Help with assigning gender could one day be at hand for intersex individuals whose genital phenotypes and sex chromosomes don't match, thanks to the discovery of a stable sex hormone signature in our cells.

Biophysicists at the University of Pennsylvania have discovered that the nuclei of human stem cells are particularly soft and flexible, rather than hard, making it easier for stem cells to migrate through the body and to adopt different shapes, but ultimately to put human genes in the correct nuclear ¡°sector¡± for proper access and expression.

A stem cells’ immediate neighborhood, a specialized environment also known as the stem cell niche, provides crucial support needed for stem cell maintenance. But nothing lasts forever, found scientists at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies. During the aging process, the level of support drops off, diminishing the stem cells’ ability to replenish themselves (self-renew) indefinitely.

A research team combining high-energy physicists from the University of California, Santa Cruz, and neuroscientists from the Salk Institute in La Jolla, Calif., has discovered a type of retinal cell that may help monkeys, apes, and humans see motion. The team's work appears in the October 10 issue of Journal of Neuroscience.

Carbon nanotubes (CNTs) have shown great potential for use as cellular probes. As “nanopipes” they can be used to transport liquids to or from cells and inject solutions or drugs directly into individual cells and individual organelles within the cells.

Integrating silicon microchip technology with a network of tiny fluid channels, some thinner than a human hair, researchers at The Johns Hopkins University have developed a thumb-size micro-incubator to culture living cells for lab tests.

Urologists at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital are studying whether a neo-bladder construct grown from a patient’s own cells can improve bladder function for adult spinal cord injury patients.

The chemical process known as acetylation plays a central role in cytokine receptor signal transduction – a fundamental biochemical cascade inside cells that controls the activity of antiviral and tumor-suppressing genes.

Although plants lack humans' T cells and other immune-function cells to signal and fight infection, scientists have known for more than 100 years that plants still somehow signal that they have been attacked in order to trigger a plantwide resistance.

Embryonic veins are the source of cells that multiply and migrate in the embryo to give rise to the entire network of lymphatic vessels, a finding that suggests that these cells might one day be used to grow new vessels

Electrical cables, garden hoses and strands of holiday lights seem to get themselves hopelessly tangled with no help at all. Now research initiated by an undergraduate student at the University of California, San Diego has resulted in the first model of how knots form.

Johns Hopkins researchers say they have figured out how human and all animal cells tune in to a key signal, one that literally transmits the instructions that shape their final bodies. It turns out the cells assemble their own little radio antenna on their surfaces to help them relay the proper signal to the developmental proteins “listening” on the inside of the cell.