News archive

A new study demonstrates that the dietary fatty acid gamma-linolenic acid (GLA) derived from the mother's milk triggers a metabolic shift essential for heart cell maturation in newborn mice. Researchers at Karolinska Institutet contributed to the study published in Nature in May 2023.

While the relevance for human heart development still needs to be addressed, GLA is found in human breast milk and the GLA-activated nuclear receptors are highly conserved between mice and humans.

A new study published in Nature reports that a technology known as spatial omics can be used to map simultaneously how genes are switched on and off and how they are expressed in different areas of tissues and organs. This improved technology, developed by researchers at Yale University and Karolinska Institutet, could shed light on the development of tissues, as well as on certain diseases and how to treat them.

Three researchers at the Department of Biosciences and Nutriton, Karolinska Institutet, have received grants from the Novo Nordisk Foundation for their research, 2022.

Epigenetic clocks based on DNA methylation data are widely used aging biomarkers useful to assess biological age in population-based cohorts. However, their utility has been limited by technical noise. In this paper, we present a method that produces high-reliability clocks for applications such as longitudinal studies and intervention trials.

Researchers from Karolinska Institutet identify an epigenetic regulator controlling the very first cell type specification in the human embryo. The study is published in Nature Cell Biology.

In a new study published in Science, researchers at Yale University, in collaboration with researchers at Karolinska Institutet, have developed a technique that gives very precise information about the location of activated and inactivated genes in a specific tissue. This can provide important knowledge about how different tissues develop and how epigenetic regulation contributes to the development of disease.

An international team of scientists, including from Karolinska Institutet, has discovered a means of identifying the risk of breast and ovarian cancer by analysing cell samples from the cervix. By measuring epigenetic changes in cervical samples from over a thousand women, the researchers have found two unique signatures for breast and ovarian cancer. The results are presented in two papers in the journal Nature Communications.

Gonçalo Castelo-Branco at the Department of Medical Biochemistry and Biophysics (MBB) at Karolinska Institutet, receives the 2021 Eric K. Fernström prize for young, especially promising and successful researchers, for his significant research in the oligodendrocyte/myelin field and multiple sclerosis.
Note that the prize 2020 was advanced to 2021.

Histones are tiny proteins that bind to DNA and hold information that can help turn on or off individual genes. Researchers at Karolinska Institutet have developed a technique that makes it possible to examine how different versions of histones bind to the genome in tens of thousands of individual cells simultanously. The technique was applied to the mouse brain and can be used to study epigenetics at a single-cell level in other complex tissues. The study is published in Nature Biotechnology.

How do cis-regulatory genome elements regulate gene expression, what are the critical components involved, and can we therapeutically target them? By investigating how corepressors modulate enhancers and silencers during inflammatory macrophage activation, BioNut researchers have found some unexpected answers to these fundamental questions. The study is published today in Molecular Cell.

People age in different ways. Biological age is a metric that scientists use to predict health risks, the relevance of which can be enhanced by combining different markers. Particularly important markers are frailty and the epigenetic clock, write researchers from Karolinska Institutet in a study published in eLife.

When Human Immunodeficiency Virus Type 1 (HIV-1) infects a cell, the virus often becomes invisible to both the immune system and drugs. Now research from Karolinska Institutet shows that the integrated virus mimics a specific chromatin structure that lets the virus sequence remain accessible while preventing production of new viruses.

On Friday January 31, Yunzhang Wang will defend his thesis "DNA methylation and aging : a longitudinal study of old Swedish twins".

Six of the 29 new Wallenberg Academy Fellows appointed in 2019 will conduct their groundbreaking research at Karolinska Institutet. The five-year grant is financed by the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation to provide the young and talented researcher leaders with long-term research funding in Sweden.

A new method, developed by Banushree Kumar and Simon Elsässer at Karolinska Institutet, produces quantitative maps for modifications of so-called histone proteins that package the DNA molecules in every eukaryotic cell. The study, published in the journal Cell Reports, describes new properties of naïve pluripotent stem cells.

Children with asthma have epigenetic DNA changes in certain cells of their immune system, a major international study involving researchers at Karolinska Institutet shows. The finding, which is presented in The Lancet Respiratory Medicine, can one day lead to improved diagnostics and treatment.