Ott Lab News

Gladstone Institutes — Earlier this year, the World Health Organization declared an end to the global health emergency for COVID-19. This announcement was quickly followed by the US federal government’s plan to end its own public health emergency declaration for the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Of course, SARS-CoV-2 is still with us. It is also ...

Fortune — Long COVID is no stranger to either patients or those immersed in studies of its effects. In the U.S., one in 7 adults–about 14% of the adult population–has experienced symptoms that lasted three months or longer after first contracting the virus. The worldwide estimate for long COVID is 65 million ...

Gladstone Institutes — Here’s the future: a doctor takes a blood sample from her sick patient. In the lab down the hallway, scientists reset the patient’s blood cells into a developmental blank slate using a cocktail of chemicals. Then, they add a combination of tiny molecules that edit the cells’ DNA. Perhaps this ...

Gladstone Institutes — Born and raised in Bangladesh, Mir Khalid (he/him) is a scientist in Melanie Ott’s lab at Gladstone Institutes. He completed his bachelors and master’s in genetic engineering and biotechnology at the University of Dhaka, Bangladesh. He completed a master’s in infection and immunity at Erasmus University in Rotterdam, Netherlands. He ...

Gladstone Institutes — To spread between cells in the body and hop from person to person, human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) must copy its genetic material, produce viral proteins, and assemble new virus particles. For this complex process to occur, a viral protein called Tat must bind to a section of the virus’s RNA—the ...

When Zika virus crosses the placenta to infect a foetus in a pregnant woman, it attacks life before it’s had a chance to establish itself, like squashing a seed before planting it. In particular, the virus infects starter cells for the nervous system, neural progenitor cells, thus causing wide-reaching developmental ...