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Category: biotech/medical

“Because of this male-specific effect, we investigated the effects of MPH through the paternal line and observed the same behaviors in several generations of their descendants not directly administered the drug.”

Summary: A new study of male guppies reveals behaviors affected by methylphenidate hydrochloride (MPH), an active ingredient in common ADHD medications, can be passed along to future generations.

Source: University of Toronto

By studying guppies, scientists at the University of Toronto and Florida State University found that behaviors affected by methylphenidate hydrochloride (MPH) – the active ingredient in stimulants such as Ritalin and Concerta used to treat ADHD—can be passed along to several generations of descendants.

“We exposed male and female Trinidadian guppies to a low, steady dose of MPH and saw that it affected the anxiety and stress-related behavior of males, but not females,” said Alex De Serrano, a Ph.D. candidate in the department of ecology and evolutionary biology (EEB) in the Faculty of Arts & Science and lead author of a study published recently in Scientific Reports.

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Summary: Researchers have identified significant differences in gene activity between the anterior and posterior areas of the hippocampus. Genes associated with depression and other mood disorders are more active in the anterior hippocampus, while genes linked to cognitive disorders, such as ASD, are more active in the posterior hippocampus.

Source: UT Southwestern Medical Center.

A study of gene activity in the brain’s hippocampus, led by UT Southwestern researchers, has identified marked differences between the region’s anterior and posterior portions.

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## JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN CHEMICAL SOCIETY • JUN 4, 2021.

# *A lovely single step bio-inspired process with some interesting complex benefits particularly for humans on Mars.*

*by holly ober, university of california — riverside*

A team led by UC Riverside engineers has developed a catalyst to remove a dangerous chemical from water on Earth that could also make Martian soil safer for agriculture and help produce oxygen for human Mars explorers.

Perchlorate, a negative ion consisting of one chlorine atom bonded to four oxygen atoms, occurs naturally in some soils on Earth, and is especially abundant in Martian soil. As a powerful oxidizer, perchlorate is also manufactured and used in solid rocket fuel, fireworks, munitions, airbag initiators for vehicles, matches and signal flares. It is a byproduct in some disinfectants and herbicides.

Because of its ubiquity in both soil and industrial goods, perchlorate is a common water contaminant that causes certain thyroid disorders. Perchlorate bioaccumulates in plant tissues and a large amount of perchlorate found in Martian soil could make food grown there unsafe to eat, limiting the potential for human settlements on Mars. Perchlorate in Martian dust could also be hazardous to explorers. Current methods of removing perchlorate from water require either harsh conditions or a multistep enzymatic process to lower the oxidation state of the chlorine element into the harmless chloride ion.

Doctoral student Changxu Ren and Jinyong Liu, an assistant professor of chemical and environmental engineering at UC Riverside’s Marlan and Rosemary Bourns College of Engineering, took inspiration from nature to reduce perchlorate in water at ambient pressure and temperature in one simple step.

Ren and Liu noted anaerobic microbes use molybdenum in their enzymes to reduce perchlorate and harvest energy in oxygen-starved environments.

“Previous efforts in constructing a chemical molybdenum catalyst for perchlorate reduction have not been successful,” Liu said. “Many other metal catalysts either require harsh conditions or are not compatible with water.”

The researchers tried to emulate the complicated microbial perchlorate reduction process with a simplified approach. They found by simply mixing a common fertilizer called sodium molybdate, a common organic ligand called bipyridine to bind the molybdenum, and a common hydrogen-activating catalyst called palladium on carbon, they produced a powerful catalyst that quickly and efficiently broke down the perchlorate in water using hydrogen gas at room temperature with no combustion involved.

“This catalyst is much more active than any other chemical catalyst reported to date and reduces more than 99.99% of the perchlorate into chloride regardless of the initial perchlorate concentration,” Ren said.

The new catalyst reduces perchlorate in a wide concentration range, from less than 1 milligram per liter to 10 grams per liter. This makes it suitable for use in various scenarios, including remediating contaminated groundwater, treating heavily contaminated wastewater from explosives manufacturing, and making Mars habitable.

“A convenient catalytic reduction system may help harvest oxygen gas from perchlorate washed from the Martian soil when the catalyst is coupled with other processes,” Liu said.

## ORIGINAL PAPER

Changxu Ren et al, **A Bioinspired Molybdenum Catalyst for Aqueous Perchlorate Reduction**, Journal of the American Chemical Society (2021). DOI: 10.1021/jacs.1c00595

https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/jacs.1c00595

Thanks to Zoomers of the Sunshine Coast BC, Bio — A.I., Sunshine Coast Climate Action Network & Folkstone Design Inc.

#Perchlorate #Mars #Oxygen #CatalyticReduction #WasteWater #Fuel #Food #SpaceX #ElonMusk #Mars #EnvironmentalMediation #Environment.

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Enrolling Tens Of Thousands Of Dogs, In 10-Year Study, To Unlock Healthy Aging Secrets — Dr Matt Kaeberlein, Founder / Co-Director, The Dog Aging Project, Professor, University of Washington, joins me on Progress, Potential, And Possibilities Nathan Shock Centers #Rapamycin #Dogs #Aging #Longevity #Healthspan #Geroscience.

#MitochondrialDisease

Dr. Matt Kaeberlein is Professor of Pathology, Adjunct Professor of Genome Sciences, and Adjunct Professor of Oral Health Sciences, at the University of Washington.

Dr. Kaeberlein received his PhD from MIT in Biology, did his post-doc in the Department of Genome Sciences, University of Washington, and his research interests are focused on basic mechanisms of aging in order to facilitate translational interventions that promote healthspan and improve quality of life.

Dr. Kaeberlein has published nearly 200 papers in top scientific journals and has been recognized by several prestigious awards, including a Breakthroughs in Gerontology Award, an Alzheimer’s Association Young Investigator Award, an Ellison Medical Foundation New Scholar in Aging Award, a Murdock Trust Award, a Pioneer in Aging Award, and the Vincent Cristofalo Rising Star in Aging Research.

Dr. Kaeberlein’s contributions have also been recognized with Fellow status in the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Aging Association, and the Gerontological Society of America.

Dr. Kaeberlein is a past President of the American Aging Association and has served on their Executive Committee and Board of Directors since 2012. He has also served as a member of the Board of Directors for the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology and is currently the Chair of the Biological Sciences Section of the Gerontological Society of America.

Dr. Kaeberlein serves on the editorial boards for several journals, including Science and eLife. Dr. Kaeberlein’s scientific discoveries have generated substantial public interest, with featured stories in major media outlets including appearing on the front page of the New York Times, the Today Show, CNN, the UK Telegraph, Popular Science, Time Magazine, Scientific American, NPR, USA Today, National Geographic, and many others.

In addition to his primary appointments, Dr. Kaeberlein is the co-Director of the University of Washington Nathan Shock Center of Excellence in the Basic Biology of Aging, the Founding Director of the Healthy Aging and Longevity Research Institute at the University of Washington, and Founder and Co-Director of the Dog Aging Project.

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The latest from Calico. A bit technical.

Reprogramming of ordinary somatic cells into induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) was initially thought to be a way to obtain all of the patient matched cells needed for tissue engineering or cell therapies. A great deal of work has gone towards realizing that goal over the past fifteen years or so; the research community isn’t there yet, but meaningful progress has taken place. Of late, another line of work has emerged, in that it might be possible to use partial reprogramming as a basis for therapy, delivering reprogramming factors into animals and humans in order to improve tissue function, without turning large numbers of somatic cells into iPSCs and thus risking cancer or loss of tissue structure and function.

Reprogramming triggers some of the same mechanisms of rejuvenation that operate in the developing embryo, removing epigenetic marks characteristic of aged tissues, and restoring youthful mitochondrial function. It cannot do much for forms of damage such as mutations to nuclear DNA or buildup of resilient metabolic waste, but the present feeling is there is nonetheless enough of a potential benefit to make it worth developing this approach to treatments for aging. Some groups have shown that partial reprogramming — via transient expression of reprogramming factors — can reverse functional losses in cells from aged tissues without making those cells lose their differentiated type. But this is a complicated business. Tissues are made up of many cell types, all of which can need subtly different approaches to safe reprogramming.

Today’s open access preprint is illustrative of the amount of work that lies ahead when it comes to the exploration of in vivo reprogramming. Different cell types behave quite differently, will require different recipes and approaches to reprogramming, different times of exposure, and so forth. It makes it very hard to envisage a near term therapy that operates much like present day gene therapies, meaning one vector and one cargo, as most tissues are comprised of many different cell types all mixed in together. On the other hand, the evidence to date, including that in the paper here, suggests that there are ways to create the desired rejuvenation of epigenetic patterns and mitochondrial function without the risk of somatic cells dedifferentiating into stem cells.

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Regulators on Friday said a new version of a popular diabetes medicine could be sold as a weight-loss drug in the U.S.

The Food and Drug Administration approved Wegovy, a higher-dose version of Novo Nordisk’s diabetes drug semaglutide, for long-term weight management.

In company-funded studies, participants taking Wegovy had average weight loss of 15%, about 34 pounds (15.3 kilograms). Participants lost weight steadily for 16 months before plateauing. In a comparison group getting dummy shots, the average weight loss was about 2.5%, or just under 6 pounds.

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The Tsimane, an indigenous people who live in the Bolivian peripheries of the Amazon rainforest, lead lives that are very different to ours. They seem to be much healthier for it.

This tribal and largely isolated population of forager-horticulturalists still lives today by traditional ways of farming, hunting, gathering, and fishing – continuing the practices of their ancestors, established in a time long before industrialization and urbanization transformed most of the world.

For the Tsimane, the advantages are considerable. A study published in 2017 found that they effectively have the healthiest hearts in the world, with the lowest reported levels of coronary artery disease of any population ever recorded.

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The White House recently announced its vision for an Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health, or ARPA-H. RAND researchers explain what it might take to ens… See More.

DARPA also maintains an extremely high tolerance for failure. The modest budgets of the NIH, combined with an enormous pool of applicants, force these institutions to bet on low-risk research that guarantees incremental progress. ARPA-H could take a different approach than NIH by accepting a much higher tolerance for failure, so that researchers are not discouraged from dreaming big.

The scientific methods behind the products of ARPA-H might gain public trust if the agency made a point of being transparent and accessible. Consider how the rapid development of the COVID-19 vaccine was met with incredulity and suspicion, slowing progress toward herd immunity. An investment in ARPA-H could accelerate the time it takes to get innovative ideas from “bench to bedside,” but it could benefit from informing the public about incremental advancements in a way that is easy to understand.

The president’s vision for ARPA-H could help get more medical treatments to market sooner. Building on lessons from DARPA and NIH, the proposed health agency has the potential to pursue the kind of high-risk research that can lead to high-reward results.

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The world is one step closer to ultimately secure conference calls, thanks to a collaboration between Quantum Communications Hub researchers and their German colleagues, enabling a quantum-secure conversation to take place between four parties simultaneously.

The demonstration, led by Hub researchers based at Heriot-Watt University and published in Science Advances, is a timely advance, given the global reliance on remote collaborative working, including calls, since the start of the C19 pandemic.

There have been reports of significant escalation of cyber-attacks on popular teleconferencing platforms in the last year. This advance in quantum secured communications could lead to conference calls with inherent unhackable security measures, underpinned by the principles of quantum physics.

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At Boston University, a team of researchers is working to better understand how language and speech is processed in the brain, and how to best rehabilitate people who have lost their ability to communicate due to brain damage caused by a stroke, trauma, or another type of brain injury. This type of language loss is called aphasia, a long-term neurological disorder caused by damage to the part of the brain responsible for language production and processing that impacts over a million people in the US.

“It’s a huge problem,” says Swathi Kiran, director of BU’s Aphasia Research Lab, and College of Health & Rehabilitation Sciences: Sargent College associate dean for research and James and Cecilia Tse Ying Professor in Neurorehabilitation. “It’s something our lab is working to tackle at multiple levels.”

For the last decade, Kiran and her team have studied the brain to see how it changes as people’s improve with speech . More recently, they’ve developed new methods to predict a person’s ability to improve even before they start therapy. In a new paper published in Scientific Reports, Kiran and collaborators at BU and the University of Texas at Austin report they can predict recovery in Hispanic patients who speak both English and Spanish fluently—a group of aphasia patients particularly at risk of long-term language loss—using sophisticated computer models of the brain. They say the breakthrough could be a game changer for the field of speech therapy and for stroke survivors impacted by aphasia.

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