An active ingredient in honeybee venom rapidly kills aggressive and hard-to-treat forms of breast cancer cells.
Category: biotech/medical – Page 1507
In a technique known as DNA origami, researchers fold long strands of DNA over and over again to construct a variety of tiny 3D structures, including miniature biosensors and drug-delivery containers. Pioneered at the California Institute of Technology in 2006, DNA origami has attracted hundreds of new researchers over the past decade, eager to build receptacles and sensors that could detect and treat disease in the human body, assess the environmental impact of pollutants, and assist in a host of other biological applications.
Although the principles of DNA origami are straightforward, the technique’s tools and methods for designing new structures are not always easy to grasp and have not been well documented. In addition, scientists new to the method have had no single reference they could turn to for the most efficient way of building DNA structures and how to avoid pitfalls that could waste months or even years of research.
That’s why Jacob Majikes and Alex Liddle, researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) who have studied DNA origami for years, have compiled the first detailed tutorial on the technique. Their comprehensive report provides a step-by-step guide to designing DNA origami nanostructures, using state-of-the-art tools. Majikes and Liddle described their work in the Jan .8 issue of the Journal of Research of the National Institute of Standards and Technology.
Gene therapies are opening up possibilities that were once reserved for science fiction.
At Harvard University, Professor of Genetics David Sinclair says he believes it’s possible to unlock the fountain of youth, and gene therapy is the key.
Sinclair spent two years trying to correct the vision of a mouse using gene therapy, and finally succeeded in doing it.
Although these discoveries are encouraging, Sinclair cautions that people set their expectations realistically.
Octopus and squid make strange evolutionary shortcuts in adaptation. Evolution is an intricate process of change.
According to Science Alert, species of squid and octopus may yet have some surprises in store for us. “In a surprising twist, scientists discovered that octopuses, along with some squid and cuttlefish species, routinely edit their RNA (ribonucleic acid) sequences to adapt to their environment,” the article said.
“When an organism changes in some fundamental way, it typically starts with a genetic mutation—a change to the DNA. Those genetic changes are then translated into action by DNA’s molecular sidekick, RNA.”
Methylation and demethylation of DNA, RNA and proteins has emerged as a major regulatory mechanism. Studying the function of these modifications would benefit from tools for their site‐specific inhibition and timed removal. S ‐Adenosyl‐L‐methionine (AdoMet) analogs in combination with methyltransferases (MTases) have proven useful to map or block and release MTase target sites, however their enzymatic generation has been limited to aliphatic groups at the sulfur atom. We engineered a SAM synthetase from Cryptosporidium hominis (PC‐ChMAT) for efficient generation of AdoMet analogs with photocaging groups that are not accepted by any WT MAT reported to date. The crystal structure of PC‐ChMAT at 1.87 Å revealed how the photocaged AdoMet analog is accommodated and guided engineering of a thermostable MAT from Methanocaldococcus jannaschii. PC‐MATs were compatible with DNA‐ and RNA‐MTases, enabling sequence‐specific modification (“writing”) of plasmid DNA and light‐triggered removal (“erasing”).
Biotin is also known as vitamin H, named for the German words “Haar” and “Haut,” which mean hair and skin. This was due to the fact that even slight deficiencies cause hair thinning, skin rash or brittle fingernails. New research, just published in PNAS, now shows that some forms of severe neurodegeneration, like the frontotemporal dementia seen in Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, can directly result from lack of sufficient biotin.
The authors discovered this by looking at fruit flies with dementia. Now, before anyone chuckles, fruit flies actually make a nice model of Alzheimer’s or other diseases when they are given the right genes. Human versions of defective MAPT (tau) genes cause these flies to develop tauopathies that resemble those that occur in our own brains. To delve deeper into the neurotoxicity of tau, they looked at over 7000 fly genes in a forward genetic screen before zeroing in on one significantly modified toxicity of the tauR406W mutant. This gene, Btnd, encodes the biotinidase enzyme that extracts biotin from food sources or recycles it from used enzymes.
TOKYO (Reuters) — Men wearing traditional loin clothes and women dressed in white robes clapped and chanted before going into an ice water bath during a Shinto ritual at a Tokyo shrine on Sunday to purify the soul and pray for the end of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Only a dozen people took part in the annual event at Teppou-zu Inari Shrine, scaled down this year due to the health crisis, compared to over a hundred in early 2020. Spectators were not allowed at the event.
After doing warming-up exercises and chanting under a clear sky with outside temperatures at 5.1 degree Celsius (41.18 Fahrenheit), the nine male and three female participants went into a bath filled with cold water and large ice blocks. “I prayed that the coronavirus comes to an end as soon as possible,” said 65-year-old participant Shinji Ooi, who heads the Shrine’s ‘Yayoikai’ parishioner group, after the ritual.
Hey it’s Han from WrySci HX coming to you with exciting news out of Johns Hopkins University. A man was able to control two robotic arms simultaneously via a brain computer interface to the point of feeding himself. Amazing stuff! More below ↓↓↓
Subscribe! =]
Please consider supporting 🙏
Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/wrysci_hx.
A new deep-learning algorithm could provide advanced notice when systems — from satellites to data centers — are falling out of whack.
When you’re responsible for a multimillion-dollar satellite hurtling through space at thousands of miles per hour, you want to be sure it’s running smoothly. And time series can help.
A time series is simply a record of a measurement taken repeatedly over time. It can keep track of a system’s long-term trends and short-term blips. Examples include the infamous Covid-19 curve of new daily cases and the Keeling curve that has tracked atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations since 1958. In the age of big data, “time series are collected all over the place, from satellites to turbines,” says Kalyan Veeramachaneni. “All that machinery has sensors that collect these time series about how they’re functioning.”
Before the pandemic, the lab of Stanford University biochemist Peter S. Kim focused on developing vaccines for HIV, Ebola and pandemic influenza. But, within days of closing their campus lab space as part of COVID-19 precautions, they turned their attention to a vaccine for SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. Although the coronavirus was outside the lab’s specific area of expertise, they and their collaborators have managed to construct and test a promising vaccine candidate.
“Our goal is to make a single-shot vaccine that does not require a cold-chain for storage or transport. If we’re successful at doing it well, it should be cheap too,” said Kim, who is the Virginia and D. K. Ludwig Professor of Biochemistry. “The target population for our vaccine is low-and middle-income countries.”
Their vaccine, detailed in a paper published in ACS Central Science (“A Single Immunization with Spike-Functionalized Ferritin Vaccines Elicits Neutralizing Antibody Responses against SARS-CoV-2 in Mice”), contains nanoparticles studded with the same proteins that comprise the virus’s distinctive surface spikes.