¹ú¼ÊÃ×À¼¶ÔÕó¿ÆĪ

Yoshinori Ohsumi is a deserving winner of this year's Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine, whose work shows the value of basic research, writes Professor David Rubinsztein, Deputy Director of the ¹ú¼ÊÃ×À¼¶ÔÕó¿ÆĪ Institute for Medical Research on The Conversation website.

It's over a hundred years since the first case of Alzheimer’s disease was diagnosed. Since then we’ve learned a great deal about the protein ‘tangles’ and ‘plaques’ that cause the disease. How close are we to having effective treatments – and could we even prevent dementia from occurring in the first place?

In the first genome-scale experiment of its kind, researchers have gained new insights into how a mouse embryo first begins to transform from a ball of unfocussed cells into a small, structured entity. Published in Nature, the single-cell genomics study was led by the European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) and the ¹ú¼ÊÃ×À¼¶ÔÕó¿ÆĪ.

¹ú¼ÊÃ×À¼¶ÔÕó¿ÆĪ Enterprise (CE), the commercialisation arm of the ¹ú¼ÊÃ×À¼¶ÔÕó¿ÆĪ, has launched a film that showcases some of the world-changing ideas it has supported in the journey to market – from a drug with the potential to save millions of lives to a flower seed mix that helps bees.

Scientists at the ¹ú¼ÊÃ×À¼¶ÔÕó¿ÆĪ have identified a new property of essential proteins which, when it malfunctions, can cause the build up, or ‘aggregation’, of misshaped proteins and lead to serious diseases.

°Õ³ó±ðÌý¹ú¼ÊÃ×À¼¶ÔÕó¿ÆĪ Animal Alphabet series celebrates ¹ú¼ÊÃ×À¼¶ÔÕó¿ÆĪ's connections with animals through literature, art, science and society. Here, V is for Venomous Snake: an animal that has long evoked fear and curiosity, but is revealing important clues for the development of treatments for some devastating conditions.

Scientists at the ¹ú¼ÊÃ×À¼¶ÔÕó¿ÆĪ Institute for Medical Research at the ¹ú¼ÊÃ×À¼¶ÔÕó¿ÆĪ and the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology have taken advantage of revolutionary developments in microscopic imaging to reveal the origins of leukaemia.

An ‘exhausted’ army of immune cells may not be able to fight off infection, but if its soldiers fight too hard they risk damaging the very body they are meant to be protecting, suggests new research from the ¹ú¼ÊÃ×À¼¶ÔÕó¿ÆĪ.

A gene essential to the production of pain-sensing neurons in humans has been identified by an international team of researchers co-led by the ¹ú¼ÊÃ×À¼¶ÔÕó¿ÆĪ. The discovery, reported today in the journal Nature Genetics, could have implications for the development of new methods of pain relief.

A dramatic video has captured the behaviour of cytotoxic T cells – the body’s ‘serial killers’ – as they hunt down and eliminate cancer cells before moving on to their next target.