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Category: biotech/medical

Now, researchers have revealed that colistin punches holes in bacteria, causing them to pop like balloons. The work, funded by the Medical Research Council and Wellcome Trust, and published in the journal eLife, also identified a way of making the antibiotic more effective at killing bacteria.

Scientists have revealed how an antibiotic of ‘last resort’ kills bacteria.

The findings, from Imperial College London and the University of Texas, may also reveal a potential way to make the antibiotic more powerful.

The antibiotic colistin has become a last resort treatment for infections caused by some of the world’s nastiest superbugs. However, despite being discovered over 70 years ago, the process by which this antibiotic kills bacteria has, until now, been something of a mystery.

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New symptoms for the disease now include “chills, repeated shaking with chills, muscle pain, headache, sore throat and new loss of taste or smell,” the CDC said.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has tripled the number of coronavirus symptoms it lists on its website.

The federal organization previously listed fever, cough and shortness of breath as symptoms of COVID-19. The CDC has added six additional symptoms as people “have had a wide range of symptoms reported,” it says on its website.

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Tesla explained how it pivoted to avoid the global microchip shortage that Intel now says could last for several more years.

The pandemic has resulted in an increase in demand for many electronics and computers that the supply chain couldn’t handle, especially the semiconductor industry.

This microchip shortage, in turn, affected the automotive industry, which has increasingly become a big consumer of microchips.

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An experimental COVID-19 vaccine could potentially provide universal protection against future COVID-19 variants as well as other coronaviruses — maybe even the ones responsible for the common cold.

And it’s dirt cheap — less than $1 a dose, researchers say.

The vaccine targets a part of the COVID-19 virus’ spike protein that appears to be highly resistant to mutation and is common across nearly all coronaviruses, said senior researcher Dr. Steven Zeichner. He is a professor of pediatric infectious disease with the University of Virginia, in Charlottesville.

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“In atopic dermatitis, the itching can be horrific, and it can aggravate disease,” said co-corresponding author K. Frank Austen, MD, a senior physician in the Division of Allergy and Clinical Immunology at the Brigham.

Scientists pinpointed a key molecular player that could represent a new therapeutic target for intractable chronic itch.

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Muscle stem cells enable our muscle to build up and regenerate over a lifetime through exercise. But if certain muscle genes are mutated, the opposite occurs. In patients suffering from muscular dystrophy, the skeletal muscle already starts to weaken in childhood. Suddenly, these children are no longer able to run, play the piano or climb the stairs, and often they are dependent on a wheelchair by the age of 15. Currently, no therapy for this condition exists.

“Now, we are able to access these patients’ gene mutations using CRISPR-Cas9 technology,” explains Professor Simone Spuler, head of the Myology Lab at the Experimental and Clinical Research Center (ECRC), a joint institution of the Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine in the Helmholtz Association and Charité — Universitätsmedizin Berlin. “We care for more than 2000 patients at the Charité outpatient clinic for muscle disorders, and quickly recognized the potential of the new technology.” The researchers immediately started working with some of the affected families, and have now presented their results in the journal JCI Insight. In the families studied, the parents were healthy and had no idea they possessed a mutated gene. The children all inherited a copy of the disease mutation from both parents.

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