You’ve seen hydrogels before: they’re used in glues, contact lenses, breast implants, band-aids– the list goes on. Hydrogels aren’t exactly one thing, but a classification of gel: they’re solid gel substances, held together by tightly connected molecules. They also absorb water easily.
Hydrogels are clearly useful for all sorts of purposes, and many have predicted they could be a powerful tool for medical research. They occur naturally in living things. Usually floating, gelatinous things are protected by a cell membrane, which preserve their shape. When a cell is under stress from factors like hunger, severe temperature, or disease, RNA and proteins sometimes clump into membrane-less globs, called stress granules.
Scientists have long suspected these stress granules are related to ALS and other neurodegenerative diseases– too many or too few granules are linked to symptoms. To learn more about ALS, click here.
Unfortunately, natural hydrogels are notoriously hard to study. They’re delicate, and don’t hold up well in a lab environment.
However, a team of scientists at Johns Hopkins may have found a way around these obstacles. They developed a system called iPOLYMER, by engineering cells to have two sorts of protein binding strings, and then adding a drug named rapamycin.
It worked. The team created hydrogels inside a living cell– something nobody had succeeded at before. While they’re still fine-tuning and conducting research on how to better imitate the stress granules that may be behind ALS, this is an accomplishment on its own.
This opens doors to research on neurodegenerative disease that scientists have never been able to study before.
