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Originally written by Catherine Couturie, University of Montreal edited by Lisa Lock , reviewed by Robert Egan Published in phy.org on September 28, 2026 Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain One of biology's fundamental questions is how our genes shape who we are . Adrian Serohijos and Stephen Michnick, professors in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Medicine at Université de Montréal's Faculty of Medicine , are studying the relationship between genotype and phenotype —that is, how DNA becomes RNA, then protein, and ultimately gives rise to observable characteristics in an individual or any other living organism. "We're trying to unravel the mechanisms of the genome , specifically how the information it encodes is processed inside the cell ," Serohijos says. The problem can be approached in two ways : One is to look at how an organism changes when disturbed by its environment . The other, pursued by researchers at the Courtois Institute of Innovati...

By transplanting human brain organoids into mice, researchers created a new in vivo platform that could advance the study of human neural functions and drug testing.    Originally written by Mariella Bodemeier Loayza Careaga, PhD, on Sep 16, 2026   Researchers created a new transplantation mouse model that shows extensive connectivity between human-derived brain organoid cells (green and red) and the mouse host brain (blue). Image credit: Pasca lab, Stanford University. (CC BY 4.0) F or over a decade, Stanford University neuroscientist Sergiu Pasca has looked for strategies to study human brain functions and its disorders. In Pasca’s eyes, using human induced pluripotent stem cells to create human-derived brain organoids—three-dimensional, self-organized tissues grown in a dish—and transplanting them into rodent hosts is an opportunity to achieve this goal. In a study published in Nature , his team described a new mouse model into which they transplanted human-derived ne...

Written by Sam Sholtis, Pennsylvania State University , on September 14, 2026 edited by Lisa Lock , reviewed by Robert Egan Credit: Molecular Cell (2026). DOI: 10.1016/j.molcel. 2026.07.012 A new 3D structure of a cancer-linked protein bound to its cellular partner reveals details of how the protein binds to chromosomes and could offer insights for future disease treatments . The protein— BRD4 —plays a critical role in how cells read, copy and repair DNA and helps determine how different kinds of cells are made ; it has been linked to many types of cancer and is considered a promising target for future therapies . The study, led by scientists at Penn State and published in the journal Molecular Cell , found that BRD4 can attach to DNA-packaging structures in cells even without a molecular signal long believed to be necessary for the interaction. Read more