Author: Shannon Sindermann

Why Antibiotic Resistance Is an Environmental Problem Too

Posted on by Shannon Sindermann
Antibiotics and Bacteria

Antibiotic resistance has an obvious suspect: antibiotics. The more we use them across human and animal medicine, the more we select for the bacteria that survive them (1). But that pressure doesn’t only come from the drugs we designed to kill bacteria. A growing line of research points to the fields, soils and waterways where our food is grown, and to chemicals that were never meant to be antibiotics at all (2,3). It is a reminder of what researchers mean by One Health: human, animal and environmental health are one connected system, not three separate problems, and resistance travels the connections between them (1,3).

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What Happens When You Delay an Ebola Vaccine Booster by 18 Months?

Posted on by Shannon Sindermann

Ebola Virus Disease (EBOD) remains one of the most severe viral infections, with case fatality rates reaching 40% during the 2013-2016 West African outbreak that claimed over 11,000 lives (1). At this scale, durable protection isn’t optional.

Ebola Virus under the microscope

If you’ve followed vaccine development, you’ve probably noticed something counterintuitive. Shorter intervals between doses are not always better. SARS-CoV-2 mRNA vaccine studies have shown that extended intervals between doses enhance neutralizing antibody responses against multiple variants (5). Now, new research published in Nature Immunology suggests the same may be true for Ebola (1).

The findings challenge assumptions about how vaccine boosters should be timed and reveal something important about how our immune systems respond when given the space to do what they do best.

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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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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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The Science of Slipping… Blame the Molecules!

Posted on by Shannon Sindermann

Whether it’s Home Alone’s booby-trapped icy steps, Bambi learning his legs have zero traction, or an Ice Age chase scene defying gravity, ice has been comedy gold for decades. In real life, the joke lands a little harder (sometimes literally).

Slippery Ice

We all know ice is slippery. The more surprising part is why it’s slippery and how long it took scientists to start agreeing on something closer to an answer. Researchers have long known the surface of ice behaves like it’s wearing a microscopic “wet” layer that lubricates motion. What they’ve argued about for nearly 200 years is what creates that layer in the first place (3,4).

So, let’s treat this like a mystery. Ice is the crime scene. Your dignity is the victim. Here are the main suspects.

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Ancient RNA From a Woolly Mammoth?

Posted on by Shannon Sindermann

Most of us first meet woolly mammoths as Manny from Ice Age (a gentle giant with main character energy) or as towering skeletons in museum halls. In the lab, though, mammoths can show up in many ways: such as fragile molecules preserved in permafrost for tens of thousands of years.

Woolly Mammoth

Ancient DNA has already helped scientists piece together mammoth genomes. Now scientists have done something wilder: they’ve pulled ancient RNA out of a ~39,000-year-old woolly mammoth and used it to see which genes were being expressed in its muscle tissue. In a new study, researchers showed that not only can woolly mammoth DNA survive tens of thousands of years in permafrost, but RNA, the fragile, quick-to-degrade “live feed” of the cell, can too.

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How Calcium Shapes Cell Communication and Invasion

Posted on by Shannon Sindermann

Platelets are best known for their role in blood clotting, but they also participate in other biological processes that influence how cells communicate and behave. In research models, scientists have observed that tumor cells can interact with platelets in ways that affect how they move and attach to new environments. A recent study by Morris et al., published in Scientific Reports, explored the molecular details behind these platelet–cell interactions and the role of calcium in regulating them.

The Role of Integrins and Calcium

The study focused on integrins, which are surface proteins that help cells anchor to their surroundings and communicate with the extracellular matrix. Two integrins, αIIbβ3 and αvβ3, are particularly important because they mediate platelet–platelet and platelet–cancer cell binding. Their structure and function depend on divalent cations such as calcium, which stabilize receptor conformation and support ligand binding.

When extracellular calcium levels were manipulated, platelet behavior changed in distinct ways.

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Do Mosquitoes Have a Taste for Beer?

Posted on by Shannon Sindermann

Festival season is here—and apparently, mosquitoes got tickets too.

If you have ever been the person in your friend group who ends a summer concert covered in large, itchy welts while everyone else goes home bite-free, you are not imagining things. Some people really are mosquito magnets.

Mosquito bite

A new study, aptly titled “Blood, Sweat, and Beers,” set out to uncover what makes certain humans irresistible to mosquitoes. But instead of a sterile lab or a rainforest expedition, this experiment took place at one of the Netherlands’ biggest music festivals; Lowlands, a three-day party with 65,000 attendees, questionable hygiene and plenty of beer. In other words: the perfect breeding ground for this science experiment.

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Exploring How NEAT1 Shapes Granulosa Cell Function

Posted on by Shannon Sindermann
Granulosa Cells

Granulosa cells (GCs), which surround and support developing oocytes, play a critical role in estrogen production, follicle maturation and overall ovarian health (3). Their ability to regulate hormone production and cell survival makes them a central focus in studies of ovarian biology.

A recent study investigated how the long non-coding RNA (lncRNA) NEAT1 regulates GC function and mapped a pathway that links NEAT1 expression to cell proliferation, apoptosis and hormone production (1).

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Why mRNA Transfection Is Transforming Transient Expression Workflows

Posted on by Shannon Sindermann

Transfection is a core technique in molecular biology used to introduce foreign nucleic acids—such as DNA, RNA, or small RNAs like siRNA, shRNA, and miRNA—into eukaryotic cells. This enables researchers to manipulate gene expression and study cellular processes, disease mechanisms and therapeutic strategies (1).

Advances in transfection technology now support a range of nucleic acid types and cell models. Researchers can pursue transient or stable expression to achieve specific goals: knocking down transcripts, expressing proteins, or probing promoter activity in systems from immortalized lines to stem cells (1).

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