Biology Archives - Page 4 of 5 - Princeton Insights

January 28, 2021March 8, 2021

A new algorithm is helping to decipher the language of morphogenesis

Review written by Sarah McFann (CBE, G5)

Language is ever-evolving. With each new generation, language structures such as word pronunciation, usage, and meaning mutate and change as they are passed imperfectly from parent to child. Similarly, bodies have the chance to evolve with every generation. Mutations in the germ line—eggs in females and sperm in males—give rise to the genetic variation that allows form and function to evolve. With each new germline mutation, the nucleotides that make up the genetic code are altered due to imperfect DNA replication. These mutations can code for changes to protein structures or protein amounts, altering the way bodies are constructed as they develop and the forms they take on along the way.

January 21, 2021January 28, 2021

Learning from our past: Using medical history to guide patient care

Review written by Kimberly Sabsay (LSI, GS)

The transition to a highly digitized society is well underway. Hospital data and medical charts are no exception. According to the CDC, over 85% of healthcare organizations have adopted Electronic Health Record (EHR) systems as of 2017. EHRs, while increasingly complex, could very well hold the secret to advancing patient care and diagnostics. EHRs contain medical history, medications, and test results, much like a regular health record, while also providing real-time information and tools to automate treatment plans. Predictive healthcare analytics are at our fingertips, and a novel statistical framework designed by researchers at Princeton University unlocks the massive potential of personalized, predictive, and real-time medical monitoring systems.

January 7, 2021February 1, 2021

A computational model for automated tracking of socially-interacting animals

Review written by Andy Jones (COS, GS)

Understanding the link between neural activity and behavior is one of the long-running goals of neuroscience. In the information age, it is becoming more and more common for neuroscientists to take a data-driven approach to studying animal behavior in order to gain insight into the brain. Under this approach, scientists collect hours’ or days’ worth of video recordings of an animal, relying on modern machine learning (ML) systems to automatically identify exact locations of body parts and classify behavior types. These methods have opened the door for more expansive studies of the relationship between brain activity and behavior, without relying on laborious manual annotations of animal movements.

Contine reading

December 10, 2020December 10, 2020

New (inter-)vistas of protein interactions

Review written by Laura A. Murray-Nerger (Molecular Biology, G6)

As primary and secondary school students, we learn that cellular organelles have specific functions. For example, the mitochondria is often called the “powerhouse” of the cell because it makes energy that drives other cellular processes. However, we often don’t learn about the multifaceted functions of these well-known organelles or learn about some of the less-well studied organelles, including the peroxisome. Moreover, as we learn about the functions of these organelles, it is easy to forget that they are filled with many proteins, each of which participates in a variety of functions. Importantly, these proteins do not work in isolation, but rather by interacting with each other, which creates a complex network of protein-protein associations that ultimately determine cellular fate. In their recent paper, the Cristea lab has built a computational platform that can be broadly used to assess the changes in protein-protein interactions in any biological context. They employ this newly developed tool to understand the protein-protein interactions that underlie alterations in mitochondrial and peroxisomal function during viral infection.

December 3, 2020December 3, 2020

Worms decipher a bacterial code to drive multigenerational change in behavior

Review written by Olivia Duddy (MOL)

Segments of DNA, called genes, encode the expression of an organism’s traits. Genes are heritable, meaning that they are transmitted from the parent to their progeny. Additionally, scientists have uncovered mechanisms that enable changes in gene function, independent of changes in DNA sequence, that are also heritable. The study of these mechanisms, collectively known as epigenetics, has revealed ways in which the environment shapes our biology in the context of health and disease.

November 12, 2020November 12, 2020

Why some mosquitoes prefer biting us

Review written by Jessi Hennacy (MOL)

There are about 3500 mosquito species worldwide, but only a handful of them are responsible for the transmission of mosquito-borne illnesses such as malaria and dengue fever. Whereas most mosquito species are generalists that lack a preference for a particular animal, the specialist mosquito species that prefer biting humans over other animals are also the species that most widely spread human diseases. Understanding the environmental factors that are driving these mosquitoes to prefer humans could help uncover strategies for mitigating the spread of mosquito-borne illnesses. It is therefore vital for public health to ask why and how certain mosquitoes have evolved to target humans.

October 22, 2020January 18, 2021

A C. elegans model reveals mechanisms behind reproductive aging

Written by Ashley Chang (MOL, 2021) and Rebekah Rashford (PNI, G3)

Physiological decline is a natural component of human aging. One of the biological processes perhaps most rapidly affected by this decline is that of reproduction in women. The quantity and quality of a woman’s eggs decreases as she ages, thereby reducing the likelihood of a successful pregnancy as she approaches her late 30s to early 40s. Pregnancy in humans at all is relatively impossible after menopause, which typically occurs in the late 40s and beyond. Because of these biological restrictions, doctors and researchers have developed treatments to help women who want to have children later in life, such as freezing their eggs or in vitro fertilization followed by freezing of the embryos. While these treatments have undoubtedly changed the landscape of modern conception and fertility, they do not directly combat the deleterious effects of reproductive aging. Instead of creating systems that circumvent the inevitable, what if we could challenge the issue head-on by preventing deterioration in the quality of the egg precursor, the oocyte, and extending the reproductive age-span?

October 8, 2020October 8, 2020

Parents are encouraged to read to their children when they're young, but is this really so important?

Written by Munisa Said (PSY, 2022) & Crystal Lee (PSY, G2)

Why is it so important for parents to read to their children? Previous research has found that when parents read to their infants (also called “shared reading”), there are significant improvements in early language development (Mol & Bus, 2011). However, not all children broadly benefit from shared reading. The advantages of shared reading vary quite widely among children. A recent paper led by researchers from Princeton and Rutgers Universities endeavored to explain this variability by considering genetic factors that may impact this development of language acquisition. In previous studies, individual differences in dopaminergic and serotonergic systems (the neural pathways that deliver dopamine and serotonin throughout the brain) have been implicated in different outcomes for learning, attention, and behavior. Thus, Jiminez et al. examined the genetic characteristics of these systems of almost 2,000 children in order to see if this variable also explained the diverse effects of shared reading.

September 10, 2020September 9, 2020

Biophysical modeling of liquid-liquid interactions helps scientists understand cell division

Review written by Alexandra Libby (PNI)

Cell division is one of the most important and well-studied biological processes. Organisms generate new cells in order to grow and reproduce (Figure 1); the types of cell division responsible for each of these goals are called mitosis and meiosis, respectively. Like many biological processes, cell division involves a well-timed, complex coordination of proteins and cellular machinery. Disrupted division can lead to a multitude of problems including genetic mutations, cell death, and cancer (Zhivotovsky and Orrenius, 2010).

September 3, 2020October 15, 2020

Life: Like oil and water? Part II

Part II of our series into the phenomenon of phase separation that is changing how biologists understand cellular biology

Review written by Xinyang (David) Bing (LSI)

“Repression condensates”

“For liquid-liquid phase separation, Princeton is the center of the universe, and my work benefited from collaborations and interactions with Cliff Brangwynne's lab.”

This is how Dr. Nicholas Treen, from the lab of Mike Levine, described his close working relationship with the neighboring Brangwynne lab. In his latest publication, he and his collaborators set out to describe a novel type of condensate formation in the nucleus involved in gene silencing.

The first cell divisions of a newly fertilized embryo are arguably the most instrumental events that occur throughout the life of an animal. During early embryonic development, an intricate web of processes must occur coordinately to lay the blueprint for the developing organism. Like a set of dominoes, every gene that is expressed during early developmental processes leads to consequences downstream during later developmental stages. Even slight errors may lead to a malfunctioning embryo and certain death of the animal. Therefore, all animals have their own set of developmental “blueprints” that necessitate massive numbers of genes be expressed in a tightly controlled manner, both in terms of timing and levels.