About Us
Founded in 1944, the American Committee for the Weizmann Institute of Science develops philanthropic support for the Weizmann Institute in Israel, and advances its mission of science for the future of humanity.
https://www.weizmann-usa.org/blog/in-celebration-of-crispr/
Oct 29, 2020...
In February 2017, in Boston for the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s (AAAS’s) annual conference, The Curiosity Review snagged a chair in a packed ballroom of attendees.
The main attraction was Dr. Emmanuelle Charpentier. Then a rock star to scientists, today she is headline news; along with her longtime collaborator, Dr. Jennifer Doudna, Charpentier just received the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the development of CRISPR. The method, which stands for “clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats,” enables scientists to edit DNA.
Nov 05, 2020... REHOVOT, ISRAEL—November 5, 2020—Peculiar hybrid structures called retrons that are half RNA, half single-strand DNA are found in many species of bacteria. Since their discovery around 35 years ago, researchers have learned how to use retrons for producing single strands of DNA in the lab – yet despite extensive research into the matter, the retrons’ function in the bacteria was unknown. Now, in a paper published in Cell, Weizmann Institute of Science researchers report that the longstanding mystery has been solved: Retrons are immune system “guards” that ensure the survival of the bacterial colony when it is infected by viruses.
Dec 16, 2020... REHOVOT, ISRAEL—December 16, 2020—Cancers like melanoma are hard to treat, not least because they have a varied bag of tricks for defeating or evading treatments. Now, a combined research effort by the Weizmann Institute of Science, the Netherlands Cancer Institute in Amsterdam, and the University of Oslo shows exactly how tumors, in their fight to survive, will go so far as to starve themselves in order to keep the immune cells that would eradicate them from functioning. The work was published in Nature.
Jan 19, 2021...
Prof. Maya Schuldiner of Weizmann’s Department of Molecular Genetics uses analogies to clarify the nature of cells. These tiny living beings are highly organized communities, and while there are different types – blood, skin, etc. – they have basically the same elements. One of these is the peroxisome, an organelle whose malfunction or absence can lead to devastating diseases in children.
Because cells are so similar, Prof. Schuldiner’s lab is able to use common Baker’s yeast as a stand in for the human cell to study peroxisomes. She hopes to someday offer treatment – even a cure – for the unique children suffering from peroxisomal diseases.
https://www.weizmann-usa.org/news-media/news-releases/the-triple-threat-of-coronavirus/
May 12, 2021... REHOVOT, ISRAEL—May 12, 2021—Severe symptoms of COVID-19, leading often to death, are thought to result from the patient’s own acute immune response rather than from damage inflicted directly by the virus. Intensive research efforts are therefore seeking to determine how the SARS-CoV-2 virus manages to mount an effective invasion while throwing the immune system off course. A new study, published in Nature, reveals a multipronged strategy that the virus employs to ensure its quick and efficient replication, while avoiding detection by the immune system. The study, conducted jointly by the research groups of Dr. Noam Stern-Ginossar at the Weizmann Institute of Science and Dr. Nir Paran and Dr. Tomer Israely of the Israel Institute for Biological, Chemical and Environmental Sciences, focused on understanding the molecular mechanisms at work during infection by SARS-CoV-2 at the cellular level.
May 12, 2021...
COVID-19 is so dangerous because the virus uses a three-pronged attack mechanism to stop cells from quickly triggering the immune system, Israeli scientists have concluded.
They offer a portrait of how exactly the SARS-CoV-2 virus behaves once inside human cells — they say it’s the most detailed to date — in an article published on Wednesday in the peer-reviewed journal Nature.
After hundreds of hours in their labs monitoring the virus interacting with cells, they have concluded that the virus mounts a hostile takeover on the cell’s protein-making machinery, and stops it from making proteins needed to galvanize the immune system.
https://www.weizmann-usa.org/news-media/news-releases/a-natural-food-supplement-may-relieve-anxiety/
May 18, 2021... REHOVOT, ISRAEL—May 18, 2021—A natural food supplement reduces anxiety in mice, according to a new Weizmann Institute of Science study. The plant-derived substance, beta-sitosterol, was found to produce the calming effect both on its own and in synergic combination with a common antidepressant, fluoxetine (brand name Prozac). If these findings, published in Cell Reports Medicine, are confirmed in clinical trials, they could point the way toward the use of beta-sitosterol as a treatment for relieving anxiety in humans.
https://www.weizmann-usa.org/news-media/video-gallery/decoding-the-functions-of-long-non-coding-rna/
Dec 22, 2021... Prof. Ulitsky’s discoveries have unlocked the potential of using lncRNAs as both therapeutic agents and targets with promising potential treatment of diseases such as cancer, brain injury, and epilepsy.
https://www.weizmann-usa.org/news-media/feature-stories/the-primordial-soap/
Mar 14, 2022...
What is the origin of life? It’s one of humanity’s greatest questions, and theories differ amidst the scientific community. Right now, the leading hypothesis is that life developed from RNA molecules, known for being able to self-replicate.
Weizmann’s Prof. Doron Lancet disagrees, and thinks it’s highly improbable that the origin of life traces back to a single complex molecule. More likely, he believes it traces back to assemblies of simple chemical compounds that can form spontaneously and reproduce as a whole, and he’s built a computational chemistry model to show the feasibility of this alternative timeline.
Aug 01, 2022... REHOVOT, ISRAEL—August 1, 2022— An egg meets a sperm – that’s a necessary first step in life’s beginnings, and it’s also a common first step in embryonic development research. But in a Weizmann Institute of Science study published today in Cell, researchers have grown synthetic embryo models of mice outside the womb by starting solely with stem cells cultured in a petri dish – that is, without the use of fertilized eggs. The method opens new horizons for studying how stem cells form various organs in the developing embryo, and may one day make it possible to grow tissues and organs for transplantation using synthetic embryo models.
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