Detecting Neuroinflammation in Microglia and Astrocytes

Posted on by Simon Moe

The brain is one of the most complex and fascinating parts of biology. Thankfully, it’s also remarkably good at protecting itself. When exposed to a pathogen, an injury or even misfolded proteins, microglia and astrocytes function as the central nervous system’s (CNS) primary immune defenders. They mount an inflammatory response by releasing cytokines and working to contain the damage. Yet this same system can malfunction or not resolve, which manifests as devastating consequences.

Chronic neuroinflammation is now recognized as a shared characteristic across some of the most common and difficult-to-treat neurological conditions. A 2023 review in Signal Transduction and Targeted Therapy highlighted the dualistic nature of neuroinflammation: while acute responses serve a protective role, chronic or dysregulated inflammatory signaling can initiate and accelerate neurodegeneration, identifying these pathways as priority targets for therapeutic intervention (Zhang et al., 2023). A 2025 review in Science reinforced this view, noting that within Multiple Sclerosis, disease-modifying therapies targeting neuroinflammation have seen the most clinical success (Shi & Yong, 2025). This could suggest applications within neurological conditions where the same inflammatory mechanisms are at work.

Understanding how and where these inflammatory signals originate in the CNS is an active area of preclinical research. One cytokine being actively studied is IL-6. IL-6 is produced by several cell types, including astrocytes and microglia in the CNS. As a key mediator of inflammatory responses, it mediates pro-inflammatory effects through its trans-signaling, which occurs via soluble IL-6 receptors. Dysregulation of this mechanism may contribute to the chronic neuroinflammation seen in several neurological conditions. Characterizing how and when IL-6 is secreted from CNS cells is an important step toward understanding the neuroinflammatory processes underlying these disorders.

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Some St. Patrick’s Day Science: Green Rivers, Four-Leaf Clovers and Optics of a Good Pint

Posted on by Shannon Sindermann

St. Patrick’s Day means different things depending on where you are in the world. In Ireland, it’s a national holiday steeped in culture and tradition: parades, traditional music sessions and, for many, a pint of Guinness accompanied by a hearty “Sláinte” are all part of the day. Here in the American Midwest, we tend to turn that same spirit into a full spectacle. Green everything as far as the eye can see, including somehow an entire river.

Whatever your version of the holiday looks like, there is a lot of fun science behind it. Here is a look at Midwest St. Patrick’s Day through a lab lens.

The Chicago River: Where Orange Becomes Green

St. Patricks Day, Chicago River, Green

Every St. Patrick’s Day, the Chicago Journeymen Plumbers Local 130 heads out on the river and, in roughly 45 minutes, turns a stretch of the Chicago River a surreal emerald green (7, 11). The twist: the dye goes in orange.

The tradition dates to the early 1960s, rooted in a practical idea. Dye had been used to trace leaks and flow in the city’s waterways and someone realized the same concept could be repurposed into a public spectacle (7,11). The exact formula has been kept secret ever since, described only as environmentally friendly and designed to fade after a few hours (1,7,11).

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Light Has a Favorite Color, But It’s Complicated

Posted on by Elise Johnson

Last spring, my niece and I made a trip to a home improvement store to put together a Mother’s Day planter for my sister. My niece had a clear vision: my sister’s favorite color is blue, so we were going to buy blue flowers. We walked every aisle of the garden center. We checked the annuals, the perennials, and the hanging baskets then left with purple, red, and a grumpy 7-year-old.

It turns out we were not up against a bad selection. We were up against biology.

The Problem with Blue

Blue is one of the rarest colors in the natural world. The food industry is currently finding that out the hard way. There is a good chance you have eaten something blue today. Maybe it was the frosting on a birthday cake, the coating on some M&M’s® candies, or the sports drink in your refrigerator. That blue almost certainly came from a petroleum-based synthetic dye, and for the first time in decades, the food industry is being asked to find something better.

The FDA banned Red Dye No. 3 in January 2025, and pressure has been building around the remaining synthetic dyes ever since, including Blue No. 1 and Blue No. 2. Major food brands have begun announcing plans to reformulate.

There is just one problem. Blue is genuinely, stubbornly hard to make in nature. It turns out that blue has almost nothing to do with color, and almost everything to do with light.

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Why BRETSA™ Target Engagement Matters for Drug Discovery

Posted on by Michele Arduengo, PhD

Drug discovery researchers face a fundamental constraint in their work to develop safe, effective therapeutics: the vast majority of the human proteome remains inaccessible to conventional small molecule approaches. Proteins without defined binding pockets, those lacking known chemical probes, and protein targets that fail to translate from biochemical assays into cellular models have long been considered out of reach of standard drug discovery screening tools. As Dixit et al. describe, developing biochemical or cellular assays for all genome-encoded targets “is not scalable and likely impossible as most proteins have ill-defined or unknown activity” — these are what the authors call “the dark undruggable expanses” of the proteome [1].

That gap is now narrowing. Promega Corporation recently launched the TarSeer™ BRETSA™ Target Engagement System, a live-cell target engagement platform designed to bring previously challenging targets within reach of early-stage drug discovery.

The Problem: A Translation Gap in Early Discovery

Drug discovery teams regularly encounter a frustrating disconnect. A compound may show strong binding activity in a biochemical assay, only to fail when tested in a cellular environment. Without target-specific cellular assays, which generally aren’t available for poorly characterized proteins, researchers face difficult choices when deciding which compounds to advance through the drug development pipeline.

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A Live-Cell NanoBRET Assay Shines Light on Toxic RNA–Protein Interactions in Myotonic Dystrophy

Posted on by Johanna Lee
How NanoBRET works image.

RNA doesn’t just carry genetic instructions—it also interacts with proteins to regulate nearly every aspect of gene expression, from splicing to translation. When those interactions go awry, the consequences can be devastating. In myotonic dystrophy type 1 (DM1), the most common adult-onset muscular dystrophy, a toxic RNA repeat expansion hijacks a critical protein called MBNL1, trapping it in nuclear clumps called foci. This leads to widespread splicing defects and progressive muscle wasting. But studying these toxic interactions inside living cells—and finding small molecules that can disrupt them—has been a significant challenge.

A recent study led by the Scripps Institute may have a solution. The study introduces a NanoBRET™ assay that can monitor the interaction between the expanded CUG RNA repeats and MBNL1 protein in real time, in live cells. Their findings demonstrate how this platform can be used not only to detect disease-driving RNA–protein complexes but also to identify small molecules that break them apart.

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How Enzymes Are Powering A New Generation of Micro-Robots

Posted on by Anna Bennett
Cute, tiny robot. White body, black features, and blue glowing eyes.

Many consider enzymes the workhorses of biochemistry (move over, mitochondria)—catalyzing reactions, breaking down substrates, keeping the machinery of life humming along. But a growing number of researchers are re-envisioning what enzymes can do. Instead of facilitating chemistry, what if enzymes could steer and even guide tiny robots to a tumor? 

That’s exactly what’s happening in the rapidly expanding field of enzyme-powered microscopic robots (a.k.a “microrobots”). Microrobots are tiny, engineered devices—often smaller than the width of a human hair—built to perform tasks inside the body that would be difficult or impossible at a larger scale, like delivering drugs to a specific tissue. A recent paper published in Nature Nanotechnology by a team of researchers at California Institute of Technology and the University of Southern California offers a particularly elegant example that we highlight below1.

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Sequence to Substance: Making the mRNA Therapeutic

Posted on by Shannon Sindermann

mRNA-based therapeutics are being explored across a range of applications, including vaccines, protein replacement and immunotherapies (2).

Before any formulation decisions enter the picture, teams need confidence in the RNA itself: that it is the right sequence, right properties and the right purity to behave predictably downstream. That is where it helps to separate drug substance from drug product. The drug substance is the active ingredient intended to deliver a pharmacological effect, while drug product is the finished dosage form that contains that ingredient (6).

This post focuses on what happens upstream, making the mRNA drug substance before formulation. In practical terms, that upstream work spans choosing an mRNA construct, producing it by IVT, and then purifying and analyzing the product so it has the desired quality attributes (5).

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More Than Beer and Cheese: Why Wisconsin Has Always Been Good Ground for Science 

Posted on by Elise Johnson

Challenging Assumptions About Innovation

When people talk about places where science and technology tend to flourish, a few names surface almost immediately. Silicon Valley, Boston, Seattle, Houston. Cities associated with density, competition and speed.

For many people outside the state, Wisconsin still collapses into a short list of associations: beer, cheese, cold winters, maybe a football team. Biotechnology rarely makes that list.

That hesitation usually has less to do with science itself and more to do with assumptions about where innovation is supposed to live. National Wisconsin Day, celebrated February 15, is a good moment to look past those assumptions and consider what Wisconsin has quietly offered for a long time: an environment and culture that is well-suited for scientific advances.

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From Gum Disease to Breast Cancer: An Oral Bacterium’s Unexpected Journey

Posted on by Sara Millevolte

You’re sitting in the dentist’s chair, nodding along to the familiar flossing lecture you’ve been politely ignoring for most of your adult life. Fair enough. It’s hard to get excited about gum health. But it turns out your dentist may have been underselling the pitch.

A study published in January 2026 in Cell Communication and Signaling shows that a common gum disease bacterium can promote breast cancer growth and spread in mice, and the findings hint at a particularly troubling link for people carrying BRCA1 mutations (1). “Floss to help prevent cancer” probably wasn’t on your 2026 bingo card, yet here we are.

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Polar Bears, Shrinking Sea Ice and a Scientific Surprise

Posted on by Kelly Grooms
A polar bear sits on a snow-covered ice floe in the Arctic Ocean, gazing toward the horizon as sunlight filters through clouds over icy water.

When you think about climate change in the Arctic, you might imagine melting sea ice or maybe hungry polar bears. After all, polar bears depend on sea ice to hunt seals, and seals are their main source of energy. The negative effects of decreasing sea ice on polar bear body condition index (BCI), survival and reproduction have been documented in polar bear populations from regions such as the Western Hudson Bay and the Southern Beaufort Sea. So, when researchers started studying the polar bears in Svalbard, Norway (Barents Sea region), which is losing sea ice at a faster rate than any other region, they expected the BCI of those bears would also be declining. Except it isn’t.

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