Madeline Lancaster’s method of growing organoids to understand early brain development is featured in this “guide to crafting tissues in a dish that reprise in vivo organs” More…
Orchestrating Organoids
Worming our way to a new understanding of behaviour
The wriggling and writhing of worms may hold clues to the inner workings of our brains, according to scientists at the MRC’s Clinical Sciences Centre and their collaborators at the LMB. The researchers have developed a pioneering tool to analyse a worm’s posture as it wriggles, and will use the tool to investigate how exactly the worm’s brain controls its movements. More …
From tool to therapy: a timeline of monoclonal antibody technology
Abstract: They started out as a useful tool for studying the immune system in the lab and now they’re a family of drugs treating millions of patients, with global revenues of nearly $75 billion in 2013. MRC funding and researchers have been entwined with the monoclonal antibodies story from the very beginning. Forty years ago this month, Nature published a paper by the LMB’s César Milstein and Georges Köhler which described how they’d made mouse monoclonal antibodies. Here we look at the landmarks on the 40-year journey. More…
The MORPHEUS II protein crystallization screen
Fabrice Gorrec from the LMB has published developments related to MORPHEUS II – a protein crystallization screen. He has demonstrated that additives selected from the PDB that are under-represented in traditional screens can be combined to formulate suitable and useful conditions, not only for crystallization but the overall structure determination process. More
New details of the transmission of stimuli in living organisms unveiled
A team lead by Dmitry Veprintsev from the Paul Scherrer Institute (PSI) and ETH Zurich together with Madan Babu Mohan’s group at LMB and the pharmaceutical company Roche provide new details of how the activation of G-protein-coupled receptors takes place and demonstrate that only a few amino acids have a major influence on GPCR function. More…
Monoclonal antibodies: the invisible allies that changed the face of medicine
They are tiny magic bullets that are quietly shaping the lives of millions of patients around the world. Monoclonal antibodies are contained in six out of ten of the world’s bestselling drugs, helping to treat everything from cancer to heart disease to asthma. The technique for producing them was first published 40 years ago by César Milstein and Georges Köhler, at the LMB. More…