Lifeboat Foundation

Hailey-Hailey disease is a rare, inherited condition characterized by patches of blisters appearing mainly in the skin folds of the arm pits, groin and under the breasts. It is caused by a mutation in the gene that codes for a specific protein involved in the transportation of calcium and manganese ions from the cell cytoplasm and into a sac-like organelle called the Golgi apparatus.

Scientists at Tohoku University, together with colleagues in Japan, have uncovered some aspects of this protein’s structure that could help researchers understand how it works. The findings, published in the journal Science Advances, help build the foundations for research into finding treatments for Hailey-Hailey disease and other neurodegenerative conditions.

The protein the team studied is called secretory pathway Ca²⁺/Mn²⁺-ATPase, or SPCA for short. It is located in the Golgi apparatus, a cellular sac-like structure that plays a crucial role in protein quality control before they are released into cells. The Golgi apparatus also acts like a sort of calcium ion storage container. Calcium ions are vital for cell signaling processes and are important for proteins to function properly, so maintaining the right calcium ion balance inside cells is necessary for their day-to-day activities.

A team of chemists and computer scientists from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne, the University of California and Institut des Sciences et Ingenierie Chimiques, Ecole, have developed an ecosystem of tools to boost machine-learning-based design of metal-organic frameworks.

In their study, reported in the journal ACS Central Science, Kevin Maik Jablonka, Andrew Rosen, Aditi Krishnapriyan and Berend Smit coded tools to convert data into machine learning inputs to create a system to boost machine-learning frameworks.

Reticular chemistry is the science of designing and synthesizing porous crystalline materials with certain predefined structures and properties (building blocks). These materials, known as metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) have applications in gas storage, separation, catalysis, sensing and drug delivery.

A team of Rutgers University scientists dedicated to pinpointing the primordial origins of metabolism – a set of core chemical reactions that first powered life on Earth – has identified part of a protein that could provide scientists clues to detecting planets on the verge of producing life.

The research, published on March 10 in the journal Science Advances.

<em>Science Advances</em> is a peer-reviewed, open-access scientific journal that is published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). It was launched in 2015 and covers a wide range of topics in the natural sciences, including biology, chemistry, earth and environmental sciences, materials science, and physics.

Genetic Engineering extends far beyond the controversial news headlines that obsess over ‘designer babies’. In the science community, gene-editing tools like CRISPR and PRIME editing will do nothing less than save the planet.

The Rise Of Genetic Engineering (2022)
Writers: Kyle McCabe, Christopher Webb Young.
Stars: Rodolphe Barrangou, George Church, Mary Beth Dallas.
Genre: Documentary.
Country: United States.
Language: English.
Release Date: August 24, 2022 (United States)

Continue reading “The Rise Of Genetic Engineering | Gene-Editing | Documentary” »

A semirigid stamp and a standard photolithography mask-aligner enable a reliable and scalable pickup and release process for van der Waals materials integration at the wafer scale.

Harvard Medical School professor Michael E. Greenberg has won The 2023 Brain Prize for his decades-long research on brain plasticity, alongside University of Cambridge professor Christine E. Holt and Max Planck Institute Director Erin M. Schuman.

Nucleic acid sensing involving CRISPR technologies is powerful but has certain limitations, such as PAM sequence requirements and limited multiplexing. Here, authors report a CRISPR-based barcoding technology which enables multiple outputs from any target sequence, based on cis-and trans-cleavage.

Researchers led by Prof. Zhou Wu from the University of Chinese Academy of Sciences (UCAS) and Prof. Sokrates T. Pantelides of Vanderbilt University have pushed the sensitivity of single-atom vibrational spectroscopy to the chemical-bonding-configuration extreme, which is critical for understanding the correlation of lattice vibrational properties with local atomic configurations in materials.

Using a combination of experimental and theoretical approaches, the researchers demonstrated the effect of chemical-bonding configurations and the atomic mass of impurity atoms on local vibrational properties at the single-atom level.

The study was published in Nature Materials.

A research team led by Prof. Xue Yuanchao from the Institute of Biophysics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences has developed a new method for global profiling of in-situ RNA–RNA contacts associated with a specific RNA-binding protein (RBP) and revealed positional mechanisms by which PTBP1-associated RNA loops regulate cassette exon splicing.

This study was published online in Molecular Cell on March 22.

In eukaryotes, the same pre-mRNA can produce multiple protein isoforms to execute similar or different biological functions through alternative splicing. Several longstanding models proposed that RBPs may regulate alternative splicing by modulating long-range RNA–RNA interactions (RRI). However, direct experimental evidence was lacking.