Highlights

Every year, a committee of experts sits down with a tough job to do: from among all ICREA publications, they must find a handful that stand out from all the others. This is indeed a challenge. The debates are sometimes heated and always difficult but, in the end, a shortlist of  the most outstanding publications of the year is produced. No prize is awarded, and the only additional acknowledge is the honour of being chosen and highlighted by ICREA. Each piece has something unique about it, whether it be a particularly elegant solution, the huge impact it has in the media or the sheer fascination it generates as a truly new idea. For whatever the reason, these are the best of the best and, as such, we are proud to share them here.

LIST OF SCIENTIFIC HIGHLIGHTS

Format: yyyy

  • Disruption of type I interferon is often the cause of life-threatening COVID-19 (2020)

    Martínez-Picado, Javier (IrsiCaixa)
    Pujol Onofre, Aurora (IDIBELL)

    view details
    CLOSE

    Disruption of type I interferon is often the cause of life-threatening COVID-19

    More than 10% of young and healthy people who develop severe COVID-19 have misguided antibodies that attack not the virus, but the immune system itself, and another 3.5%, at least, carry a specific kind of genetic mutation.

    In both groups, the upshot is the same: The patients lack type I interferon, a set of proteins crucial for protecting cells from viral infections. Whether the proteins have been neutralized by so-called auto-antibodies, or were not produced due to genetic mutations, the missing-in-action of the first barrier against SARS-CoV-2 appears to be a common theme among a subgroup of severe COVID-19 sufferers.

    Published in two back-to-back papers in Science, and highlighted as one of the Top 10 scientific discoveries of 2020 by the journal Nature, the findings help explain why some people develop a disease much more severe than others in their age group.

    One study analyzed the genomes from more than 650 patients who had been hospitalized for life-threatening pneumonia due to SARS-CoV-2. It also included samples from another 530 people with asymptomatic or benign infection. A significant number of patients (around 3.5%) with severe disease carried rare pathogenic variants in 13 genes that govern the type I interferons. As a consequence, their immune cells did not produce type I interferons in response to the virus.

    The second study examined 987 patients with life-threatening COVID-19 pneumonia. More than 10% had auto-antibodies against interferons at the onset of their infection. The majority of them, 95%, were men. Biochemical experiments confirmed these auto-antibodies, which are extremely rare in the general population, can effectively curb the activity of interferon.

    The findings point to certain medical interventions to consider for further investigation, including therapies with two types of interferons available as drugs and approved for use to treat certain conditions.

    These are the first results being published out of the COVID Human Genetic Effort, an ongoing international consortium spanning over 50 sequencing hubs and hundreds of hospitals around the world.

  • Phase transitions from the fifth dimension (2020)

    Mateos, David (UB)

    view details
    CLOSE

    Phase transitions from the fifth dimension

    Phase transitions are ubiquitous in Nature. They are common in our everyday's life (cooled water turns into ice) and they play a crucial role in particle physics (at high temperatures neutrons and protons melt into a plasma of quarks and gluons). Yet, following the dynamics in real time of a system undergoing a phase transition is extremely difficult with conventional methods, since the physics involved is typically out of equilibrium. For this reason we have used a string-theoretical tool known as "holography", which maps the properties of quantum matter in our four-dimensional world to those of … a classical black hole in five dimensions!

    By solving Einstein's equations in five dimensions we have determined the time evolution of the black hole horizon, and from this the evolution of the four-dimensional system across the phase transition. We have shown that a supercooled or superheated system evolves into a "phase-separated" state in which the two phases coexist in thermal equilibrium -- as ice cubes floating in water or as a quark-gluon plasma coexisting with a gas of protons and neutrons. Moreover, we have been able to determine the shape of the interface between the two phases, since this corresponds to the shape of the black hole horizon in five dimensions. 

  • Design and fabrication of nanoparticle-based lateral-flow immunoassays (2020)

    Merkoçi, Arben (ICN2)

    view details
    CLOSE

    Design and fabrication of nanoparticle-based lateral-flow immunoassays

    Lateral flow assays (LFAs) represent one of the most important point of care (POC) devices for diagnostics applications. LFAs are quick, simple and cheap assays that can be used to analyse various samples out of the laboratory making them one of the most widespread biosensors currently available. LFAs have been successfully employed for various applications that range from chemical to biochemical analytes in various kinds of samples (ex. water, blood, food or environmental samples). LFAs operation is based on the capillary flow of the sample throughout a series of sequential pads with different functionalities aiming to generate a signal to indicate the absence/presence (and, in some cases, the concentration) of the analyte of interest. To have a user-friendly operation, their development requires the optimization of multiple and interconnected parameters. This process is quite important for those who are involved in the LFA development and application. In this tutorial we provide the readers with important knowledge including procedures and results with interest for research and development of LFAs based on nanoparticles as signalling tools. Some basic knowledge to understand the principles governing an LFA and to take informed decisions during lateral flow strip design and fabrication are given first. This is followed by a roadmap for optimal LFA development independent of the specific application and step-by-step example procedure for the assembly and operation of an LF strip for the detection of human Immunoglobulin G. The tutorial also contains an extensive troubleshooting section addressing the most frequent issues in designing, assembling and using LFAs. By changing only the receptors, the provided example procedure can easily be adapted for cost-efficient detection of a broad variety of targets with interest for various applications including applications with interest for some COVID19 related biomarkers.

  • Deciphering the mechanism that determines organ size and shape (2020)

    Milán Kalbfleisch, Marco (IRB Barcelona)

    view details
    CLOSE

    Deciphering the mechanism that determines organ size and shape

    Morphogens are distributed throughout tissues in a concentration gradient, informing cells about the "location” within a tissue and providing instructions on how these cells should develop. Several studies have reported that these morphogens are also responsible for the growth of these tissues. While the presence of morphogens along a gradient defines the spatial distribution of the different structures, the study headed by the Milán lab has used the developing wing primordium of Drosophila to demonstrate that the gradient itself is not indispensable to promote growth. The two morphogens addressed in this study, namely Dpp and Wg (the orthologues of BMP and Wnt in vertebrates), promote the growth of the fly wing, but through two independent and non-interchangeable pathways. Dpp stimulates growth along the anteroposterior axis in a unique and exclusive manner, while Wg favours proliferative activity along the proximodistal axis.  The work carried out by Lara Barrio and Marco Milán demonstrates that the capacity of these morphogens to promote growth in two distinct directions is due to their restricted  expression in two perpendicular bands and to the need for both to be present for the tissue to grow. These findings thus reveal the mechanism through which organ proportions are regulated by morphogen activity. Given the high genetic and mechanistic conservation between flies and humans, these discoveries pave the way for new research lines into congenital malformations and other diseases

  • Entanglement of 15 trillion hot, strongly-interacting atoms (2020)

    Mitchell, Morgan W. (ICFO)

    view details
    CLOSE

    Entanglement of 15 trillion hot, strongly-interacting atoms

    Quantum entanglement is a process by which microscopic objects like electrons or atoms lose their individuality to become better coordinated with each other.  Entanglement is at the heart of quantum technologies that promise large advances in computing, communications and sensing, for example detecting gravitational waves. Entanglement is also thought to play an important role in macroscopic quantum phenomena such as superconductivity.

    Entangled states are famously fragile: in most cases even a tiny disturbance will undo the entanglement. For this reason, current quantum technologies take great pains to isolate the microscopic systems they work with, and typically operate at temperatures close to absolute zero. Here, in contrast, we heated a collection of atoms to 450 Kelvin, millions of times hotter than most atoms used for quantum technology. Moreover, the individual atoms were anything but isolated; they collided with each other every few microseconds, and each collision set their electrons spinning in random directions.

    We then used a laser to monitor the magnetization of this hot, chaotic gas. The magnetization is caused by the spinning electrons in the atoms, and provides a way to study the effect of the collisions and to detect entanglement. What we observed was an enormous number of entangled atoms – about 100 times more than ever before observed.  We also saw that the entanglement is non-local – it involves atoms that are not close to each other. Between any two entangled atoms there are thousands of other atoms, many of which are entangled with still other atoms, in a giant, hot and messy entangled state.

  • Developing kidney organoids to reveal how the coronavirus ravages the body (2020)

    Montserrat Pulido, Núria (IBEC)

    view details
    CLOSE

    Developing kidney organoids to reveal how the coronavirus ravages the body

    The generation of organoids is one of the biggest scientific advances in regenerative medicine. Here by exposing human pluripotent stem cells into inductive signals mirroring those found during embryonic kidney development I lead my team to derive mini-kidneys which upon single cell profiling showed to contain multiple cell clusters capturing important features of the human developing kidney. Upon extensive characterization we aimed to understand how SARS-Co-V2 interacts and infects human kidney cells. Our collaborative work also exploited vascular organoids to explore these questions. Moreover, we could validate a therapy able to reduce substantially viral load in both kidney and vascular organoids.

    This international collaboration led to more than 250 press communications (including TV, radio and web), being recently awarded by the ATRESMEDIA group and Fundación AXA with the award “Constants and Vitals” as the Best biomedical publication of 2020. Our collaboration with Professor Josef Penninger (Director of Life Science Institute at University British Columbia in Vancouver and IMBA in Vienna) and Professor Ali Mirazimi (Karolinska Institutet, Sweden) has also materialized in the obtention of different grants aiming to exploit organoid technology to target SARS-CoV-2-cell interactions, including ISCIII, IMI-H2020 and Fundación BBVA calls during 2020. 

     

Pages