“When the heart cannot replace injured cardiomyocytes with healthy ones, it becomes progressively weaker, a condition leading to heart failure. In this study, we investigated a new way to stimulate cardiomyocyte proliferation to help the heart heal,” said co-corresponding author Dr. Riham Abouleisa, assistant professor in the Division of Cardiothoracic Surgery at Baylor.

Previous studies showed that calcium plays an important role in cardiomyocyte proliferation. In the current study, Abouleisa and her colleagues explored how modulating calcium influx in cardiomyocytes would affect their proliferation.

“We found that preventing calcium influx in cardiomyocytes enhances the expression of genes involved in cell proliferation,” Abouleisa said. “We prevented calcium influx by inhibiting L-Type Calcium Channel (LTCC), a protein that regulates calcium in these cells. Our findings suggest that LTCC could be a target for developing new therapies to induce cardiomyocyte proliferation and regeneration.”

The study demonstrates that both pharmacological and genetic inhibition of LTCC can induce cardiomyocyte replication and that this occurs by modulating the activity of calcineurin, a known regulator of cardiomyocyte proliferation. This innovative approach showed promising results both in human cardiac slices grown in the lab and in live animals.

“Abouleisa’s multi-continent collaborations led to a discovery that can revolutionize the use of current medicines that regulate calcium entry to the cells, such as Nifedipine, in heart failure patients,” said Dr. Tamer Mohamed, co-author and director of Baylor College of Medicine’s Laboratory for Cardiac Regeneration.

Co-author Dr. Todd K. Rosengart, chair and professor of the Michael E. DeBakey Department of Surgery, emphasized that, “The premise of regenerating heart tissue, which once seemed like an impossible dream, is getting closer almost daily. The work of Dr. Abouleisa and the Baylor cardiac regeneration team represents a major step toward human trials that I believe are in the not-too-distant future.”

Abouleisa and her colleagues’ research highlights the importance of targeting calcium signaling pathways to unlock the regenerative potential of the heart and opens new avenues for developing cardiac regenerative therapies, potentially transforming the treatment landscape for patients suffering from heart failure.

Other contributors to this work include Lynn A C Devilée, Abou Bakr M Salama, Jessica M Miller, Janice D Reid, Qinghui Ou, Nourhan M Baraka, Kamal Abou Farraj, Madiha Jamal, Yibing Nong, Douglas Andres, Jonathan Satin and James E Hudson.

In a new study, Northwestern University researchers have discovered why the role of stretching is so important. By simulating spider silk in a computational model, the team discovered the stretching process aligns the protein chains within the fibers and increases the number of bonds between those chains. Both factors lead to stronger, tougher fibers.

The team then validated these computational predictions through laboratory experiments using engineered spider silk. These insights could help researchers design engineered silk-inspired proteins and spinning processes for various applications, including strong, biodegradable sutures and tough, high-performance, blast-proof body armor.

The study will be published on Friday (March 7) in the journal Science Advances.

“Researchers already knew this stretching, or drawing, is necessary for making really strong fibers,” said Northwestern’s Sinan Keten, the study’s senior author. “But no one necessarily knew why. With our computational method, we were able to probe what’s happening at the nanoscale to gain insights that cannot be seen experimentally. We could examine how drawing relates to the silk’s mechanical properties.”

“Spiders perform the drawing process naturally,” said Northwestern Jacob Graham, the study’s first author. “When they spin silk out of their silk gland, spiders use their hind legs to grab the fiber and pull it out. That stretches the fiber as it’s being formed. It makes the fiber very strong and very elastic. We found that you can modify the fiber’s mechanical properties simply through modifying the amount of stretching.”

An expert in bioinspired materials, Keten is the Jerome B. Cohen Professor of Engineering, professor and associate chair of mechanical engineering and professor of civil and environmental engineering at Northwestern’s McCormick School of Engineering. Graham is a Ph.D. student in Keten’s research group.

Stronger than steel, tougher than Kevlar

Researchers long have been interested in spider silk because of its remarkable properties. It’s stronger than steel, tougher than Kevlar and stretchy like rubber. But farming spiders for their natural silk is expensive, energy-intensive and difficult. So, scientists instead want to recreate silk-like materials in the lab.

“Spider silk is the strongest organic fiber,” Graham said. “It also has the advantage of being biodegradable. So, it’s an ideal material for medical applications. It could be used for surgical sutures and adhesive gels for wound-closure because it would naturally, harmlessly degrade in the body.”

Study coauthor Fuzhong Zhang, the Francis F. Ahmann Professor at Washington University (WashU) in St. Louis, has been engineering microbes to produce spider-silk materials for several years. By extruding engineered spider silk proteins and then stretching them by hand, the team has developed artificial fibers similar to threads from the golden silk orb weaver, a large spider with a spectacularly strong web.

Simulating stretchiness

Despite developing this “recipe” for spider silk, researchers still don’t fully understand how the spinning process changes fiber structure and strength. To tackle this open-ended question, Keten and Graham developed a computational model to simulate the molecular dynamics within Zhang’s artificial silk.

Through these simulations, the Northwestern team explored how stretching effects the proteins’ arrangement within the fibers. Specifically, they looked at how stretching changes the order of proteins, the connection of proteins to one another and the movement of molecules within the fibers.

Keten and Graham found that stretching caused the proteins to “line up,” which increased the fiber’s overall strength. They also found that stretching increased the number of hydrogen bonds, which act like bridges between the protein chains to make up the fiber. The increase in hydrogen bonds contributes to the fiber’s overall strength, toughness and elasticity, the researchers found.

“Once a fiber is extruded, its mechanical properties are actually quite weak,” Graham said. “But when it’s stretch up to six times its initial length, it becomes very strong.”

Experimental validation

To validate their computational findings, the team used spectroscopy techniques to examine how the protein chains stretched and aligned in real fibers from the WashU team. They also used tensile testing to see how much stretching the fibers could tolerate before breaking. The experimental results agreed with the simulation’s predictions.

“If you don’t stretch the material, you have these spherical globs of proteins,” Graham said. “But stretching turns these globs into more of an interconnected network. The protein chains stack on top of one another, and the network becomes more and more interconnected. Bundled proteins have more potential to unravel and extend further before the fiber breaks, but initially extended proteins make for less extensible fibers that require more force to break.”

Although Graham used to think spiders were just creepy-crawlies, he now sees their potential to help solve real problems. He notes that engineered spider silk provides a stronger, biodegradable alternative to other synthetic materials, which are mostly petroleum-derived plastics.

“I definitely look at spiders in a new light,” Graham said. “I used to think they were nuisances. Now, I see them as a source of fascination.”

The study, “Charting the envelope of mechanical properties of synthetic silk fibers through predictive modeling of the drawing process,” was supported by the National Science Foundation (grant numbers OIA-2219142 and DMR-2207879).

“What’s surprising is the magnitude of the association that we found — we saw a 17% lower risk of death when we modeled swapping butter with plant-based oils in daily diet. That is a pretty huge effect on health,” said study lead author Yu Zhang, MBBS, research assistant at the Channing Division of Network Medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, a founding member of the Mass General Brigham healthcare system. Zhang is also a student in the Department of Epidemiology at Harvard Chan School.

A key difference between butter and oil is the types of fatty acids contained in them. Butter is rich in saturated fatty acids, while plant-based oils have more unsaturated fatty acids. While there have been many studies on dietary fatty acids, fewer studies have focused on their primary food sources, including butter and oils. Many previous studies have looked at a person’s diet at a point in time and have been done in a small population, limiting their applicability to public health.

The new study analyzed dietary data from 221,054 participants in the Nurses’ Health Study (NHS), Nurses’ Health Study II (NHSII), and Health Professionals Follow-up Study (HPFS). Every four years, they answered questions about how often they consumed certain types of food. The researchers used the data to estimate how much butter and plant oils they ate.

Total butter intake included butter from butter and margarine blend, spreadable butter added to food and bread, and butter used in baking and frying at home. The intake of plant-based oils was estimated based on the reported use in frying, sautéing, baking, and salad dressing.

The researchers also identified participants who had died and their causes of death. Using statistics to compare death rates across different diet intake levels, the researchers found that participants who ate the most butter had a 15% higher risk of dying than those who ate the least. In contrast, those who ate the most plant-based oils had a 16% lower risk of death than those who ate the least.

“People might want to consider that a simple dietary swap — replacing butter with soybean or olive oil — can lead to significant long-term health benefits,” said corresponding author Daniel Wang, MD, ScD, of the Channing Division of Network Medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. Wang is also an assistant professor in the Department of Nutrition at Harvard Chan School and an associate member at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. “From a public health perspective, this is a substantial number of deaths from cancer or from other chronic diseases that could be prevented.”

The researchers also did a substitution analysis, which mimics how swapping butter for plant oils would impact health in a feeding trial. They found that substituting 10 grams of butter a day (less than a tablespoon) with equivalent calories of plant-based oils could lower cancer deaths and overall mortality by 17%.

“Even cutting back butter a little and incorporating more plant-based oils into your daily diet can have meaningful long-term health benefits,” Wang said.

One limitation of the study is that the participants are mainly health professionals, so they might not represent the U.S. population as a whole, the researchers said. In the future, they’d like to study the biological mechanisms underlying why this dietary change has such a large impact.

Specially Appointed Associate Professor Takashi Suzuki at the Osaka Metropolitan University Center for Health Science Innovation captured images of palms of human hands using a hyperspectral camera and AI-based region of interest. Hemoglobin contained in red blood cells absorbs light, so it is possible to observe the state of the blood vessels in the palm. Since the distribution pattern of blood vessels differs from person to person, it is also possible to differentiate between individuals. Further, vein patterns are not visible on the surface of the skin like the face or fingerprints, so this bioinformation is considered highly secure as it cannot be easily read.

To test this, Dr. Suzuki developed a method for identifying biometric information regardless of position or orientation using AI-based image recognition. Furthermore, by superimposing the images in order of wavelength and cutting them based on the coordinates on the palm obtained through AI, the researcher was able to obtain images with more accurate positionings, smaller sizes, and greater information content than conventional methods.

“It was possible to distinguish between the subjects. Furthermore, accuracy of the developed method was verified and a high discrimination accuracy was confirmed,” stated Dr. Suzuki. “Biometric authentication using hyperspectral images provides remarkably high security through the palm of a hand, thus it could even be used as keys to a house. If the capability to read the state of health from the hyperspectral imaging of the palm becomes possible, a daily health management system could be developed with health data obtained through biometric unlocking.”

The findings were published inthe Journal of Biomedical Optics.

Porous organic polymers (POPs) are like sponges. Their high porosity allows them to soak up harmful pollutants like carbon dioxide (CO₂). They also boast high thermal and chemical stability, giving POPs the potential to be applied to a wide range of fields, such as gas separation and energy storage.

Previously, POPs were synthesized via oxidation reactions using metal salts as oxidants or coupling reactions using organometallic catalysts. However, these oxidants and catalysts usually remain as metal impurities within the pores of POPs — decreasing its porosity and overall usefulness. It would be like trying to clean dishes with a sponge that is already dirty. To avoid this, we need a way to produce highly pure (squeaky clean) POPs with no residual impurities.

A group of researchers from Tohoku University developed a method for synthesizing POPs using iodine as an oxidant to minimize residual impurities. They found that iodine and iodine-derived impurities were completely removed by washing it with ethanol after synthesis, and highly pure POPs (polytriphenylamine derivatives) with no residual impurities were successfully obtained. The obtained POPs exhibited the highest specific surface area among reported POPs containing triphenylamine.

“As expected, reducing the impurities improved the porosity, which lead to better performance in measures such as CO₂ adsorption capacity,” explains Kouki Oka (Tohoku University), “Furthermore, they exhibited their inherent functionalities for the first time, such as proton conductivity and unique gas adsorption behavior accompanied by the gate-opening phenomenon. This is exciting because it indicates the potential for novel applications of POPs as fuel cells and adsorbents.”

This new finding indicates that synthesizing highly pure POPs enables the realization and development of organic materials with their inherent functionality. As greenhouse gas emissions continue to be a problem, researching innovative and effective solutions such as POPs will continue to be an important endeavor for researchers.

The details of these results were published in Small on February 17, 2025.

Until now, artificial gels have either managed to replicate this high stiffness or natural skin’s self-healing properties, but not both. Now, a team of researchers from Aalto University and the University of Bayreuth are the first to develop a hydrogel with a unique structure that overcomes earlier limitations, opening the door to applications such as drug delivery, wound healing, soft robotics sensors and artificial skin.

In the breakthrough study, the researchers added exceptionally large and ultra-thin specific clay nanosheets to hydrogels, which are typically soft and squishy. The result is a highly ordered structure with densely entangled polymers between nanosheets, not only improving the mechanical properties of the hydrogel but also allowing the material to self-heal.

The research was published in the journal Nature Materials on 7 March.

Healing via ‘entanglement’

The secret of the material lies not only in the organised arrangement of the nanosheets, but also in the polymers that are entangled between them — and a process that’s as simple as baking. Postdoctoral researcher Chen Liang mixed a powder of monomers with water that contains nanosheets. The mixture was then placed under a UV lamp — similar to that used to set gel nail polish. ‘The UV-radiation from the lamp causes the individual molecules to bind together so that everything becomes an elastic solid — a gel,’ Liang explains.

‘Entanglement means that the thin polymer layers start to twist around each other like tiny wool yarns, but in a random order,’ adds Hang Zhang, from Aalto University. ‘When the polymers are fully entangled, they are indistinguishable from each other. They are very dynamic and mobile at the molecular level, and when you cut them, they start to intertwine again.’

Four hours after cutting it with a knife, the material is already 80 or 90 percent self-healed. After 24 hours, it is typically completely repaired. Furthermore, a one-millimetre-thick hydrogel contains 10,000 layers of nanosheets, which makes the material as stiff as human skin, and gives it a comparable degree of stretch and flexibility.

‘Stiff, strong and self-healing hydrogels have long been a challenge. We have discovered a mechanism to strengthen the conventionally soft hydrogels. This could revolutionise the development of new materials with bio-inspired properties,’ says Zhang.

Gaining inspiration from nature

‘This work is an exciting example of how biological materials inspire us to look for new combinations of properties for synthetic materials. Imagine robots with robust, self-healing skins or synthetic tissues that autonomously repair,” says Olli Ikkala, from Aalto University. And even though there may be some way to go before real-world application, the current results represent a pivotal leap. ‘It’s the kind of fundamental discovery that could renew the rules of material design.’

The collaboration was led by Dr. Hang Zhang, Prof. Olli Ikkala and Prof. Josef Breu. The synthetic clay nanosheets were designed and manufactured by Prof. Josef Breu at the University of Bayreuth in Germany.

In an interdisciplinary cooperation project of the EU-projects FACE-IT, ECOTIP, and SEA-Quester, the scientists investigated consequences of climate change in the Arctic. They focused on a group of organisms that form the very basis of Arctic coastal ecosystems — brown macroalgae, known as kelps, which form dense and extensive underwater forests along rocky coastlines. The ecological role of kelps can be compared to trees on land: They provide food, habitat, and a nursery ground for a variety of organisms and thereby maintain complex ecosystems. The researchers focused on the effects of climate change on kelps in order to draw conclusions about the ecological and socio-economic consequences. Their new findings in Arctic coastal ecology have now been published in the international journal Scientific Reports by Sarina Niedzwiedz and Kai Bischof from the University of Bremen and MARUM — Center for Marine Environmental Sciences and their team of co-authors.

Warming Increases Run-off Intensities — And Influences Element Concentrations

The Arctic region is warming at a rate that is far above the global average. Consequently, snow, glaciers, and permafrost are melting — all of which are contributing to coastal run-off plumes. The run-off plumes changes water parameters drastically as large volumes of fresh water reduce the salinity, washed-in sediments reduce the light availability, and, depending on the lithogenic and organic material in the run-off, the elemental composition is changing. While many of the elements that are being washed into the fjords can act as micronutrients for kelps (e.g., sodium, magnesium, potassium), harmful elements, such as heavy metals (e.g., cadmium, lead, mercury) have also been found in higher concentrations. The researchers collected kelps exposed to different levels of run-off intensities and analyzed their elemental composition. Across all investigated elements, the team found the same pattern: As run-off intensity increases, so does element concentrations. In the case of mercury, kelps that were highly influenced by run-off were characterised by a 72 per cent higher mercury content compared to kelps from the control area.

Changing Microbiome

Further, the researchers analyzed how different run-off rates affect the kelp microbiome. The microbiome is highly important for the ecological function of kelps, such as their nutritional value or elemental cycling in the ecosystem. They found that the microbiome also changed with different run-off rates.

Both of these climate-related changes on kelps are likely to have cascading consequences for the entire ecosystem. The ingestion of metal-contaminated kelps was shown to have negative impacts, such as reduced development, growth, and reproduction, and might lead to a bioaccumulation of harmful elements across the Arctic food web. Eventually, this might also have socio-economic consequences. The high biosorption potential of kelps has to be considered in the implementation of maricultures. However, harvesting kelps in fjords with high levels of meltwater and metal contamination might be an environmentally friendly method to harvest rare earths (phytomining). Rare earths are increasingly being used in key technologies such as renewable energies and electronics.