Just as people are picky about the type of mattress they want to sleep on – not too hard, but not so soft either – so are cells. In fact, the rigidity of the cellular environment is so important that it can be the determining factor of whether a stem cell will differentiate into bone or fat, for example – or whether a cell behaves normally or turns cancerous.

Researchers at IBEC have made an important leap towards understanding the second most common neurodegenerative illness, Parkinson’s disease (PD), which affects around 5% of the population by age 85.

We’ve all eaten rich meals or fatty foods and joked that we can feel our ‘arteries hardening’. However, the reality of atherosclerosis – when fat, cholesterol, and other substances build up in the artery walls and form solid structures called plaques – is no joking matter. The consequences of this disorder can include stroke and coronary artery disease, the leading cause of death in many developed countries.

This image, which features on the November cover of the high-impact journal Trends in Cell Biology, illustrates work by researchers from Barcelona’s Institute for Bioengineering of Catalonia (IBEC), who collaborated with Harvard investigators earlier this year to come up with a brand new concept in biology, plithotaxis.

Scientists at the Institute for Bioengineering of Catalonia (IBEC) describe a major step towards the understanding of epilepsy in a paper published in Molecular Biology of the Cell.

The Institute for Bioengineering of Catalonia (IBEC) has been selected to go through to the next phase of the Ministry of Science and Innovation’s ‘Apoyo a Centros y Unidades de Excelencia Severo Ochoa’ programme, it was announced today.

First measurements of forces driving collective cell migration unveil new principle in biology

Wine fraud is a growing problem, with experts estimating that up to 10% of the wines offered to consumers in some European countries are of a lesser quality than the label claims. It’s an issue that affects everyone from expert collectors to average consumers, and is such a concern in some countries that drastic measures have been taken: the Italian Carabinieri Corps, for instance, has educated 25 of their officers as sommeliers.

People can be brittle, transparent, shattered, or have a heart of glass. Now these attributes seem all the more appropriate following a discovery by researchers that migrating cells in our bodies behave in a remarkably similar way to glass when it is heated and cooled.

Flick a switch, turn a knob or pull a lever and you’re operating an electromechanical device, albeit a complex one. Now an IBEC researcher and his collaborators have broken new ground with a proven concept for the first such electronic component to operate using just a single-molecule electrical contact.