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Category: biotech/medical

Japanese scientists produce first 3D-bioprinted, marbled Wagyu beef

The world of lab-grown meats is fast filling with all kinds of tasty bites, from burgers, to chicken breasts, to a series of increasingly complex cuts of steak. Expanding the scope of cultured beef are scientists from Japan’s Osaka University, who have leveraged cutting-edge bioprinting techniques to produce the first lab-grown “beef” that resembles the marbled texture of the country’s famed Wagyu cows.

From humble beginnings that resembled soggy pork back in 2,009 to the classic steaks and rib-eyes we’ve seen pop up in the last few years, lab-grown meat has come along in leaps and bounds. The most sophisticated examples use bioprinting to “print” living cells, which are nurtured to grow and differentiate into different cell types, ultimately building up into the tissues of the desired animal.

The Osaka University team used two types of stem cells harvested from Wagyu cows as their starting point, bovine satellite cells and adipose-derived stem cells. These cells were incubated and coaxed into becoming the different cell types needed to form individual fibers for muscle, fat and blood vessels. These were then arranged into a 3D stack to resemble the high intramuscular fat content of Wagyu, better known as marbling, or sashi in Japan.

Dr. Hanadie Yousef, Ph.D. Co-Founder & CEO — Juvena Therapeutics — Secretome Derived Therapies

Secretome Derived Regenerative Therapeutics — Dr. Hanadie Yousef Ph.D., Co-Founder & CEO, Juvena Therapeutics

Dr. Hanadie Yousef, Ph.D. is a Scientist, Co-Founder and CEO of Juvena Therapeutics (https://www.juvenatherapeutics.com/), a regenerative medicine company developing protein therapeutics to promote tissue regeneration and increase healthspan, to prevent, reverse, and cure degenerative diseases.

For over 17 years, Dr. Yousef elucidated mechanisms of aging and developed methods for tissue regeneration supported by multiple awards, fellowships and grants. Her discoveries were published in top publications that include Nature Medicine and led to several issued patents which laid the foundation of Juvena Therapeutics’ venture-backed, drug discovery and pre-clinical development platform.

Dr. Yousef earned a BS in Chemistry, summa cum laude, from Carnegie Mellon University, a PhD in Molecular and Cell Biology from UC Berkeley as an NSF graduate research fellow, pursued a 5-year postdoctoral fellowship in Neurology at Stanford School of Medicine, and conducted R&D at Regeneron and Genentech.

Berries may lower blood pressure with help from gut bacteria

Research indicates that flavonoids may protect against: high blood pressureTrusted Source heart attack and stroke type 2 diabetesTrusted Source certain types of cancer-medicalnewstoday.com

New research finds that people who consume foods high in flavonoids, such as berries, apples, and pears, have lower blood pressure than those who do not.

These Scientists Added A Human Fat Gene To Potatoes — And They Are Growing To Huge Proportions

Okay, maybe not as big as the one in the picture.

Potatoes are my favorite vegetable; you can turn them into fries, bake them for an exquisite dish or mash them and eat them as a side dish. There are endless possibilities to cook a potato and what can be better than adding human fat gene in them to make them bigger and juicier?

Scientists have been experimenting with growing larger crops and it seems like they found the perfect solution; adding the human gene related to obesity and fat mass into the plants to yield super crops. The potato plants were inserted with a fat-regulating protein called FTO which changed the genetic code into producing extra proteins which resulted in large potatoes that were almost twice the size of regular ones grown from the same plant crop. “It [was] really a bold and bizarre idea. To be honest, we were probably expecting some catastrophic effects,” said Chuan He, a chemist at University of Chicago.

A longevity expert shares the diet, exercise and sleep rules he lives

Longevity expert Sergey Young has spent his career gathering insights from health researchers, doctors and dietitians about how to live a longer and stronger life. He shares his top health rules, including his diet, exercise routine and how much sleep he gets.

Genes for Alcohol Use Disorder and Alzheimer’s Risk Overlap: Study

ABOVE: MAPT, one of the genes linked to both heavy drinking and neurodegenerative diseases, codes for the protein tau (blue in this illustration) inside a neuron. NATIONAL INSTITUTE ON AGING/ NATIONAL INSTITUTES OF HEALTH

Some genetic risk factors for alcohol use disorder overlap with those for neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s, scientists reported in Nature Communications on August 20. The study, which relied on a combination of genetic, transcriptomic, and epigenetic data, also offers insight into the molecular commonalities among these disorders, and their connections to immune disfunction.

“By meshing findings from genome wide association studies… ith gene expression in brain and other tissues, this new study has prioritized genes likely to harbor regulatory variants influencing risk of Alcohol Use Disorder,” writes David Goldman, a neurogenetics researcher at the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA), in an email to The Scientist. “Several of these genes are also associated with neurodegenerative disorders—an intriguing connection because of alcohol’s ability to prematurely age the brain.”

Revolution in biomedicine using emerging of picomaterials: A breakthrough on the future of medical diagnosis and therapy

Pico technology is hypothetical future level of technology which will revolutionized the scientist world. This technology is combination of pico and meter with scale of trillionths of a meter (10−12). This atomic and subatomic range particles reveals extraordinary properties and pave the way for tremendous applications [1].

The way lengths and angles attach together is the main determine of the materials properties. Alterable or reversible bonds distortions at pico-meter scale which changes the electronic conformation causes multiple properties for materials.

On the other hand, pico-scale particles changes the material properties by converting energy state of electrons within an atom. Physical and chemical properties of systems such as melting point, fluorescence, electrical conductivity, magnetic permeability, and chemical reactivity changes basically at pico-scale due to quantum effects of materials [2]. Moreover, surface energy of atoms increases by alternation of electron distribution and therefore, enhances protein and molecules adsorption on to materials. This privileges will resulting in tracing proteins, DNA and molecules and labeling them for various purpose.

AI Makes Strangely Accurate Predictions From Blurry Medical Scans, Alarming Researchers

New research has found that artificial intelligence (AI) analyzing medical scans can identify the race of patients with an astonishing degree of accuracy, while their human counterparts cannot. With the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approving more algorithms for medical use, the researchers are concerned that AI could end up perpetuating racial biases. They are especially concerned that they could not figure out precisely how the machine-learning models were able to identify race, even from heavily corrupted and low-resolution images.

In the study, published on pre-print service Arxiv, an international team of doctors investigated how deep learning models can detect race from medical images. Using private and public chest scans and self-reported data on race and ethnicity, they first assessed how accurate the algorithms were, before investigating the mechanism.

“We hypothesized that if the model was able to identify a patient’s race, this would suggest the models had implicitly learned to recognize racial information despite not being directly trained for that task,” the team wrote in their research.

Discovery that TRPV4 gene regulates cartilage growth might yield future therapies for joint repair

New information from a study reported in Stem Cells might result in more effective treatments for osteoarthritis and other cartilage diseases, as well as hereditary disorders affecting cartilage development. Their findings might also point to a new way to accelerate stem cell differentiation for bioengineering cartilage, the researchers say.

Dust-sized supercapacitor packs the same voltage as a AAA battery

The scientists behind the new device were working within the realm of nano-supercapacitors (nBSC), which are conventional capacitors but scaled down to the sub-millimeter scale. Developing these types of devices is tricky enough, but the researchers sought to make one that could work safely in the human body to power tiny sensors and implants, which requires swapping out problematic materials and corrosive electrolytes for ones that are biocompatible.

These devices are known as biosupercapacitors and the smallest ones developed to date is larger than 3 mm3, but the scientists have made a huge leap forward in terms of how tiny biosupercapacitors can be. The construction starts with a stack of polymeric layers that are sandwiched together with a light-sensitive photo-resist material that acts as the current collector, a separator membrane, and electrodes made from an electrically conductive biocompatible polymer called PEDOT: PSS.