Commentary

The neurodegenerative disease ALS causes motor neuron death and paralysis. However, long before the cells die, they lose contact with the muscles as their axons atrophy. Researchers at Karolinska...

Doctors have long observed that biological age and chronological age are not always one and the same. A 55-year-old may exhibit many signs of old age...

Science has chosen single-cell analyses of gene activity through time as its 2018 Breakthrough of the Year, honoring a trifecta of methods that together are enabling researchers to determine, at the individual cell level, which genes are turned on and ...

Understanding how plants respond to microgravity is critical to providing fresh food during space exploration initiatives. Researchers compared two methods - RNA-Seq and microarray -- of analyzing which genes are expressed (the 'transcriptome')...

Estonian scientists have announced the invention of a genetic testing technology to analyse the number of clinical biomarkers at the single-molecule level, which enhances the sensitivity of tests in precision medicine and will make them more affordable in future...

Microglia, the resident immune cells of the brain, were seen to change throughout the lifespan of mice in a study — and to be diverse, with distinct cell subtypes. Those with pro-inflammatory behavior may be disease-causing, as they were found to accumulate in the brains of a mouse model of multiple...

A team of researchers at Baylor College of Medicine, the Texas Heart Institute and Texas Children’s Hospital has developed a powerful new approach to understand the formation of new neurons in the mammalian adult brain. Published in the journal...

Single-cell RNA sequencing is a powerful tool for studying cellular diversity, for example in cancer where varied tumor cell types determine diagnosis, prognosis and response to therapy. Single-cell technologies generate hundreds to thousands...

While many cells in our bodies can accumulate oncogenic mutations, the majority of these events do not lead to tumor formation as these abnormal...

By measuring a cell's mass and growth rate immediately prior to single-cell RNA-sequencing, we can now use a cell’s ‘fitness’ to classify it as responsive or nonresponsive to a drug...