news 2021

Humans have been always on the move, creating a complex history of languages and cultural traditions dispersed over the globe. An international team under UZH's lead has now traced families of related languages over more than 10,000 years by combining data from genetics, linguistics and musicology using novel digital methods.

Toxic substances in the environment can harm the nervous system of fish embryos. Now, researchers at Eawag have developed a computer model that helps to better understand how the damage occurs. Every day, a large number of synthetic chemicals enter streams, lakes and sometimes even drinking water via various pathways.

Thanks to their swimming robot modeled after a lamprey, scientists may have discovered why some vertebrates are able to retain their locomotor capabilities after a spinal cord lesion. The finding could also help improve the performance of swimming robots used for search and rescue missions and for environmental monitoring.

An international team of researchers including scientists from the Institute of Genetics of the University of Bern has unraveled the enigma of inheritance of coat color patterns in dogs. The researchers discovered that a genetic variant responsible for a very light coat in dogs and wolves originated more than two million years ago in a now extinct relative of the modern wolf.

It was long assumed that cyanobacteria were mainly responsible for fixing nitrogen on early Earth, thus making nitrogen available to the biosphere. In a paper published today in "Nature Communications", a team of researchers from Germany and Switzerland now shows that purple sulfur bacteria could have contributed substantially to nitrogen fixation.

Researchers have characterized a mechanism that allows bacteria to direct their movement in response to the mechanical properties of the surfaces the microbes move on - a finding that could help fight certain pathogens. Many disease-causing bacteria such as Pseudomonasaeruginosa crawl on surfaces through a walk-like motility known as "twitching".

Why do some people get sick and die from COVID-19 while others seem to be completely unaffected? EPFL's Blue Brain Project deployed its powerful brain simulation technology and expertise in cellular and molecular biology to try and answer this question. A group in the Blue Brain assembled an AI tool that could read hundreds of thousands of scientific papers, extract the knowledge and assemble the answer - A machine-generated view of the role of blood glucose levels in the severity of COVID-19 was published today by Frontiers in Public Health, Clinical Diabetes.

Neuroscientists often use calcium imaging to analyze neuronal activity in the intact brain. But this method provides only an indirect and slow measure of action potential firing, creating the need to reliably reconstruct action potentials from calcium signals. Peter Rupprecht, a former PhD candidate in the Friedrich group, developed a novel algorithm based on machine learning that is very effective, easy to use, and highly robust.

Using a combination of powerful sequencing techniques and mathematical methods, researchers have traced the genetic programs that direct the development of each cell in the brain. This molecular map could help researchers to understand how the brain develops and provide insights into a range of conditions, including brain tumors and neurodevelopmental disorders.

For decades, a key brain area has been thought to merely regulate locomotion. Now, a research group at the Biozentrum, University of Basel, and the Friedrich Miescher Institut for Biomedical Research (FMI) has shown that the region is involved in much more than walking, as it contains distinct populations of neurons that control different body movements.

An EPFL scientist has found that brain fingerprints - or maps of the neural connections within our brain - can be used to detect a decline in cognitive ability. That's because the fingerprints are harder to detect in people who already have mild cognitive impairment. Just like our fingertips, our brains contain an embedded pattern that's different for every individual.

Researchers have found that a form of neuron-to-neuron communication that has long been dismissed as 'background noise' is required to keep nerve junctions intact as animals age. The finding suggests that defects in this type of neural communication could contribute to neurodegenerative disorders and other brain conditions.

A team from the University of Geneva has identified important regulatory mechanisms of the protein responsible for chromosome separation during cell division. During cell division, chromosomes are duplicated and separated so that one copy of each chromosome is inherited by each of the two emerging daughter cells.

Researchers at ETH Zurich have developed a cell culture test to detect substances that are directly or indirectly harmful to embryos. Based on an existing test used for developing new drugs and chemicals, the augmented version is designed to help reduce the number of animal experiments. Drugs must be safe not just for the patients; in the case of pregnant patients, drugs must also be safe for the unborn children still in the womb.

A team of researchers from the Institute for Infectious Diseases (IFIK) at the University of Bern and the Institute of Virology and Immunology (IVI) have used a unique collection of advanced cell culture models of cells lining the airways from various domesticated and wildlife animals to determine which animals are susceptibly to SARS-CoV-2 infection.

The brain mechanisms underlying the suppression of fear responses have attracted a lot of attention as they are relevant for therapy of human anxiety disorders. Despite our broad understanding of the different brain regions activated during the experience of fear, how fear responses can be suppressed remains largely elusive.

Thanks to a unique system that decodes brain activity during sleep, a team from the University of Geneva is deciphering the neuronal mechanisms of memory consolidation. We sleep on average one third of our time. But what does the brain do during these long hours? Using an artificial intelligence approach capable of decoding brain activity during sleep, scientists at the University of Geneva , Switzerland, were able to glimpse what we think about when we are asleep.

The Lausanne University Hospital (CHUV) and EPFL teamed up to develop a new test that's sensitive enough to measure the amount of SARS-CoV-2 neutralizing antibodies present in the bloodstream. The scientists' discovery, published in the prestigious Science Translational Medicine , opens promising new avenues for tracking immunity acquired by infection or vaccination.

An international team, led by UNIGE and MHN, has optimized a method for analyzing the genomes of specimens from natural history collections making possible to identify their placement along the evolutionary timeline. Museum specimens held in natural history collections around the world represent a wealth of underutilized genetic information due to the poor state of preservation of the DNA, which often makes it difficult to sequence.

Long considered 'junk', non-coding RNAs have emerged as important regulators of diverse cellular processes, including the silencing of genes. Working in yeast, researchers from the Bühler group have identified more than 20 mutations that enable RNA-mediated gene silencing. The findings could improve our understanding of the factors that keep gene silencing in check.