The gut is famously known for its function in food digestion and absorption, but what if we told you that it is also involved in diseases like diabetes? Diabetes is a metabolic disease, which affects over 460 million adults worldwide, where the body struggles to regulate blood glucose levels. The gut releases hormones that help control glucose levels and, when severely obese patients with type 2 diabetes undergo a bypass surgery that rearranges their gut, they see independent weight loss and glucose improvements. Although various treatments are available for patients who suffer from diabetes, there are still many unresolved questions concerning its pathology which means we are yet to find a cure. This article explores how organoids, a 3D stem cell-derived model also known as a mini-organ, might be employed to study the gut’s role in diabetes. Intestinal organoids serve as an effective new model to better understand the disease, thanks to its ability in enabling the cells to arrange in a way that closely resembles the human gut. Using intestinal organoids in diabetes research could lead to new treatment options which are necessary in order to improve the lives of those whose are affected by diabetes every day.

Discussions on gender are a minefield of opinions, with gender too frequently the loser to agenda. This is not surprising, given the complexity of the discussion, but it is unhelpfully muddied by opinions which are not grounded in evidence and coloured by bias. Nevertheless, conversation which seeks to put evidence at its core helps to move the discussion onto a more useful level. Gina Rippon’s The Gendered Brain does just this, drawing on work in cognitive neuroscience and psychology to tackle the issues surrounding gender. Outside of the gender debate, neuroscience promises to push forward various stale philosophical discussions, and it is no different in this case.Surprisingly, Gina Rippon turns to the history of science for the source of many unfounded conclusions, deftly outlining how science has been guilty of serving a sexist social agenda. She describes how science research has pushed the idea of a male and a female brain, in the past often based on outlandish experiments, such as skull volume measurements using bird seed. Even recently, despite the advent of brain imaging techniques, conclusions have been declared regarding male–female differences which are often unsubstantiated. However, her point is not that there are necessarily no differences between male and female brains, but that the evidence accumulated so far is inconclusive. Certainly, the kinds of differences we hear sometimes, like women are inherently worse at spatial tasks, therefore are less equipped for a career in engineering, are not robustly supported and are woefully unfair: we exist in a rule-based environment and our brains are extremely adept at identifying these rules, however biased. It is perhaps lacking in discussion on sex differences elsewhere in the animal kingdom, as surely this is important when considering our own, but generally it is a well-balanced book, with fascinating information about our social brain, babies’ brains, and the issues around binary gender identity.A year on from publication, sociopolitical views are as polarized as ever, so it is crucial that we learn to identify our inherent biases and how they inform our world view. Reading books like The Gendered Brain, which is witty, accessible, and thought-provoking, is an excellent way to do this.

For the past 10 years, the Biochemical Society has looked to identify and celebrate outstanding science communication talent with an annual Science Communication Competition. In 2020, to mark the 10th anniversary of this scheme, the Society revamped the Competition by renaming it the ‘Biochemical Society Science Communication Prize’ and opened its applications to secondary/A-level students in addition to higher education students (as had been its exclusive remit in previous years).The prize attracted an international portfolio of engaging and creative entries, which could be submitted as a written piece or in a media format – such as video or audio – and had to be bioscience themed and aimed at the general public.The Biochemical Society was delighted with an amazing number of high-standard entries, which made competition for this year’s prize especially fierce. These entries were judged by a panel of four expert judges with expertise across science communication practice: Agnese Abrusci (Media Editor at Springer Nature), Catherine Webb (Teaching Fellow in Science Communication at Imperial College London), Güneş Taylor (Postdoctoral Research Fellow at The Francis Crick Institute and Crick Public Engagement Prize-awardee) and Rachel Kahn (Research Communications Manager at Blood Cancer UK).The Society is pleased to celebrate the 2020 Biochemical Society Science Communication Prize winners, all of them video entries!The winning entries in the secondary/A-level category covered biomolecular topics as wide as blood clotting, the physiological role of sleep and the myriad of ways our bodies are affected by alcohol when we drink. Resorting to an impressive array of creative techniques, from digital to stop-motion animation, these videos showcased clear and engaging science with remarkable media mastery. The first prize in this category went to Clarissa Pereira from Tiffin Girls’ School and her video ‘Blood clotting: the good, the bad &the sticky’. On winning this prize and why she had chosen to tackle her topic via video she said: ‘I am so thrilled to have won the Science Communication Prize, especially for such an important topic! The truth about blood clotting is tucked away in scientific journals, hidden behind paywalls and jargon complex enough to put off the most tenacious non-scientist. The difficulties I encountered in researching this topic drove me to make an animated video that could explain the fundamentals of blood clotting in an exciting way.’ The second and third prizes in this category were won, respectively, by Olga Kryl with the video ‘What is the purpose of sleep?’ and Sasha Scott with the animation ‘What happens when you drink?’The higher education category comprised another inspiring set of prize-winning videos. The first prize went to Lauryn Deaville, a biochemistry student at St Anne’s College, University of Oxford, and her engaging animated explanation of our circadian rhythms and light-sensing visual systems ‘What makes you tick? Your body clock, light sensing, and jet lag’. On winning her prize, Lauryn said: ‘after attending a talk on circadian rhythms and hearing about the competition from a tutor, I thought this could be a fun way to develop a new skill and explore an interesting aspect of biochemistry outside of my degree. The application of circadian rhythms to daily life made it the perfect topic for a video entry, and I loved the challenge of creating a story to show to viewers. I am so grateful to have been chosen as this year’s winner, and I hope my video might encourage others to explore the science behind daily life in a creative way!’ The second and third prizes in this category went to, respectively, Victoria Bolton for her video ‘Leishmania – the story of an ancient survivor’ and Shakira Mahadeva for her stop-motion animation on the molecular mechanisms of transcription ‘Switching genes on’.On this year’s Science Communication Prize, Dr Helen Watson, Chair of the Biochemical Society’s Education, Training and Public Engagement Committee, said: ‘We were very happy to see such a variety of interesting and dynamic topics for this year’s competition, especially from our new post-16 category. Science is often a complex topic to communicate, especially in these challenging times. We want to help make science as accessible as possible for the public, so it’s essential that we continue to encourage and support effective science communicators.’Visit our website to view the six winning entries in full: biochemistry.org/science-communication-prize-winners/

When Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein in 1818, she probably did not see synthetic biology coming. Shelley’s unorthodox use of galvanism and vivisection may have become computational biology, protein engineering and genome editing, but – many scientists would argue – has lost none of its gothic charm. As a truly interdisciplinary field, synthetic biology has been around – at least in its modern molecular incarnation – since Stanley Cohen and Herbert Boyer genetically engineered the first plasmid in 1973. In Synthetic Biology: A Very Short Introduction, Jamie Davies starts us off on the ‘creation of new living systems by design’ with one of many predictable clashes – between the economic forces who swear by the promise of synthetic biology and the bioethicists whose reservations keep this field at arm’s length. As most books in the Very Short Introduction series, Davies’ pocket-size guide provides readers with a thorough and engaging introduction to the biology and methods of synthetic biology while touring its numerous applications, from saving our oceans to changing the way we produce drugs. Davies does a great job of sketching a field concerned with the deliberate redesigning of life. As with other great introductions, by the end of this book, one cannot help oneself, but wanting to know more.

The history of mental illness has been the target of many scholarly works. Michel Foucault’s 1961 Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason is a notorious example, and the one that Andrew Scull paraphrases to title his 2015 Madness in Civilization: A Cultural History of Insanity, from the Bible to Freud, from the Madhouse to Modern Medicine. In that well-received global history of humanity’s encounters with unreason, Scull elaborates on this proposal for a culturally systematic ostracism of that shunned other, ‘the mad’, an argument that he picks up in Psychiatry and its Discontents (2019). In this new volume, Scull collects a series of 16 essays that take the reader on a hopscotch journey across the history of psychiatry, from a systematic evisceration of Foucault’s 1961 work to the taxonomic vicissitudes and shortcomings of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). Scull presents a patchy but solid case for a profession in need of profound reinvention — as he bluntly puts it, “an approach on the brink of collapse”. The biological turn of psychiatry has much to offer. As Scull suggests, however, this is a turn that has still not turned up.

As the cultural shift towards open scholarship continues to gather pace, members of the Society Publishers’ Coalition (SocPC) are leading the way with practical initiatives to foster openness, transparency and collaboration. SocPC members are on the road to open scholarship, and various paths to transition are taking shape in 2020.

The growing prevalence of antibiotic resistance is a global crisis. It is predicted that by 2050, antibiotic resistance-related deaths will exceed by 10 million per year. Thus, there is an urgent need for alternative strategies that can either replace or supplement antibiotic use. Bacteriophages and their encoded lytic proteins, called endolysins, have both shown promise as antibiotic alternatives. Bacteriophages were first investigated as therapeutics nearly a century ago, but the success of antibiotics led to phage therapy being largely abandoned in Western medicine until recently. While sporadic reports of life-saving successes in the ad hoc use of phage therapy have emerged, properly designed, robust clinical trials and clear regulatory guidelines are required before the true potential of phage therapy can be realized. In addition, despite endolysin research still being in its infancy, the early successes of endolysin-based therapeutics already entering clinical trials are an exciting glimpse into the future. No stone can be left unturned in the discovery and development of novel therapeutics if we are to ensure a future supply of effective treatments for bacterial infections.

Michael Woolley is a Principal Scientist in the Drug Product Development department at Novartis, Austria. In this role, he is part of a team that develops the manufacturing process for protein-based therapeutics (predominantly, antibody therapies). Michael did both his PhD (University of Warwick, UK) and postdoctoral research (University of Birmingham, UK) on the structure and function of the CGRP (Calcitonin gene-related peptide) receptor, a family B GPCR (G protein-coupled receptor). This research focused on understanding the ligand binding and activation mechanisms of this receptor.

Plants coordinate their growth and development through complex regulatory networks involving changes in the expression of thousands of genes. Many developmental pathways are regulated at the level of messenger RNA (mRNA) through alternative choices in mRNA processing. These choices can have consequences for the localization, stability or translatability of mRNAs. One of the key ways in which RNAs are processed is by the methylation of the RNA base adenosine – a modification known as m6A. Even though it was first discovered in the 1970s, the biological significance of m6A marks has only recently become clear. In this feature article, we identify the factors controlling the writing and reading of m6A modifications in plants. We also highlight some of the features of plant development that depend on m6A and explore the recently discovered molecular mechanisms that use m6A to control development or response to environmental stress.

While there is universal recognition of the dangers of antimicrobial resistance (AMR) to human health, far less attention has been directed towards the steady growth of resistance to the pesticides and herbicides that safeguard global food security. As a major constraint on crop productivity, weed competition causes greater losses than invertebrate pests and fungal pathogens combined, with the development of herbicide resistance now a primary agronomic threat to arable agriculture and horticulture. Here in the UK, our dominant crop, winter wheat, is now subject to annual losses of 1 million tons of grain equating to an estimated £0.5 billion, primarily due to the mass evolution of herbicide resistance in the highly competitive weed blackgrass (Alopecurus myosuroides). Informed by strategies being developed in healthcare to combat AMR through its rapid identification, we now look to new tools to combat herbicide and pesticide resistance informed by molecular diagnostics.