Lifeboat Foundation

The removal of one gene renders poxviruses—a lethal family of viral infections that are known to spread from animals to humans—harmless, a new study in the journal Science Advances reports.

During this ground-breaking study, scientists from the Spanish National Research Council and the University of Surrey investigated the immune response of cells to poxviruses. Poxviruses, such as cowpox and monkeypox, can spread to humans from infected animals, causing skin lesions, fever, swollen lymph nodes and even death.

Viruses contain genetic material which helps them outsmart host cells, enabling replication and the spread of the infection. Cells in the body are comprised of molecules that sense the presence of viruses, sometimes via the recognition of their genetic material, and alert the immune system of an upcoming infection. Poxviruses, unlike other viruses, are highly unusual in that they have large DNA genomes that are replicated exclusively in the cell cytosol, an area of the cell full of sensors. How poxviruses manage to stay undetectable has remained unknown.

Artificial intelligence (AI) experts at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and the Baylor College of Medicine report that they have successfully addressed what they call a “major, long-standing obstacle to increasing AI capabilities” by drawing inspiration from a human brain memory mechanism known as “replay.”

First author and postdoctoral researcher Gido van de Ven and principal investigator Andreas Tolias at Baylor, with Hava Siegelmann at UMass Amherst, write in Nature Communications that they have developed a new method to protect—” surprisingly efficiently”— deep neural networks from “catastrophic forgetting;” upon learning new lessons, the networks forget what they had learned before.

Siegelmann and colleagues point out that deep neural networks are the main drivers behind recent AI advances, but progress is held back by this forgetting.

Wouldn’t it be better to have a creature, something furry and warm that had the ability to produce perfect breast milk? A non-sentient, biological organism that has been engineered to produce milk nutritionally equivalent to mother’s milk? A milk Tribble? That type of technology would be awesome for babies.

Karl Schmieder: Is there a biological technology that you wished you had?

Andrew Hessel: I want the enzymatic DNA synthesizer that will be at least a thousand times better than what we have today. Next-generation sequencing technology massively accelerated our ability to read DNA. An enzymatic DNA synthesizer could be the equivalent accelerator for engineered biology. If you can synthesize DNA faster, then you can conduct more experiments and learn faster. That’s what I’d like to see. More people programming life.

In the past decade, researchers have engineered an array of new tools that control the balance of genetic inheritance. Based on CRISPR technology, such gene drives are poised to move from the laboratory into the wild where they are being engineered to suppress devastating diseases such as mosquito-borne malaria, dengue, Zika, chikungunya, yellow fever and West Nile. Gene drives carry the power to immunize mosquitoes against malarial parasites, or act as genetic insecticides that reduce mosquito populations.

Although the newest gene drives have been proven to spread efficiently as designed in laboratory settings, concerns have been raised regarding the safety of releasing such systems into wild populations. Questions have emerged about the predictability and controllability of gene drives and whether, once let loose, they can be recalled in the field if they spread beyond their intended application region.

Now, scientists at the University of California San Diego and their colleagues have developed two new active genetic systems that address such risks by halting or eliminating gene drives in the wild. On Sept.18, 2020 in the journal Molecular Cell, research led by Xiang-Ru Xu, Emily Bulger and Valentino Gantz in the Division of Biological Sciences offers two new solutions based on elements developed in the common fruit fly.

Ira Pastor, ideaXme life sciences ambassador, interviews Rick Bente, MSc, MBA, BS, CEO of Seventh Sense Biosystems.

Ira Pastor Comments:

Continue reading “World’s First Push Button Blood Collection: No More Needles?” »

This year’s ceremony was held virtually (thanks, coronavirus), but the fun remained.

“Planet Earth Report” provides descriptive links to headline news by leading science journalists about the extraordinary discoveries, technology, people, and events changing our knowledge of Planet Earth and the future of the human species.

The Universe Might Be Too Thin, Scientists may have found a new crack in our understanding of the universe, reports The Atlantic and Quanta. The cosmos is starting to look a bit weird. For a few years now, cosmologists have been troubled by a discrepancy in how fast the universe is expanding. They know how fast it should be going, based on ancient light from the early universe, but apparently the modern universe has picked up too much speed—a clue that scientists might have overlooked one of the universe’s fundamental ingredients, or some aspect of how those ingredients stir together.

The biotech company Moderna released a 135-page document on Thursday that spells out the details of how it is conducting the late-stage trial of its coronavirus vaccine.

The company hopes to earn the trust of the public and of scientists who have clamored for details of its study.

The disease is caused by a bacteria that commonly infects livestock.