News

New paper lays out Burroughs Wellcome Fund thinking regarding the importance of research into pregnancy.

29 June 2020

Advancing Human Health in the Decade Ahead: Pregnancy as a Key Window for Discovery A Burroughs Wellcome Fund Pregnancy Think-Tank. Yoel Sadovsky, MD Sam Mesiano, PhD Graham J. Burton, PhD Michelle Lampl, PhD, MD Jeffrey C. Murray, MD Rachel M. Freathy, PhD Anita Mahadevan-Jansen, PhD Ashley Moffett, MD Nathan D. Price...

Autophagy-mediated apoptosis eliminates chromosomally abnormal cells from the mouse epiblast

24 June 2020

New paper in Nature Communications by the Zernicka-Goetz group shows that apoptosis and autophagy ensure aneuploid cells in early stage embryos do not proceed through post-implantation development of the fetus not proceed through post-implantation development of the fetus Images from time-lapse series showing apoptosis of...

Chicks hatch clue on life-saving therapy for preterm babies

5 June 2020

Scientists at the University of Cambridge have suggested that subtle changes to the drugs administered to mothers threatened with preterm birth or to premature babies could further improve clinical treatment and help increase their safety. While the current practice of using glucocorticoid therapy shows life-saving...

Placental glycogen stores and fetal growth: insights from genetic mouse models, review article just publised in Reproduction

5 June 2020

Read the full review article by authors: Simon J Tunster , Erica D Watson , Abigail Fowden and Graham Burton here The placenta performs a range of crucial functions that support fetal growth during pregnancy, including facilitating the supply of oxygen and nutrients to the fetus, removal of waste products from the fetus...

Review on oxygen and development of the human placenta just published in Reproduction

29 May 2020

The review, writen by Burton GJ, Cindrova-Davies T, Yung HW, Jauniaux E. has just been published in Reproduction. You can read the full article here

Professor Wolf Reik FRS appointed Acting Director of the Babraham Institute

27 May 2020

Professor Wolf Reik has been appointed the Institute’s Acting Director with immediate effect, following the sad loss of Professor Michael Wakelam at the end of March. Professor Reik is an internationally renowned expert in the field of epigenetics and has led the Institute’s Epigenetics research programme since 2008. He...

Living cells adapt their stiffness to that of their surroundings, or not?

26 May 2020

Living cells adapt their stiffness to that of their surroundings, or not? New study by the Franze lab published in Nature Materials could have disproven a central dogma of mechanobiology: that living cells adapt their stiffness to the stiffness of their microenvironment. Scientists have developed a new method that allows...

Investigation of human trophoblast invasion in vitro, just published in Human Reproduction Update

26 May 2020

The paper by Yassen Abbas, Margherita Y Turco, Graham J Burton and Ashley Moffett b rings together engineering skills in microfluidics with a biological question that is central to placental development. You can read the full article here Abstract BACKGROUND In humans, inadequate trophoblast invasion into the decidua is...

TET1 and 5-Hydroxymethylation Preserve the Stem Cell State of Mouse Trophoblast, just published in Cell.com

22 May 2020

The ten-eleven translocation factor TET1 and its conferred epigenetic modification 5-hydroxymethylcytosine (5hmC) have important roles in maintaining the pluripotent state of embryonic stem cells (ESCs). We previously showed that TET1 is also essential to maintain the stem cell state of trophoblast stem cells (TSCs). Here...

A high-throughput platform for detailed lipidomic analysis of a range of mouse and human tissues, just published in Analytical and Bioanalytical Chemistry

13 May 2020

Lipidomics is of increasing interest in studies of biological systems. However, high-throughput data collection and processing remains non-trivial, making assessment of phenotypes difficult. We describe a platform for surveying the lipid fraction for a range of tissues. These techniques are demonstrated on a set of seven...