news 2019

Pathogens can drive the evolution of social behaviour in insects. This is shown by researchers from Bern and Würzburg for ambrosia beetles. Ants and honeybees share nests of hundreds or thousands of individuals in a very small space. Hence the risk is high that infectious diseases may spread rapidly.

Painful inflammatory lesions of the skin and mucous membranes may occur in children who develop bacterial pneumonia. A research group at the University Children's Hospital Zurich has recently developed a new diagnostic blood test, which reliably diagnoses bacteria as the causative pathogen at an early stage, allowing more specific treatment and prediction about prognosis.

Between 2007 and 2017, children in eight lowand middle-income countries received, on average, 25 antibiotic prescriptions from birth through age five - up to five times higher than the already high levels observed in high-income settings. Many of the prescriptions are unnecessary and might exacerbate resistance.

To uncover the relationship between variation in genes and phenotypic diversity, geneticists use a set of fully sequenced fruit-fly genomes. But little is known about the variation in the mitochondrial genome, for which mutations are linked to an array of diseases. Now, EPFL scientists have created a high-resolution map of mitochondrial DNA variants in the fruit fly, connecting mitochondrial genes to metabolic traits and diseases.

The Defitech Foundation has teamed up with EPFL, CHUV and UNIL to widen access to the groundbreaking neurotechnology developed under the 2018 STIMO study, which allowed paraplegic patients to walk again. Their aim is also to develop new neurosurgical treatments for people suffering from Parkinson's disease or from neurological disorders following a head injury or stroke.

Scientists from ETH Zurich and the University of Basel's Biozentrum have shown that chaperone proteins dynamically bind to the Parkinson protein -synuclein. If this interaction is disturbed, it leads to cell damage and the formation of aggregates typical for the disease. Parkinson's disease is characterised by the progressive death of nerve cells in the brain.

EPFL researchers have developed Big Data tools for identifying new gene functions. The work identifies millions of connections between genes and their functions, and can facilitate the development of precision medicine. Genes are the functional units of heredity, and the understanding of gene function is the major focus of biomedical research, serving as the basis of precision medicine.

A material that thickens when you pull on it seems to contradict the laws of physics. However, the so-called auxetic effect, which also occurs in nature, is interesting for a number of applications. A new Empa study recently published in "Nature Communications" shows how this amazing behavior can be improved - and even used to treat injuries and tissue damage.

Patient safety in intensive care units could be significantly improved if false alarms could be greatly reduced and critical complications such as epileptic seizures could be predicted. This is where the "ICU Cockpit" project of the National Research Programme "Big Data" (NRP 75) comes in: The large amounts of data from intensive care medicine will be used to develop procedures for early warning systems and therapeutic recommendations.

Causal Effects of Brevity on Style and Success in Social Media Faculty of Informatics Open lecture of the course Argumentation in Conflict Resolution Visiting Alumni: Loredana Padurean, Associate Dean, Asia School of Business «Quel ramo del lago di Como. Lettura dei «Promessi Sposi» Faculty of Communication Sciences Visiting Alumni: Elia Frapolli, Freelance Consultant Course schedules Academic calendar Humans cells select, through the endoplasmic reticulum, the damaged proteins that must be destroyed quickly to avoid their accumulation, which is toxic to our organism.

Researchers from UNIGE and HUG demonstrate how the fears we experience in our dreams prepare us to tackle anxiety-provoking situations once we're awake. Do bad dreams serve a real purpose? To answer this question, researchers from the University of Geneva (UNIGE) and University Hospitals of Geneva (HUG), Switzerland, - working in collaboration with the University of Wisconsin (USA) - analysed the dreams of a number of people and identified which areas of the brain were activated when they experienced fear in their dreams.

Acute lymphoblastic leukemia is the most common form of cancer affecting children in Switzerland and, unfortunately, is often incurable. Researchers from the University of Zurich and the University Children's Hospital Zurich have now found a way to stop the driving force behind this type of leukemia at a molecular level and develop a targeted therapy.

A protective membrane for cardiac pacemakers developed at ETH Zurich has proved successful in animal trials in reducing the undesirable build-up of fibrotic tissue around the implant. The next step is to test the protective membrane in patients. ETH scientists have developed a special protective membrane made of cellulose that significantly reduces the build-up of fibrotic tissue around cardiac pacemaker implants, as reported in the current issue of the journal Biomaterials.

Killer cells of the immune system detect and kill infected cells or cancer cells. Researchers at the Institute of Pathology at the University of Bern have now discovered that the mechanism by which certain immune cells kill their target cells can also be used to control the killer cells themselves. This finding may be relevant to cancer immunotherapy.

A new EPFL and MIT study into the interplay between mobility and the 2013 and 2014 dengue outbreaks in Singapore has uncovered a legal void around access to mobile phone data - information that can prove vital in preventing the spread of infectious diseases. Researchers from EPFL and MIT have shown that human mobility is a major factor in the spread of vector-borne diseases such as malaria and dengue even over short intra-city distances.

An international scientific consortium led by the cell biologists Volker Heussler from the University of Bern and Oliver Billker from the Umeå University in Sweden has for the first time systematically investigated the genome of the malaria parasite Plasmodium throughout its life cycle in a large-scale experiment.

In a groundbreaking study published today, scientists used precision geospatial analysis techniques to show that obesity and the consumption of sugar-sweetened beverages (SSBs) are more prevalent in some parts of Geneva than others. The study, a collaboration between HUG, EPFL, UNIGE and CHUV, is the first of its kind to establish a link between place of residence, SSB consumption and high body mass index (BMI).

The University of Geneva awards its 3R Prize to research that reduces the number of animals in experimentation through better selection of the compounds to be tested. Minimize the number of anti-infective compounds to be tested in an animal model by first selecting them on infected amoebas to retain only the most effective ones.

UNIGE researchers have been analysing the rise in healthy life expectancy in Switzerland since 1990 and measuring the differences based on an individual's level of education. Life expectancy in Switzerland has been growing steadily for decades. But have these additional years been spent in good health or, on the contrary, do they only prolong the ills of an aging population?

By successfully strengthening pancreatic islets before transplantation, researchers at UNIGE and HUG are hoping for a significant improvement in the success of cell transplants in patients with severe diabetes. To save patients with a severe form of type 1 diabetes (characterized by the absence of functional insulin-producing cells), pancreatic cell transplantation is sometimes the last resort.