Lifeboat Foundation

ReVector researchers have expertise in synthetic biology, human microbiome, and mosquito studies.

The American Society for Microbiology estimates that there are trillions of microbes living in or on the human body that constitute the human microbiome¹. The human skin microbiome (HSM) acts as a barrier between humans and our external environment, protecting us from infection, but also potentially producing molecules that attract mosquitos. Mosquitos are of particular concern to the Department of Defense, as they transmit pathogens that cause diseases such as chikungunya, Zika, dengue, West Nile virus, yellow fever, and malaria. The ReVector program aims to maintain the health of military personnel operating in disease-endemic regions by reducing attraction and feeding by mosquitos, and limiting exposure to mosquito-transmitted diseases.

Genome engineering has progressed to the point where editing the HSM to remove the molecules that attract mosquitos or add genes that produce mild mosquito repellants are now possible. While the skin microbiome has naturally evolved to modulate our interactions with the environment and organisms that surround us, exerting precise control over our microbiomes is an exciting new way to provide protection from mosquito-borne diseases.

Continue reading “DARPA Selects Teams to Modify Skin Microbiome for Disease Prevention” »

The final €85 billion budget is €1.5 billion more than first proposed by the European Commission in 2018, but €5 billion is reserved for applied research and support for small tech firms under a postpandemic recovery fund. The remaining budget is a little larger than the current program, Horizon 2020, but European agencies receive less in the early years of a 7-year budget. That means basic science organs such as the European Research Council (ERC) could have less money in 2021 than in 2020, depending on further negotiations over the budget breakdown, to be held in the coming weeks.

European Parliament wins concessions to bring Horizon Europe budget to €85 billion—but research advocates remain unimpressed.

‘Germicidal’ ultraviolet light technology has a proven track record against indoor transmission of tuberculosis and other airborne microbes. It’s now being used in some restaurant…

Engineers at Cornell University have developed a new technique for 3D printing metallic objects – and it involves blasting titanium particles at supersonic speeds. The resulting metals are very porous, which makes them particularly useful for biomedical objects like implants and replacement joints.

Traditional 3D printing involves a nozzle depositing plastic, hydrogels, living cells or other materials layer by layer to build up an object. Metal parts and objects are usually 3D printed in other ways, such as firing a laser at a bed of metal powder to selectively melt sections into the desired shape, or firing metal powder at high speeds at a substrate to fuse the particles together.

The latter method is known as “cold spray,” and the new technique expands on that base. The Cornell team blasted titanium alloy particles, each measuring between 45 and 106 microns wide, at speeds up to 600 m (1,969 ft) per second (for reference, the speed of sound in air is around 340 m (1,115 ft) per second). The team calculated this as the ideal speed – any faster, and the particles would disintegrate too much on impact to bond to each other.

Aging link

~~~ “The telomere biology of humans is closer to the telomere biology of birds than those of traditional laboratory models. In both humans and birds, telomere length is measured in a minimally-invasive way from small blood samples,” says Collegium Researcher Antoine Stier from the University of Turku (Finland), the main author of the research article.

While authors of the study had reasons to expect shorter telomeres in chicks born from eggs injected with thyroid hormones, they were quite surprised to find that those chicks actually exhibited longer telomeres right after birth.” “Based on the natural decline of telomere length observed with age in the same collared flycatcher population, we estimated that chicks hatching from thyroid hormones injected eggs were approximately four years younger at birth than chicks hatched from control eggs,” adds Collegium Researcher Suvi Ruuskanen.

Continue reading “Born to be young? Prenatal thyroid hormones influence ‘biological age’ at birth” »

The COVID-19 crisis has led to a significant increase in the use of cyberspace, enabling people to work together at distant places and interact with remote environments and individuals by embodying virtual avatars or real avatars such as robots. However, the limits of avatar embodiment are not clear. Furthermore, it is not clear how these embodiments affect the behaviors of humans.

Therefore, a research team comprising Takayoshi Hagiwara (graduate student) and Professor Michiteru Kitazaki from Toyohashi University of Technology; Dr. Ganesh Gowrishankar (senior researcher) from UM-CNRS LIRMM; Professor Maki Sugimoto from Keio University; and Professor Masahiko Inami from The University of Tokyo aimed to develop a novel collaboration method with a shared avatar, which can be controlled concurrently by two individuals in VR, and to investigate human motor behaviors as the avatar is controlled in VR.

Full body movements of two participants were monitored via a motion-capture system, and movements of the shared avatar were determined as the average of the movements of the two participants. Twenty participants (10 dyads) were asked to perform reaching movements with their right hand towards target cubes that were presented at various locations. Participants exhibited superior reaction times with the shared avatar than individual reaction times, and the avatar’s hand movements were straighter and less jerky than those of the participants. The participants exhibited a sense of agency and body ownership towards the shared avatar although they only formed a part of the shared avatar.

Summary: YTHDF2 is a key protein that assists in creating healthy blood cells by regulating the body’s inflammatory response.

Source: University of Edinburgh

The study is the first to reveal a protein that has a crucial role in protecting the blood’s stem cells, which continually produce all blood and immune cells needed in the body, from premature aging.

Rank in social hierarchy is a condition not solely claimed by humans. In the animal kingdom, male peacocks exhibit brightly colored plumes to illustrate dominance, and underwater, male fish show pops of bright colors to do the same. Despite the links identified between social status, physiology and behavior, the molecular basis of social status has not been known, until now.

“We discovered that two paralogous androgen receptor genes control social status in African cichlid fish,” reports Beau Alward in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Alward is an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Houston with a joint appointment in biology and biochemistry. Paralogs are duplicate genes; androgens are hormones like testosterone necessary for male sexual development.

“Testosterone binds to androgen receptors to exert its effects. What we found through genome editing is that the two genes encoding these receptors are required for different aspects of social status,” said Alward. “This type of coordination of social status may be fundamental across species that rely on social information to optimally guide physiology and behavior.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wb7o_9CUmiM&feature=youtu.be

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Sources cited in this episode include the following:

Continue reading “Four Quick Stories on Press Freedoms and Venture Funding: Age of Ingenuity” »