Lifeboat Foundation

Lab tests show potential of gene-spreading strategy to fight plant diseases.

New discoveries have raised the possibility of exploring dino genetics, but controversy surrounds the results.

Washington (AFP) — The wealthy Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation called Wednesday for global cooperation to ready COVID-19 vaccines for seven billion people, while offering $150 million toward developing therapeutics and treatments for the virus.

While it is likely to take as many as 18 months to develop and fully test a safe coronavirus vaccine, global authorities and businesses need to start now on plans to manufacture it, said foundation chief executive Mark Suzman.

“It’s normal to have, at maximum, hundreds of millions of doses manufactured,” he said.

Just like a virus hijacks your cells and forces them to churn out more copies of the virus, this vaccine is expected to automate the production of those particles, which B-cells and T-cells — the biological hunter-seekers of the immune system — can use to ready themselves to fight the real-deal coronavirus.

The main difference between this sort of DNA-based vaccine and a traditional one, Slavcev told Futurism, is that it relies on the person’s cells to create the mock virus instead of merely exposing them to an inert version of the real virus.

“Personal genetics only has to do with how the vaccine is presented,” Slavcev told Futurism, regarding the decision to develop a DNA-based vaccine. “There is some variation between individuals and populations, but in this case the DNA is just to improve immune response and make it mimic a viral infection as closely as possible to stimulate the most effective immune response.”

:ooooooo.

With psilocybin on the cusp of becoming a clinically validated and approved medicine, scientists are exploring new ways to produce the chemical without needing to grow magic mushrooms or relying on costly synthesis techniques. A team of Danish researchers has presented a novel method of producing the psychedelic chemical using common yeast.

“It’s infeasible and way too expensive to extract psilocybin from magic mushrooms and the best chemical synthesis methods require expensive and difficult-to-source starting substrates,” explains Nick Milne, an author on the new study published in the journal Metabolic Engineering. “Thus, there is a need to bring down the cost of production and to provide a more consistent supply chain.”

Continue reading “Scientists turn yeast into psychedelic psilocybin factories” »

Brain cells, wrote the Spanish neuroanatomist Santiago Ramón y Cajal in the late 19^th century, “may die” and cannot “be regenerated.” Cajal then threw down the gauntlet, asserting that it was the job of the “science of the future to change, if possible, this harsh decree.” Jack Price’s engaging book The Future of Brain Repair details past, present, and future attempts to address Cajal’s formidable challenge. In so doing, it provides a vibrant and compelling guide to the important and rapidly evolving fields of stem cell–based therapies and brain repair, which together, he believes, are poised to deliver unprecedented changes to the management of brain diseases.

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“In corticospinal injuries using a mouse model, adult neurons begin a natural regeneration by revertiprocessng back to an embryonic state and that regeneration is sustained by a surprising gene.”

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When adult brain cells are injured, they revert to an embryonic state, according to new findings published in the April 15, 2020 issue of Nature by researchers at University of California San Diego School of Medicine, with colleagues elsewhere. The scientists report that in their newly adopted immature state, the cells become capable of re-growing new connections that, under the right conditions, can help to restore lost function.

Continue reading “When Damaged, the Adult Brain Repairs Itself” »

PCs, tablets, 5G-powered live streams, and cloud platforms are all expected to see more demand from the education sector in China, with the coronavirus outbreak accelerating a digital shift, according to a report from research firm IDC China.

Via Harvard David A. Sinclair “The coronavirus is part bat & part human virus. A new study says the Frankenstein event happened well before its transmission to humans. Wait, what? Humans first infected bats?

The intermediate Frankenstein coronavirus has part human/part bat versions of the spike protein (the knobs on the outside of the virus & what COVID-19 vaccines target). Coronafrankenstein is formally called RaTG13, the name, rank & serial # of a horseshoe bat sample. If we gave bats coronavirus first, then people, including scientists, should stay away from bats especially if they don’t feel well. That’s why, as much as I like cats, I don’t like how they can catch it from us. It’s a potentially vicious cycle.

The new study says a mutation has changed the spike protein of an Indian strain of coronavirus that likely reduces its ability to transmit, but “raises the alarm that the ongoing vaccine development may become futile in future epidemics” like seasonal flu.”

Monitoring the mutation dynamics of SARS-CoV-2 is critical for the development of effective approaches to contain the pathogen. By analyzing 106 SARS-CoV-2 and 39 SARS genome sequences, we provided direct genetic evidence that SARS-CoV-2 has a much lower mutation rate than SARS. Minimum Evolution phylogeny analysis revealed the putative original status of SARS-CoV-2 and the early-stage spread history. The discrepant phylogenies for the spike protein and its receptor binding domain proved a previously reported structural rearrangement prior to the emergence of SARS-CoV-2. Despite that we found the spike glycoprotein of SARS-CoV-2 is particularly more conserved, we identified a mutation that leads to weaker receptor binding capability, which concerns a SARS-CoV-2 sample collected on 27^th January 2020 from India. This represents the first report of a significant SARS-CoV-2 mutant, and raises the alarm that the ongoing vaccine development may become futile in future epidemic if more mutations were identified.