Latest Discoveries & Publications

gd T cells keeping us warm Image courtesy of Pedro H. Papotto and Bruno Silva-Santos, authors of News and Views TBSI's Lydia Lynch said: “Surprisingly, we found that the immune cells in fat respond to cold temperatures – they play an integral part in regulating thermogenesis by ‘turning on’ the burning of white fat, or by stimulating the conversion of white fat into brown fat, which generates the heat required to keep us warm in the cold. This heat generation happens when the lipids in the white fat are burned up, and, when this occurs, weight loss is the chief side effect.”   Published in Nature April 2018. 

 

Switch capable of turning off inflammation. Exciting news from Luke O'Neill's lab with Evanna L. Mills and Dylan G. Ryan in TBSI, Published: 28 March 2018 in Nature   RTE news

 

Chemistry Breakthroughs:thinking inside the box and reconfiguring the pigments of life, both led by Professor Mathias Senge. The findings involved adding new materials to a previously unstable chemical scaffold and building molecules onto the “pigments of life”, and will also open up new possibilities to molecular engineers, materials and computer scientists, and energy researchers. Published in the International journal of Chemistry and The International journal of Chemical Communcations. See also TCD press

 

Loss of the molecular clock in myeloid cells exacerbates T cell-mediated CNS autoimmune disease. Time of day affects severity of autoimmune disease. In the new study, Professor Kingston Mills and Dr Caroline Sutton of Trinity College Dublin, and Dr Annie Curtis of RCSI (Royal College of Surgeons Ireland), and colleagues show that immune responses and regulation of autoimmunity are affected by the time of the day when the immune response is activated. Nature communications   TCD press

 

Andrew Bowie's paper out today 7 December 2017 in Nature Communications explaining how Malaria DNA triggers innate immune sensors - collaboration between TCD and Weizmann. Professor in Immunology at TBSI Andrew Bowie, said of the new research: "When our immune system responds to pathogens such as malaria, it's a double-edged sword. The wrong kind of response can actually favour the pathogen and lead to more harm than good. And it seems that malaria parasites actually switch on an immune response to their own DNA to survive longer." "Here we found the switch mechanism for this, an immune sensor called STING, which senses DNA from the malaria nanovesicles when it is delivered into monocytes. Through STING, malaria parasites fool the immune system into inappropriate responses that favour the parasite's survival." Nature paper

 

Plusvital Launches the World's First Nutrigenomic Supplement for Horses In research funded by SFI and published this week, scientists at University College Dublin and Trinity College Dublin, have shown that the genetic background of a horse has a significant influence on the production of CoQ10 in horse muscle cells. Collaborating scientist TBSI's Professor Richard Porter, School of Biochemistry and Immunology said, "Mitochondrial function is clearly an important variable in equine performance. Our research has shown that efficiency in mitochondrial function has a genetic basis in the horse and that this information can now be applied in practice." Thoroughbred Daily Irish Tech News TCD press

Discoveries prior to those listed above