Amazing Science

Scientists have found the first eukaryotic organism that functions fine without mitochondria, the "powerhouses" that make energy for the cells of yeast, humans and other animals.

Mitochondria are the powerhouses inside eukaryotic cells, the type of complicated cell that makes up people, other critters and plants and fungi. All eukaryotic cells contain a nucleus and little organelles — and one of the most famous was the mitochondrion. "They were considered to be absolutely indispensable components of the eukaryotic cell and the hallmark of the eukaryotic cell," says Anna Karnkowska, a researcher in evolutionary biology at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. Karnkowska and her colleagues describe their new find in a study published online Thursday in the journal Current Biology.i

Mitochondria have their own DNA, and scientists believe they were once free-living bacteria that got engulfed by primitive, ancient cells that were evolving to become the complex life forms we know and love today. For decades, researchers have tried to find eukaryotic cells that don't have mitochondria — and for a while they thought they'd found some. One example is Giardia, a human gut parasite that causes diarrhea. It was considered to be a kind of living fossil because it had a nucleus but didn't seem to have acquired mitochondria. But additional studies on Giardia and other microbes showed that actually, the mitochondria were there.

"It turned out that all of them actually had some kind of remnant mitochondrion," says Karnkowska, who notes that mitochondria perform key jobs in the cell beyond just generating power. A biggie is assembling iron-sulfur clusters for certain proteins, which is thought to be a mitochondrial function that's really essential. So even if a microbe powers itself in a different way and has a limited form of the organelle that isn't the same as the mitochondria found in people, Karnkowska says, "it's still a mitochondrion and it has some important function for the cell."

That kind of vestigial mitochondrion is what she expected to find when she was a researcher at Charles University in Prague and started investigating a particular gut microbe that had been isolated from a researcher's pet chinchilla.

After she and her colleagues sequenced the gut microbe's genome, however, they found no trace that it made any mitochondrial proteins at all. "So that's a great surprise for us," she says. "That should theoretically kill the cell — it shouldn't exist."

What they learned is that instead of relying on mitochondria to assemble iron-sulfur clusters, these cells use a different kind of machinery. And it looks like they acquired it from bacteria. The researchers say this is the first example of any eukaryote that completely lacks mitochondria.

A University of Washington team of computer scientists and engineers has built what they say is one of the most highly capable five-fingered robot hands in the world. It can perform dexterous manipulation and learn from its own experience without needing humans to direct it. Their work is described in a paper to be presented May 17 at the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation.

“Hand manipulation is one of the hardest problems that roboticists have to solve,” said lead author Vikash Kumar, a UW doctoral student in computer science and engineering. “A lot of robots today have pretty capable arms but the hand is as simple as a suction cup or maybe a claw or a gripper.”

The UW research team has developed an accurate simulation model that enables a computer to analyze movements in real time. In their latest demonstration, they apply the model to the robot hardware and to real-world tasks like rotating an elongated object.

AeroFarms' headquarters in Newark, New Jersey, is a former steel factory that's been converted into the world's largest vertical farm. Throughout the 6,410m2 of growing space, plant beds are stacked on top of each other in 12 layers between floor and ceiling. LEDs provide lighting and the roots of leafy greens, herbs and salads are kept nourished using an "aeroponic" mist claimed to use 95 per cent less water than outdoor agriculture.

"This is game-changing in terms of productivity," explains Marc Oshima, AeroFarms' co-founder. "We can take the same seed that might take 30-35 days to grow outside, and it will have a 12-16 day crop cycle in our system, so we can have 20 crop cycles a year." 

AeroFarms' agricultural optimisation relies on algorithms that continually monitor nutrients and lighting at different points in the plants' growth cycles. By optimising light wavelengths and the nutrient-filled mist, operators can endow plants with different tastes, textures, colours and yield. "For example, we can make watercress spicier and lettuce sweeter," he says.

“Our mission is to build farms in cities all over the world,” Rosenberg recently told The Huffington Post. “We are very much building the infrastructure not to build one, two or three farms but to build 20, 30 or 50 farms.”

Indoors farming has long been touted as a way to address two major problems. The first is macro-level and lofty: How will we, the Earth’s 7.4 billion (and counting) humans, go about feeding ourselves in a changing world? The second is more immediate: How do you get fresh, healthy produce to people in urban food deserts, where diet-related conditions like diabetes and obesity run rampant?

The answers to those questions could be a gold mine. By 2050, the world’s population is projected to rise to between 9 billion and 10 billion people. Those numbers, coupled with income growth across the world, could result in more than a 70 percent increase in demand for food by that year, according to a report by the World Bank. Making matters worse, the unpredictable and increasingly extreme weather, droughts and flooding that come of climate change are expected to grow more intense in the coming decades, as greenhouse gas emissions continue to warm the planet.

The flagship facility, in partnership with RBH, Prudential and Goldman Sachs, will be able to produce 900,000kg of vegetables -- which will be distributed to local buyers -- annually when it reaches full capacity, predicted for midway through 2016.

On June 28, 2009, the world-famous physicist Stephen Hawking threw a party at the University of Cambridge, complete with balloons, hors d'oeuvres and iced champagne. Everyone was invited but no one showed up. Hawking had expected as much, because he only sent out invitations after his party had concluded. It was, he said, "a welcome reception for future time travelers," a tongue-in-cheek experiment to reinforce his 1992 conjecture that travel into the past is effectively impossible. But Hawking may be on the wrong side of history. Recent experiments offer tentative support for time travel's feasibility—at least from a mathematical perspective. The study cuts to the core of our understanding of the universe, and the resolution of the possibility of time travel, far from being a topic worthy only of science fiction, would have profound implications for fundamental physics as well as for practical applications such as quantum cryptography and computing.

The source of time travel speculation lies in the fact that our best physical theories seem to contain no prohibitions on traveling backward through time. The feat should be possible based on Einstein's theory of general relativity, which describes gravity as the warping of spacetime by energy and matter. An extremely powerful gravitational field, such as that produced by a spinning black hole, could in principle profoundly warp the fabric of existence so that spacetime bends back on itself. This would create a "closed timelike curve," or CTC, a loop that could be traversed to travel back in time.

Hawking and many other physicists find CTCs abhorrent, because any macroscopic object traveling through one would inevitably create paradoxes where cause and effect break down. In a model proposed by the theorist David Deutsch in 1991, however, the paradoxes created by CTCs could be avoided at the quantum scale because of the behavior of fundamental particles, which follow only the fuzzy rules of probability rather than strict determinism. "It's intriguing that you've got general relativity predicting these paradoxes, but then you consider them in quantum mechanical terms and the paradoxes go away," says University of Queensland physicist Tim Ralph. "It makes you wonder whether this is important in terms of formulating a theory that unifies general relativity with quantum mechanics."

Recently Ralph and his PhD student Martin Ringbauer led a team that experimentally simulated Deutsch's model of CTCs for the very first time, testing and confirming many aspects of the two-decades-old theory. Theirfindings are published in Nature Communications. Much of their simulation revolved around investigating how Deutsch's model deals with the “grandfather paradox,” a hypothetical scenario in which someone uses a CTC to travel back through time to murder her own grandfather, thus preventing her own later birth.

Deutsch's quantum solution to the grandfather paradox works something like this: Instead of a human being traversing a CTC to kill her ancestor, imagine that a fundamental particle goes back in time to flip a switch on the particle-generating machine that created it. If the particle flips the switch, the machine emits a particle—the particle—back into the CTC; if the switch isn't flipped, the machine emits nothing. In this scenario there is no a priori deterministic certainty to the particle's emission, only a distribution of probabilities. Deutsch's insight was to postulate self-consistency in the quantum realm, to insist that any particle entering one end of a CTC must emerge at the other end with identical properties. Therefore, a particle emitted by the machine with a probability of one half would enter the CTC and come out the other end to flip the switch with a probability of one half, imbuing itself at birth with a probability of one half of going back to flip the switch. If the particle were a person, she would be born with a one-half probability of killing her grandfather, giving her grandfather a one-half probability of escaping death at her hands—good enough in probabilistic terms to close the causative loop and escape the paradox. Strange though it may be, this solution is in keeping with the known laws of quantum mechanics.

In their new simulation Ralph, Ringbauer and their colleagues studied Deutsch's model using interactions between pairs of polarized photons within a quantum system that they argue is mathematically equivalent to a single photon traversing a CTC. "We encode their polarization so that the second one acts as kind of a past incarnation of the first,” Ringbauer says. So instead of sending a person through a time loop, they created a stunt double of the person and ran him through a time-loop simulator to see if the doppelganger emerging from a CTC exactly resembled the original person as he was in that moment in the past. By measuring the polarization states of the second photon after its interaction with the first, across multiple trials the team successfully demonstrated Deutsch's self-consistency in action. "The state we got at our output, the second photon at the simulated exit of the CTC, was the same as that of our input, the first encoded photon at the CTC entrance," Ralph says. "Of course, we're not really sending anything back in time but [the simulation] allows us to study weird evolutions normally not allowed in quantum mechanics."

Wireless charging of mobile devices is possibly one of the most desired technological milestones. Some devices can already be charged wirelessly by placing the mobile device on top of a charging base. The next step, charging devices without the need of taking them out of one's pocket, might be just around the corner.

A group of researchers from the Department of Physics of Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona has developed a system which can efficiently transfer electrical energy between two separated circuits thanks to the use of metamaterials. This system is still in the experimental stage, but once it has been perfected and can be applied to mobile devices, it will be able to charge them wirelessly and at a longer distance than currently possible.

Today's wireless devices make use of induction to charge through a special case adapted to the device and a charging base connected to an electrical socket. When the device is placed on top of the base, this generates a magnetic field which induces an electric current inside the case and, without the need of using any cables, the device is charged. If the device is separated from the base, the energy is not transferred efficiently enough and the battery cannot be charged.

The system created by UAB researchers overcomes these limitations. It is made up of metamaterials which combine layers of ferromagnetic materials, such as iron compounds, and conductor materials such as copper. The metamaterials envelop the emitter and receiver and enable transferring energy between the two, at a distance and with unprecedented efficiency.

With the use of metamaterial crowns researchers were able in the lab to increase the transmission efficiency 35-fold, "and there is much more room for improvement, since theoretically the efficiency can be increased even more if conditions and the design of the experiment are perfected" explains Àlvar Sánchez, director of the research.

"Enveloping the two circuits with metamaterial shells has the same effect as bringing them close together; it's as if the space between them literally disappears", states Jordi Prat, lead author of the paper. Moreover, the materials needed to construct these crowns such as copper and ferrite are easily available. The first experiments conducted with the aim of concentrating static magnetic fields required the use of superconductor metamaterials, unfeasible for everyday uses with mobile devices. "In contrast, low frequency electromagnetic waves – the ones used to transfer energy from one circuit to the other – only need conventional conductors and ferromagnets", Carles Navau explains.

Persons with the serious disorder ALS, can have a genetic mutation that causes the protein SOD1 to aggregate in motor neurons in the brain and spinal cord. Researchers at Umeå University have discovered that, when injected into mice, the SOD1 aggregation spreads rapidly leading to ALS. The discovery has been described in theJournal of Clinical Investigation.

ALS, Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, is a disorder which causes death of motor neurons in the brain and the spinal cord in charge of controlling muscles. This leads to progressive paralysis and death, often due to carbon dioxide narcosis.

“The occurrence of SOD1 aggregates in nerve cells in ALS patients has been known for a while,” says Thomas Brännström, professor of Pathology at Umeå University and one of the authors of the article.

“But it has long been unclear what role the SOD1 aggregates play in the disease progression in humans carrying hereditary traits for ALS. We have now been able to show that the SOD1 aggregates start a domino effect that rapidly spreads the disease up through the spinal cord of mice. We suspect that this could be the case for humans as well.”

Researchers at the Departments of Medical Biosciences and Pharmacology and Clinical Neuroscience at Umeå University have examined whether the accumulation of the SOD1 aggregates inside nerve cells drives the ALS disease or if it is a harmless side-effect. The research team has been able to identify two different kinds of SOD1 aggregates in mice. The results showed that both kinds caused a spread of SOD1 aggregation when a small amount was injected into the spinal cord of mice. The accumulation of aggregates progressed in nerve cells along the entire spinal cord of the mice at the same time as it led to a rapid and eventually mortal outcome of the disease.

“The results show that the aggregation of SOD1 plays a critical role in the disease progression – a research hypothesis that ALS researchers in Umeå long has based its work upon,” says Stefan Marklund, professor of Clinical Chemistry. “More research is necessary, but our aim is to develop interventions that prevent or stop the fatal course of the disease in carriers of hereditary traits of ALS.”

To study certain aspects of cells, researchers need the ability to take the innards out, manipulate them, and put them back. Options for this kind of work are limited, but researchers reporting May 10 in Cell Metabolism describe a "nanoblade" that can slice through a cell's membrane to insert mitochondria. The researchers have previously used this technology to transfer other materials between cells and hope to commercialize the nanoblade for wider use in bioengineering.

"As a new tool for cell engineering, to truly engineer cells for health purposes and research, I think this is very unique," says Mike Teitell, a pathologist and bioengineer at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). "We haven't run into anything so far, up to a few microns in size, that we can't deliver."

Teitell and Pei-Yu "Eric" Chiou, also a bioengineer at UCLA, first conceived the idea of a nanoblade several years ago to transfer a nucleus from one cell to another. However, they soon delved into the intersection of stem cell biology and energy metabolism, where the technology could be used to manipulate a cell's mitochondria. Studying the effects of mutations in the mitochondrial genome, which can cause debilitating or fatal diseases in humans, is tricky for a number of reasons.

"There's a bottleneck in the field for modifying a cell's mitochondrial DNA," says Teitell. "So we are working on a two-step process: edit the mitochondrial genome outside of a cell, and then take those manipulated mitochondria and put them back into the cell. We're still working on the first step, but we've solved that second one quite well."

The nanoblade apparatus consists of a microscope, laser, and titanium-coated micropipette to act as the "blade," operated using a joystick controller. When a laser pulse strikes the titanium, the metal heats up, vaporizing the surrounding water layers in the culture media and forming a bubble next to a cell. Within a microsecond, the bubble expands, generating a local force that punctures the cell membrane and creates a passageway several microns long that the "cargo"–in this case, mitochondria–can be pushed through. The cell then rapidly repairs the membrane defect.

Teitell, Chiou, and their team used the nanoblade to insert tagged mitochondria from human breast cancer cells and embryonic kidney cells into cells without mitochondrial DNA. When they sequenced the nuclear and mitochondrial DNA afterwards, the researchers saw that the mitochondria had been successfully transferred and replicated by 2% of the cells, with a range of functionality. Other methods of mitochondrial transfer are hard to control, and when they have been reported to work, the success rates have been only 0.0001%-0.5% according to the researchers.

Centuries of caravan domestication and travel left some metaphorical tire marks on Arabian camel genes, researchers find.

Arabian camels (Camelus dromedarius) have trekked across ancient caravan routes in Asia and Africa for 3,000 years. But it’s unclear how camels’ domestication has affected their genetic blueprints.

To find out, Faisal Almathen of King Faisal University in Saudi Arabia and his colleagues combed through the DNA of 1,083 modern camels and ancient remains of wild and domesticated camels found at archaeological sites going back to 5000 B.C.

Camels run high on genetic diversity thanks to periodic restocking from now-extinct wild populations in the centuries after their domestication, the team reports May 9 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Travel on human caravan routes also created a steady flow of genes between different domesticated populations, except in a geographically isolated group in East Africa. That diversity may give some camel populations a leg up in adapting to future changes in climate, the authors suggest. 

Two implantable devices developed by American and Chinese researchers are designed to dissolve in the brain over time and may eliminate several current problems with implants.

University of Pennsylvania researchers have developed an electrode and an electrode array, both made of layers of silicon and molybdenum that can measure physiological characteristics (like neuron signals) and dissolve at a known rate (determined by the material’s thickness). The team used the device in anesthetized rats to record brain waves (EEGs) and induced epileptic spikes in intact live tissue.

In another experiment, they showed the dissolvable electronics could be used in a complex, multiplexed ECoG (intracranial electroencephalography) array over a 30-day period.

As the researchers note online in Nature Materials, this new technology offers equal or greater resolution for measuring the brain’s electrical activity, compared to conventional electrodes, while eliminating “the risks, cost, and discomfort associated with surgery to extract current devices used for post-operative monitoring,” according to senior co-author Brian Litt, MD, a professor of Neurology, Neurosurgery, and Bioengineering at the Perelman School of Medicine.

Other potential uses of the dissolvable electronics include:

• Disorders such as epilepsy, Parkinson’s disease, depression, chronic pain, and conditions of the peripheral nervous system. “These measurements are critically important for mapping and monitoring brain function during and in preparation for neurosurgery, for assisting in device placement, such as for Parkinson’s disease, and for guiding surgical procedures on complex, interconnected nerve structures,” Litt said.
• Post-operative monitoring and recording of physiological characteristic after minimally invasive placement of vascular, cardiac, orthopaedic, neural or other devices. At present, post-operative monitoring is based on clinical examination or interventional radiology, which is invasive, expensive, and impractical for continuous monitoring over days to months.
• Heart and brain surgery for applications such as aneurysm coiling, stent placement, embolization, and endoscopic operations. These new devices could also monitor structures that are exposed during surgery, but are too delicate to disturb later by removing devices.
• More complex devices that also include flow, pressure, and other measurement capabilities.

Simin Qiu, the creator and designer of this concept designed the faucet such that it passes water via a double turbine .The latter rotates as the water courses through it thus bring about a lattice of elaborate and beautiful jets of water. Less water is used to form this intricate swirls, in fact it reduces the flow of water by 15%.This means that less water is utilized at any point in time, thus saving you water. Three nozzles are available all creating different water swirl patterns. The  Design concept award in 2014 was awarded to Qiu for this concept. In order to retain the sleek and elegant design, the operation of this faucet is carried out with a simple touch button at the top.

Evidence confirms dramatic climate change effects in the Solomon Islands

Sea-level rise, erosion and coastal flooding are some of the greatest challenges facing humanity from climate change. Recently at least five reef islands in the remote Solomon Islands have been lost completely to sea-level rise and coastal erosion, and a further six islands have been severely eroded.

These islands lost to the sea range in size from one to five hectares. They supported dense tropical vegetation that was at least 300 years old. Nuatambu Island, home to 25 families, has lost more than half of its habitable area, with 11 houses washed into the sea since 2011.

This is the first scientific evidence, published in Environmental Research Letters, that confirms the numerous anecdotal accounts from across the Pacific of the dramatic impacts of climate change on coastlines and people.

Identifying the sites where gamma-retroviruses commonly insert into the genome may help to identify genes associated with specific cancer types, according to a study published April 20, 2016 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Kathryn Gilroy at the University of Glasgow, UK, and colleagues.

Gamma-retroviruses, such as feline leukaemia virus, tend to cause mutations when they insert into a host’s genome, and have been used as a tool to discover genes associated with cancer. However, this discovery process can be time consuming, requiring the collection of multiple tumors from animals and comparative genomic analyses. The authors of the present study sought to investigate the pattern of gamma-retrovirus insertion using deep sequencing to analyse common insertion sites for feline leukaemia virus in cell culture. The study was also expanded to analyze published genome insertion profiles of other gamma-retroviruses.

The authors found that the gamma-retroviruses preferentially inserted into cancer-driving genes, regardless of transcription levels, in a cell type-specific manner. This authors suggest that gamma-retrovirus integration profiling in vitro may be a tool to identify potential therapeutic target genes in different human cancer types.

The human placenta is an organ unlike any other. During the course of nine months it is formed by the embryo, sustains life and then is shed. “What that means,” said Montserrat Anguera, an assistant professor in the University of PennsylvaniaSchool of Veterinary Medicine, “is it has to make very specialized cells, it has to form structures to support itself and the baby, it has to sense cues from the mom and from the environment and it has to do all of these things really, really fast." 

In a new study, Anguera and colleagues have identified a long non-coding RNA, or lncRNA, that contributes to a crucial function of the placenta: protecting the unborn baby from invading pathogens. The work, published in the journal Molecular and Cellular Biology, is the first to identify a lncRNA in the placenta involved in regulating the immune response.

Further study of this and other lncRNAs could shed light on how the placenta protects against pathogens, even at the earliest stage of embryotic development. Long-term, the researchers say, it’s possible that this lncRNA could even present a target for priming the placenta to resist viruses or other infectious agents.

Knowledge about lncRNAs is fast-evolving, and it’s an area that Anguera has been part of since her time as a postdoctoral researcher. As their name suggests, lncRNAs are RNA transcripts greater than 200 nucleotides in length that do not code for proteins. Many of them are known to regulate gene expression and to do so in a rapid manner. Other researchers have identified lncRNAs in later-term placentas involved in regulating functions such as growth, but Anguera wanted to look at the earliest stages of placental formation to see how lncRNAs might be influencing development.

Using data from an earlier paper by a Chinese group that had sequenced RNA in various stages of early human development, Anguera’s team zeroed on a lncRNA called lncRHOXF1, located on the X chromosome, that was present at high levels in trophectoderm cells, from which the placenta arises, and barely detectable in the cells that give rise to the embryo. Not only was it present in trophectoderm cells, it was one of the most abundant lncRNAs in that cell type.

Induced pluripotent stem cells hold promise for regenerative medicine because they can, in theory, turn into any type of tissue and because they are made from a patient’s own adult cells, guaranteeing compatibility. However, the technique that turns adult cells into these iPS cells is not foolproof; after reverting to their pluripotent state, these cells don’t always correctly differentiate back into adult cells. 

Researchers from the University of Pennsylvania have now discovered one of the reasons why: the reversion process does not always fully capture the way a cell’s genome is folded up inside its nucleus. This folding configuration directly influences gene expression and therefore the functionality of the cell.

The new study shows that current techniques might not produce iPS cells that are equivalent to the pluripotent stem cells found in embryos, as some clones retain folding patterns that partially resemble those found in the adult cells from which they are made.  

Led by Jennifer Phillips-Cremins, assistant professor in the School of Engineering and Applied Science’s Department of Bioengineering, and Jonathan Beagan, a graduate student in her lab, the study, published in the journal Cell Stem Cell, also suggests ways of minimizing these folding errors.

Though techniques for reverting adult cells into iPS cells have existed for a decade and avoid the issues surrounding the use of embryonic stem cells that have stymied research into regenerative medicine, clinical investigations of these cells have been cautious and slow. IPS cells can fail to correctly differentiate into the desired tissue. Moreover, there are also concerns that the resulting tissue could have unforeseen genetic abnormalities or could become cancerous.

Even outside the clinical applications, many researchers are interested in iPS cells as a way of generating a “disease in a dish.” Rather than taking a tissue sample from a patient with a genetic disorder, which is especially challenging when the affected organ is the brain, researchers could use iPS cells derived from that patient’s skin cells to grow model organs as needed. Observing the development of those tissues could provide clues to the progression of the disease, as well as serve as ideal test-beds for treatments not yet approved for use in humans.

In both clinical and research applications, however, the traits that allow for the generation of “high quality” iPS cells capable of correctly differentiating into the desired tissue with no genetic abnormalities is unclear. “We know there is a link between the topology of the genome and gene expression,” Phillips-Cremins said, “so this motivated us to explore how the genetic material is reconfigured in three dimensions inside the nucleus during the reprogramming of mature brain cells to pluripotency. We found evidence for sophisticated configurations that differ in important ways between iPS cells and embryonic stem cells.”

One year ago, Brazil reported the first laboratory-confirmed cases of Zika. The virus had cropped up elsewhere in a few earlier outbreaks, too, but it didn’t seem all that threatening at the time. Zika symptoms were generally pretty mild — or even nonexistent, the Pan American Health Organization and the World Health Organization reported in an epidemiological alert May 7, 2015. The alert made no mention of pregnant women, babies or microcephaly. In fact, it noted: “Complications (neurological, autoimmune) are rare.”

What a difference a year makes. Now scientists have convincingly tied Zika infection to birth defects, and suspect it’s behind an uptick in neurological disorders in adults, too. But researchers are still figuring out how the virus acts, and how to stop it. A vaccine is in the works, but could take years.

So Zika-fighting tactics have gotten creative. A new billboard in Brazil lures mosquitoes in with spritzes of humanlike scent, and then traps them inside a chamber to die. (It kills hundreds of mosquitoes a day, the billboard’s makers tout, but scientists have yet to weigh in.) Researchers have recently explored other methods to rein in Zika.

This and more from recent research:

• The best weapon against Zika may be a mosquito-infecting bacteria. Mosquitoes harboringWolbachia pipientis resisted infection from two strains of Zika virus circulating in Brazil, researchers report May 4 in Cell Host & Microbe. And if Wolbachia-carrying mosquitoes do get infected, they’re less likely to transmit the virus. Releasing these mosquitoes in the wild could help halt Zika’s spread. 

• An antimalarial drug called chloroquine could also work against Zika. When added to human brain cells and mouse minibrains in the lab, the drug helped prevent Zika infection. It also kept minibrains looking somewhat healthy, researchers report May 2 at bioRxiv.org. Chloroquine is a promising candidate for clinical trials, the authors write, because it’s safe for use in pregnant women.

• Zika kills brain cells by cranking up production of a protein that triggers cellular self-destruction, researchers report May 6 in Cell Stem Cell. Scientists knew that infection with the virus could kill cells, shrinking minibrains grown in the lab, but until now, they didn’t understand how. The protein, an immune molecule called TLR3, could act as a target for therapies.
• A new paper-based Zika test could offer doctors a quick and easy way to detect the virus. The test senses Zika RNA and can differentiate between African and American strains, scientists report May 6 in Cell. Though still in the proof-of-concept stage, the test was able to confirm Zika’s presence in samples from an infected macaque. The news comes on the heels of the FDA’s recent approval of a commercial test for Zika.