Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: genetics

A look back at one of the milestones for SRF and the first successful fundraiser on Lifespan.io for MitoSENS.

We need your support at this critical juncture of the MitoSENS project. The MitoSENS team has already demonstrated the rescue of cells containing mitochondrial mutations, and has recently generated highly promising preliminary data showing the rescue of the complete loss of a mitochondrial gene. Our next steps will focus on improving the effectiveness of the targeting system, so that we can repeat our success with one mitochondrial gene to all thirteen. We will then transition this work into animal models of mitochondrial dysfunction. This would be a crucial step in what may be the development of an eventual cure for aging and aging related diseases.

We have a talented team of highly trained mitochondrial biologists working on MitoSENS. Right now the rate-limiting factor is the cost of the expensive reagents that we use for these experiments. Increasing our funding with this campaign will allow us to double the pace of our research and bring results to the public that much faster. We have made preliminary progress on rescuing function with a second gene, ATP6, and your support will help us perfect our targeting of both ATP8 and ATP6. This requires more cells, more viruses, and many new synthetic gene sequences. Specifically, we will spend your generous donations on cell culture reagents, oxygen consumption measurements, virus production, quantitative reverse transcription PCR, DNA synthesis services, and publication of our results in a peer-reviewed journal.

Your support will help take us there.

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https://youtube.com/watch?v=ySsv5-jSqss

BMI implant leveraging AI.

You probably clicked on this article because the idea of using brain implants to allow artificial intelligence (AI) to read your brain sounds futuristic and fascinating. It is fascinating, but it’s not as futuristic as you might think. Before we start talking about brain implants and how to augment the human brain using AI, we need to put some context around human intelligence and why we might want to tinker with it.

We floated the idea before that gene editing techniques could allow us to promote genetic intelligence by performing gene editing at the germline. That’s one approach. As controversial as it might be, some solid scientific research shows that genetics does play a role in intelligence. For those of us who are already alive and well, this sort of intelligence enhancement won’t work. This is where we might look towards augmented intelligence. This sort of augmentation of the brain will firstly be preventative in that it will look to assist those who have age associated brain disorders as an example. In order for augmented intelligence to be feasible though, we need a read/write interface to the human brain. One company called Kernel might be looking to address this with a technology that takes a page out of science fiction.

kernel logo

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Our DNA encodes a complex biological blueprint for our lives.

Every toenail, artery, and brain cell we grow is meticulously planned and executed through our DNA’s unfathomably complex genetic instructions.

Recent genetics research has focused on how DNA may affect a person’s education, a field known as ‘educational genomics’.

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The birth of the first baby born using a technique called mitochondrial replacement, which uses DNA from three people to “correct” an inherited genetic mutation, was announced on Sept. 27.

Mitochondrial replacement or donation allows women who carry mitochondrial diseases to avoid passing them on to their child. These diseases can range from mild to life-threatening. No therapies exist and only a few drugs are available to treat them.

There are no international rules regulating this technique. Just one country, the United Kingdom, explicitly regulates the procedure. It’s a similar situation with other assisted reproductive techniques. Some countries permit these techniques and others don’t.

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New technology driving down the cost of research and therapies!

New technology arriving that will help drive down the costs of gene therapies.

“The researchers were able to use a closed, semi-automated benchtop system to produce genetically-modified HSCs in just one night and hope that such systems will increase the availability and affordability of cell therapies”.

#sens #aging

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I have been evangelizing this for a while and glad to see others chiming in.

London, Nov 26 (IANS) Researchers have engineered cells with a “built-in genetic circuit” that produces a molecule that impairs the ability of cancer cells to survive and grow in their low oxygen environment.

The genetic circuit produces the machinery necessary for the production of a compound that inhibits a protein which has a significant and critical role in the growth and survival of tumours.

This results in the cancer cells being unable to survive in the low oxygen, low nutrient tumour micro-environment.

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WASHINGTON – Scientists believe genetic engineering experiments have the potential to wipe out malaria and other illnesses that kill millions of people every year.

But they also acknowledge they could have unintended consequences that could be catastrophic.

So, over the next four years, the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, dubbed DARPA, plans to develop a cleanup crew for engineered genes deemed harmful to the eco-system.

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You get out what you put in.

You are what you eat, the old saying goes, but why is that so? Researchers have known for some time that diet affects the balance of microbes in our bodies, but how that translates into an effect on the host has not been understood. Now, research in mice is showing that microbes communicate with their hosts by sending out metabolites that act on histones—thus influencing gene transcription not only in the colon but also in tissues in other parts of the body. The findings publish November 23 in Molecular Cell.

“This is the first of what we hope is a long, fruitful set of studies to understand the connection between the microbiome in the gut and its influence on host health,” says John Denu, a professor of biomolecular chemistry at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and one of the study’s senior authors. “We wanted to look at whether the gut microbiota affect epigenetic programming in a variety of different tissues in the host.” These tissues were in the proximal colon, the liver, and fat .

In the study, the researchers first compared germ-free mice with those that have active gut microbes and discovered that gut microbiota alter the host’s epigenome in several tissues. Next, they compared mice that were fed a normal chow diet to mice fed a Western-type diet—one that was low in complex carbohydrates and fiber and high in fat and simple sugars. Consistent with previous studies from other researchers, they found that the of mice fed the normal chow diet differed from those fed the Western-type diet.

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