Lifeboat Foundation

CHICAGO, IL — Scientists are already preparing for a possible next coronavirus pandemic to strike, keeping with the seven-year pattern since 2004.

In future-looking research, Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine scientists have identified a novel target for a drug to treat SARS-CoV-2 that also could impact a new emerging coronavirus.

“God forbid we need this, but we will be ready,” said Karla Satchell, professor of microbiology-immunology at Feinberg, who leads an international team of scientists to analyze the important structures of the virus. The Northwestern team previously mapped the structure of a virus protein called nsp16, which is present in all coronaviruses. This new study provides critical information that could aid drug development against future coronaviruses as well as SARS-CoV-2.

The population on Earth is increasingly growing and people are expected to live longer in the future. Thus, better and more reliable therapies to treat human diseases such as Alzheimer’s and cardiovascular diseases are crucial. To cope with the challenge of ensuring healthy aging, a group of international scientists investigated the potential of biosynthesising several polyamines and polyamines analogs with already known functionalities in treating and preventing age-related diseases.

One of the most interesting molecules to study was spermidine, which is a natural product already present in people’s blood and an inducer of autophagy that is an essential cellular process for clearing damaged proteins, e.g., misfolded proteins in brain cells that can cause Alzheimer’s. When people get older the level of spermidine in the blood decrease and dietary supplements, or certain food products are needed to maintain a stable and high level of spermidine in the blood. However, those products are difficult to produce with traditional chemistry due to their structural complexity and extraction of natural resources is neither a commercially viable nor a sustainable approach.

Therefore, the researchers instead decided to open their biochemical toolbox and use classical metabolic engineering strategies to engineer the yeast metabolism to produce polyamines and polyamines analogs.

Research conducted by Qiang et al has discovered a link between a protein in red blood cells and age-related decline in cognitive performance. Published in the open access journal PLOS Biology on 17th June 2021, the study shows that depleting mouse blood of the protein ADORA2B leads to faster declines in memory, delays in auditory processing, and increased inflammation in the brain.

As life expectancies around the world increase, so are the number of people who will experience age-related cognitive decline. Because the amount of oxygen in the blood also declines with age, the team hypothesized that aging in the brain might be naturally held at bay by adenosine receptor A2B (ADORA2B), a protein on the membrane of red blood cells which is known to help release oxygen from the blood cells so it can be used by the body. To test this idea, they created mice that lacked ADORA2B in their blood and compared behavioral and physiological measures with control mice.

The team found that as the mice got older, the hallmarks of cognitive decline—poor memory, hearing deficits, and inflammatory responses in the brain—were all greater in the mice lacking ADORA2B than in the control mice. Additionally, after experiencing a period of oxygen deprivation, the behavioral and physiological effects on young mice without ADORA2B were much greater than those on normal young mice.

More than a year later, scientists finally figured out what caused this famous star to dim.

More than a year after Betelgeuse’s great dimming event, scientists have finally figured out what happened to cause this star to lose its brightness.

This looks extremely promising:

SAN DIEGO, June 17, 2021 /PRNewswire/ — Viking Therapeutics, Inc. (Viking) (NASDAQ: VKTX), a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company focused on the development of novel therapies for metabolic and endocrine disorders, today announced results from the company’s Phase 1 single ascending dose (SAD) and multiple ascending dose (MAD) clinical trial of VK0214, a novel, orally available small molecule thyroid receptor beta (TRβ) agonist in development for the potential treatment for X-linked adrenoleukodystrophy (X-ALD). In this study, VK0214 demonstrated encouraging safety and tolerability, as well as a predictable pharmacokinetic (PK) profile. The company expects to initiate a Phase 1b study of VK0214 in patients with X-ALD in the coming weeks.

The Phase 1 trial was a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled study in healthy volunteers. The primary objective of the study was to evaluate the safety and tolerability of VK0214 administered orally for up to 14 days. The secondary objective was to evaluate the pharmacokinetics of VK0214 following single and multiple oral doses. The first portion of the study evaluated single doses of VK0214; in the second portion of the study subjects received VK0214 once daily for 14 days. Subsequent cohorts in both parts of the study received successively higher VK0214 doses.

VK0214 was shown to be safe and well-tolerated at all doses evaluated in this study. No serious adverse events were reported, and no treatment or dose-related trends were observed for vital signs, gastrointestinal effects, cardiovascular measures, or physical examinations. VK0214 demonstrated dose-dependent exposures, no evidence of accumulation following multiple doses, and a half-life consistent with anticipated once-daily dosing regimens.

Continue reading “Viking Therapeutics Announces Results from Phase 1 Clinical Trial of Novel Oral Thyroid Receptor Beta Agonist VK0214” »

This special issue of Nature shines a spotlight on collaborations in science today, particularly in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic. It reveals that such cooperation, although complex, is thriving in many ways. It is clearly essential, both to the progress of research and for the betterment of society. But, at the same time, international collaboration is under pressure, partly as a result of geopolitical tensions. And science’s historical conventions continue to hinder such team-based working.

The other is the initiative created in Flint. Lewis is a community activist and now principal investigator at the Flint Center for Health Equity Solutions. Sadler is a geographer at Michigan State University. They draw lessons from how researchers and members of the community worked together to identify where diseases were concentrated. It’s a frank account that also flags the fact that some scientists discounted and overlooked ideas from communities, and raises the injustice of work that saves lives not necessarily meeting the ‘excellence’ criteria needed to progress in academic institutions.

These are clearly testing times for collaboration. The stories and data show that there is still some way to travel before all parts of the research enterprise recognize the true value of working across borders, cultures and disciplines.

Continue reading “Research collaborations bring big rewards: the world needs more” »

In the very last moments of the movie, however, you would also see something unusual: the sprouting of clouds of satellites, and the wrapping of the land and seas with wires made of metal and glass. You would see the sudden appearance of an intricate artificial planetary crust capable of tremendous feats of communication and calculation, enabling planetary self-awareness — indeed, planetary sapience.

The emergence of planetary-scale computation thus appears as both a geological and geophilosophical fact. In addition to evolving countless animal, vegetal and microbial species, Earth has also very recently evolved a smart exoskeleton, a distributed sensory organ and cognitive layer capable of calculating things like: How old is the planet? Is the planet getting warmer? The knowledge of “climate change” is an epistemological accomplishment of planetary-scale computation.

Over the past few centuries, humans have chaotically and in many cases accidentally transformed Earth’s ecosystems. Now, in response, the emergent intelligence represented by planetary-scale computation makes it possible, and indeed necessary, to conceive an intentional, directed and worthwhile planetary-scale terraforming. The vision for this is not to be found in computing infrastructure itself, but in the purposes to which we put it.

Fossilized bones from extinct taxa harbor the potential for obtaining protein or DNA sequences that could reveal evolutionary links to extant species. We used mass spectrometry to obtain protein sequences from bones of a 160000-to 600000-year-old extinct mastodon (Mammut americanum) and a 68-million-year-old dinosaur (Tyrannosaurus rex). The presence of T. rex sequences indicates that their peptide bonds were remarkably stable. Mass spectrometry can thus be used to determine unique sequences from ancient organisms from peptide fragmentation patterns, a valuable tool to study the evolution and adaptation of ancient taxa from which genomic sequences are unlikely to be obtained.

The metazoan mitochondrial genome (mitogenome) is an ideal model system for comparative and evolutionary genomic research. The typical mitogenome of metazoans encodes a conserved set of 37 genes for 13 protein-coding genes (PCGs), two ribosomal RNA (rRNA) genes, and 22 transfer RNA (tRNA) genes¹, with genome-level characters, such as genome size, gene content, and gene order, display high diversity in some lineages^2,3. Gene rearrangements are observed frequently in some groups, while gene duplication and loss are distributed sporadically in limited lineages such as Bivalvia, Cephalopod, and Afrobatrachia^4,5,6. These remaining duplicate genes and pseudogenes represent important data for exploring the evolutionary history and mechanisms of gene rearrangement and recruitment. For the arrangement of mitochondrial genes, the variation in relative positions of PCGs and rRNA genes are more limited compared with that of tRNA genes across organisms within a phylum⁷. The tRNA genes with characteristics of diverse changes in relative position, gene content, and secondary structure, are considered as an important tool in studying the evolution of mitogenome, in particular to the rearrangement mechanism^8,9,10. Additionally, its variation is usually linked to evolutionary relationships in a wide range of lineages at different taxonomic levels suggesting these features of tRNA could be utilized as useful phylogenetic markers¹¹.

The extensive gene rearrangements (including PCGs and RNA) of insect mitogenomes have been detected in several lineages within the Diptera (Trichoceridae, Cecidomyiidae), Hemiptera (Enicocephalidae), Hymenoptera, Thysanoptera, Psocoptera and Phthiraptera^{12,13,14,15,16,17,18}, while most of investigated mitogenomes share the same gene order with the hypothesized ancestral pancrustacean mitogenome arrangement¹⁹ or possess rare tRNA rearrangement. Previously reported dictyopteran mitogenomes consistently display the typical ancestral gene order and content, however only two species are praying mantises and the rest are cockroaches and termites. Members of the Mantodea, a separate lineage within the Dictyoptera, have evolved many unique morphological and behavioural features as the ambush and pursuit predators^20,21,22. A better understanding of the diversity of mitogenome evolution in this enigmatic order underlines the need for exploring more taxa with the diverse praying mantis.

Herein, we report eight new mitogenomes from Mantodea and describe their general characteristics. Two new gene rearrangements and reassignment of tRNA genes are described, and evolutionary mechanisms for the gene rearrangements and duplication are discussed. Further, we examine the relationship between tRNA gene duplication and codon usage, and investigate whether these tRNA features vary with phylogeny.