Research lab
Nonprofit biomedical research institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts, affiliated with MIT, whose faculty members study cell biology, genetics, and disease.
Whitehead Institute researchers saw engineered epithelial sheets gain a shared orientation once the cells migrated together, according to a PNAS paper. The experiments used cultured cells, so they show migration can supply the cue and leave open whether embryos use it.
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MIT researchers trained a neural network on six signaling pathways in human stem cells, then tested it on mouse embryo cells. Each pathway's gene-activity fingerprint held across cell types, the team reports in Nature Methods.
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Jonathan Weissman's lab at the Whitehead Institute traced the lineage of over a million cells in developing mouse embryos using a DNA recorder. The lineage is read after the fact from embryos collected at several stages, so the movie is stitched together from many animals.
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Teams led by HHMI's Jonathan Weissman and Jay Shendure reconstructed family trees spanning millions of cells in developing mice, reported in Science. Each lab had the cells record their own divisions in DNA, a first step toward mapping a mammal the way the roundworm was mapped.
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Whitehead Institute researchers report that Toxoplasma gathers the host's sugar-coated proteins into cholesterol-dependent patches that trigger its own entry. Blocking those patches impaired invasion, so the host membrane becomes a candidate drug target.
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Purified bacterial mRNA aggregates in a tube, roughly as physical chemistry predicts. Whitehead researchers report that real E. coli sequences interact less than computer-made synonyms, and read that gap as selection for solubility.
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A genome-wide CRISPR screen tied polyamine depletion to GPX4 dependence. A new genetically encoded reporter now puts numbers on redox-active iron inside living cells.
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