The secrets to immortality may lie in an unexpected place — fruit fly stem cells. Researchers led by Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) Investigator Yukiko Yamashita have found that some stem cells have a genetic trick to remain young forever across generations. While some areas of the fruit fly genome get shorter as they age, some reproductive cells are able to fix that shortening. Once observed only in yeast, this work, reported in eLife, has revealed more about aging, and how some cells can avoid it.
This work focused on critical genes in ribosomal DNA, rDNA. Ribosomes are cellular organelles that act as protein factories. That rDNA is repeated in several areas of the genome because many ribosomes are needed to make all of the proteins the body needs. Five chromosomes each have spots with hundreds of copies of rDNA. However, that type of redundant sequence can be difficult for cells to replicate accurately every time cell division happens.
THC, the element of marijuana that provides the drug’s ‘high,’ could also form the basis of future ‘tumor-shrinking’ pharmaceuticals, according to new research.
This work expands the repertoire of DNA-based recording techniques by developing a novel DNA synthesis-based system that can record temporal environmental signals into DNA with minutes resolution. Employing DNA as a high-density data storage medium has paved the way for next-generation digital storage and biosensing technologies. However, the multipart architecture of current DNA-based recording techniques renders them inherently slow and incapable of recording fluctuating signals with sub-hour frequencies. To address this limitation, we developed a simplified system employing a single enzyme, terminal deoxynucleotidyl transferase (TdT), to transduce environmental signals into DNA. TdT adds nucleotides to the 3’ ends of single-stranded DNA (ssDNA) in a template-independent manner, selecting bases according to inherent preferences and environmental conditions.
Immunotherapy is a promising strategy to treat cancer by stimulating the body’s own immune system to destroy tumor cells, but it only works for a handful of cancers. MIT
MIT is an acronym for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It is a prestigious private research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts that was founded in 1861. It is organized into five Schools: architecture and planning; engineering; humanities, arts, and social sciences; management; and science. MIT’s impact includes many scientific breakthroughs and technological advances.
“The Rejuvenome Project was launched to target these bottlenecks,” said Nicholas Schaum, PhD, Scientific Director at the Astera Institute. “We hope to do that by characterising treatments and regimens, both established and newly invented, for which we have reason to believe improve health and longevity.”
Previously, Schaum worked as a researcher at Stanford University, California, in conjunction with the Chan Zuckerberg BioHub. He organised dozens of labs and hundreds of researchers into a consortium that produced cell atlases, to characterise aging tissues in mice. These cell atlases became the foundation for Schaum’s further studies into whole-organ aging and single-cell parabiosis.
The Rejuvenome Project is expected to be complete in 2028. All wet lab operations will be centred at Buck, while the dry lab computational aspects will reside at the Astera Institute.
Balancing Risk and Cutting Edge Medical Innovation — Dr. Paul Offit, MD, Director, Vaccine Education Center, Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.
Dr. Paul A. Offit, MD, (https://www.paul-offit.com/) is an internationally recognized expert in the fields of virology and immunology, Co-Inventor of a landmark vaccine for the prevention of Rotavirus gastroenteritis, and holds multiple titles including — Director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital Of Philadelphia (CHOP), Maurice R. Hilleman Chair of Vaccinology and Professor of Pediatrics, Perelmann School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania, and Adjunct Associate Professor, The Wistar Institute of Anatomy and Biology.
Dr. Offit was a member of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, a founding advisory board member of the Autism Science Foundation and the Foundation for Vaccine Research, a member of the Institute of Medicine, and co-editor of the foremost vaccine text, Vaccines.
Dr. Offit is a recipient of many awards including the J. Edmund Bradley Prize for Excellence in Pediatrics from the University of Maryland Medical School, the Young Investigator Award in Vaccine Development from the Infectious Disease Society of America, a Research Career Development Award from the National Institutes of Health, and the Sabin Vaccine Institute Gold Medal.
Dr. Offit has published more than 150 papers in medical and scientific journals in the areas of rotavirus-specific immune responses and vaccine safety. He is also the co-inventor of a landmark rotavirus vaccine recommended for universal use in infants by the CDC.
For this achievement, Dr. Offit received the Luigi Mastroianni and William Osler Awards from the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, the Charles Mérieux Award from the National Foundation for Infectious Diseases, and was honored by Bill and Melinda Gates during the launch of their Foundation’s Living Proof Project for global health. In addition, he has received numerous other awards and honors for his groundbreaking work.
Dr. Offit is also an author of many books including, but not limited to: Vaccinated: One Man’s Quest to Defeat the World’s Deadliest Diseases, Overkill: When Modern Medicine Goes Too Far, The Cutter Incident: How America’s First Polio Vaccine Led to the Growing Vaccine Crisis, Breaking the Antibiotic Habit, Do You Believe in Magic, and his most recent, You Bet Your Life: From Blood Transfusions to Mass Vaccination, the Long and Risky History of Medical Innovation.
Scientists long believed the brain was immutable, unable to recover functions lost to injury or disease. But in the past few decades, researchers have devised methods to manipulate the brain and central nervous system to help the paralyzed move and enable the blind to see, and they’re moving closer to restoring lost cognitive abilities.
“We are at an inflection point where we are starting to give functions back to people,” said Michael Lim, MD, professor and chair of neurosurgery.
Only recently, researchers have uncovered evidence she wasn’t alone. In a 2019 study analyzing the complex mess of humanity’s prehistory, scientists used artificial intelligence (AI) to identify an unknown human ancestor species that modern humans encountered – and shared dalliances with – on the long trek out of Africa millennia ago.
“About 80,000 years ago, the so-called Out of Africa occurred, when part of the human population, which already consisted of modern humans, abandoned the African continent and migrated to other continents, giving rise to all the current populations”, explained evolutionary biologist Jaume Bertranpetit from the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Spain.
As modern humans forged this path into the landmass of Eurasia, they forged some other things too – breeding with ancient and extinct hominids from other species.
An artificial intelligence (AI)-based technology rapidly diagnoses rare disorders in critically ill children with high accuracy, according to a report by scientists from University of Utah Health and Fabric Genomics, collaborators on a study led by Rady Children’s Hospital in San Diego. The benchmark finding, published in Genomic Medicine, foreshadows the next phase of medicine, where technology helps clinicians quickly determine the root cause of disease so they can give patients the right treatment sooner.
“This study is an exciting milestone demonstrating how rapid insights from AI-powered decision support technologies have the potential to significantly improve patient care,” says Mark Yandell, Ph.D., co-corresponding author on the paper. Yandell is a professor of human genetics and Edna Benning Presidential Endowed Chair at U of U Health, and a founding scientific advisor to Fabric.
Worldwide, about seven million infants are born with serious genetic disorders each year. For these children, life usually begins in intensive care. A handful of NICUs in the U.S., including at U of U Health, are now searching for genetic causes of disease by reading, or sequencing, the three billion DNA letters that make up the human genome. While it takes hours to sequence the whole genome, it can take days or weeks of computational and manual analysis to diagnose the illness.
