Institute of
bioorganic chemistry

T-cell receptors (TCRs) play a key role in adaptive immunity. TCR repertoire is very diverse and unique to each individual because it forms in the stochastic DNA recombination process. The group of scientists from the Department of genomics of adaptive immunity in collaboration with ENS (Paris, France) studied TCR repertoires of identical twins after immunization with a live vaccine. In each donor, they identified about a thousand different T-cell clones responding to immunization. Responding clones have almost unique repertoire in each donor with higher overlap in identical twin pairs. The study was supported by RSF and published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Researchers from Molecular technologies laboratory (IBCh) in collaboration with Harvard medical school scientists developed a novel model of cardiac dysfunction caused by oxidative stress. This model is based on chemogenetics principles — enzymatic production of reactive oxygen species (ROS), stimulated by an external chemical substrate, and visualised by transgenic ROS sensor HyPer. The study is supported by Russian science foundation and published in Nature Communications.

The researchers from Laboratory of molecular bases of embryogenesis recently hypothesised that the decrease of limb regeneration capacity in amniotes (reptiles, birds and mammals) could be caused by elimination in evolution of genes, encoding for important regulators of specific wound epithelium and blastema organization, which are used by excellent regenerating anamniotes (fish and amphibia). Using two anamniotic model organisms Danio rerio adult fishes and Xenopus laevis tadpoles the authors have shown the essential role of Ras-dva small GTPases in regulation of these processes, meanwhile their genes are eliminated in a stepwise manner during evolution till total absence in placental mammals. The obtained results support the hypothesis. The investigation is published in Scientific reports.

Researchers from the Biophotonics lab of IBCH RAS (Anastasia Mamontova, Konstantin Lukyanov and Alexey Bogdanov) designed a new green fluorescent protein that combines high fluorescence brightness and short fluorescence lifetime. They used a semi-rational protein evolution approach. Their collaborators from Bach Institute of Biochemistry and Semenov Institute of Physical Chemistry helped with the time-resolved fluorescence analysis (FLIM) that allowed characterizing the physical properties of this perspective probe. Research has recently been published in the Scientific Reports.

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Scientists from the Laboratory of biocatalysis developed a new microfluidics-based ultrahigh-throughput technology for the “deep functional profiling” of microbial communities and used it to search for bacteria producing new antibiotics in the microbiome of the Siberian bear's oral cavity. This methodology allowed them not only to find the antibiotic amicoumacin, elucidating the mechanisms of its biosynthesis and self-resistance, but also to investigate the spectrum of its activity at the level of various bacterial communities. The results published in PNAS will find numerous applications in the field of antibiotic discovery and will help to solve the problem of antibiotic resistance.

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