chromosomes. Recently, researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison used an integrated system of DNA sequencing and optical mapping (a single-molecule, whole-genome analysis system) to identify both small- and large-scale genetic variations over time in a patient with multiple myeloma. Their findings were published on June 8, 2015 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Traditionally, researchers have relied on two-dimensional single-layer cell culture to analyze the physiological characteristics of tumor cells and their response to anti-cancer therapies. However, an international team of scientists recently used a three-dimensional (3D) printer to construct a three-dimensional (3D) model of a cancerous tumor, which may provide a more realistic representation of the tumor’s microenvironment and thus improve knowledge on how tumors develop, grow, and spread.