Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog

Category: genetics

This is an excerpt of a conversation between Dr. Daniel Stickler and Brian Rose.
Dr. Stickler is the Medical Director for the Neurohacker Collective, a consultant for Google on epigenetics and AI in healthcare, and a lecturer at Stanford University.
Brian Rose is the founder of London Real, a curator of people worth watching. Its mission is to promote personal transformation through inspiration, self-discovery and empowerment.
CUENTA CON SUBTÍTULOS EN ESPAÑOL
To watch the entire conversation clic here: https://youtu.be/ynbaJ2038K0

Read more | >

Using nothing but light and bioink, scientists were able to directly print a human ear-like structure under the skin of mice. The team used a healthy ear as a template and 3D printed a mirror image of that ear—tissue layer by tissue layer—directly onto the back of a mouse.

All without a single surgical cut.

If you’re thinking that’s super creepy, yeah…I’m with you. As a proof-of-concept, however, the team shows that it’s possible to build or rebuild tissue layers, even those as intricate as an ear, without requiring surgical implant. This means that it could one day be possible to fix an ear or other surface tissue defects—either genetic or from injuries—directly at the injury site by basically waving a sophisticated light wand.

Read more | >

Could speed up healing.

Wound healing in mammalian skin often results in fibrotic scars, and the mechanisms by which original nonfibrotic tissue architecture can be restored are not well understood. Here, Wei et al. have shown that pharmacological activation of the nociceptor TRPA1, which is found on cutaneous sensory neurons, can limit scar formation and promote tissue regeneration. They confirmed the efficacy of TRPA1 activation in three different skin wounding mouse models, and they also observed that localized activation could generate a response at distal wound sites. TRPA1 activation induced IL-23 production by dermal dendritic cells, which activated IL-17–producing γδ T cells and promoted tissue regeneration. These findings provide insight into neuroimmune signaling pathways in the skin that are critical to mammalian tissue regeneration.

Adult mammalian wounds, with rare exception, heal with fibrotic scars that severely disrupt tissue architecture and function. Regenerative medicine seeks methods to avoid scar formation and restore the original tissue structures. We show in three adult mouse models that pharmacologic activation of the nociceptor TRPA1 on cutaneous sensory neurons reduces scar formation and can also promote tissue regeneration. Local activation of TRPA1 induces tissue regeneration on distant untreated areas of injury, demonstrating a systemic effect. Activated TRPA1 stimulates local production of interleukin-23 (IL-23) by dermal dendritic cells, leading to activation of circulating dermal IL-17–producing γδ T cells. Genetic ablation of TRPA1, IL-23, dermal dendritic cells, or γδ T cells prevents TRPA1-mediated tissue regeneration.

Read more | >

A plan to release over 750 million genetically modified mosquitoes into the Florida Keys in 2021 and 2022 received final approval from local authorities, against the objection of many local residents and a coalition of environmental advocacy groups. The proposal had already won state and federal approval.

“With all the urgent crises facing our nation and the State of Florida — the Covid-19 pandemic, racial injustice, climate change — the administration has used tax dollars and government resources for a Jurassic Park experiment,” said Jaydee Hanson, policy director for the International Center for Technology Assessment and Center for Food Safety, in a statement released Wednesday.

“Now the Monroe County Mosquito Control District has given the final permission needed. What could possibly go wrong? We don’t know, because EPA unlawfully refused to seriously analyze environmental risks, now without further review of the risks, the experiment can proceed,” she added.

Read more | >

Glycerol, used in the past as antifreeze for cars, is produced by a range of organisms from yeasts to vertebrates, some of which use it as an osmoprotectant—a molecule that prevents dangerous water loss in salty environments—while others use it as an antifreeze. Here, scientists from the University of Nevada and Miami University in Ohio show that two species of the single-celled green algae Chlamydomonas from Antarctica, called UWO241 and ICE-MDV, produce high levels of glycerol to protect them from osmotic water loss, and possibly also from freezing injury. Presently, only one other organism, an Arctic fish, is known to use glycerol for both purposes. Both species synthesize glycerol with enzymes encoded by multiple copies of a recently discovered ancient gene family. These results, published today in the open-access journal Frontiers in Plant Science, illustrate the importance of adaptations that allow life to not only survive but to thrive in extreme habitats.

The researchers collected both Chlamydomonas species from depths of 13 to 17 m, a region with a steep salinity gradient, in Lake Bonney, a permanently ice-covered lake in the McMurdo Dry Valleys of Victoria Land, Antarctica. Previously, they showed that both species are remarkably adapted to their extreme habitat, with a photosynthetic apparatus adapted to cold, saline, and light-poor conditions, novel proteins, more fluid cell membranes that function at low temperatures, and ice-binding proteins that protect against freeze-thaw injury.

“Our overall goal is to understand how microorganisms survive in extreme environments. The Chlamydomonas species of Lake Bonney are well-suited for such studies because they are exposed to many extremes, including low light, low temperature, oxidative stress, and high salinity. The present results are the first to show that glycerol production by microorganisms, which is well-known in warm, salty environments, is also important in polar regions,” says corresponding author Dr. James Raymond, Adjunct Research Professor at the School of Life Sciences, University of Nevada, Las Vegas, USA.

Read more | >

In this Review, Suhre, McCarthy and Schwenk describe how combining genetics with plasma proteomics is providing notable insights into human disease. As changes in the circulating proteome are often an intermediate molecular readout between a genetic variant and its organismal effect, proteomics can enable a deeper understanding of disease mechanisms, clinical biomarkers and therapeutic opportunities.

Read more | >

Both shocking and intriguing for the possibilities of gynogenesis reproduction in which sperm is used from one creature to fertilize an egg, but its DNA is ignored.

A team of researchers working at Hungary’s National Agricultural Research and Innovation Centre, Research Institute for Fisheries and Aquaculture, has accidentally bred a new kind of fish—dubbed the sturddlefish by some observers, it is a cross between an American Paddlefish and a Russian Sturgeon. In their paper published in the journal Genes, the group describes accidentally breeding the fish and what they learned by doing so.

In the past, scientists and others have bred animals from different species for various reasons, from research to utility—mules (crossed between donkeys and horses) are considered to have beneficial traits from both animals, and ligers (a cross between lions and tigers) have helped researchers understand their respective genetic backgrounds. In this new effort, the researchers claim that they were not trying to create a new type of fish, they were instead attempting to apply gynogenesis (a type of reproduction in which sperm is used from one creature to fertilize an egg, but its DNA is ignored) using American paddlefish and Russian sturgeon. To their surprise, the eggs produced fish that grew to adults.

In studying the hundreds of offspring produced, which some on the internet have named sturddlefish, the researchers found that they fell into one of three main categories: those that looked mostly like their mothers, those that looked mostly like their fathers and those that inherited features of both parents.

Read more | >

An international, first-of-its-kind cardiology trial used personalized genetic testing to reduce by 34 percent the number of serious adverse events following balloon angioplasty, a treatment for the most common form of heart disease.

For patients undergoing (PCI)—a non-surgical procedure where physicians inflate a balloon and place a metal stent in narrowed arteries to improve to the heart —the choice of antiplatelet therapy can be critical to post-treatment success, and to minimize the chance of heart attack or stroke.

The TAILOR-PCI trial, co-led by principal investigators Dr. Michael Farkouh, cardiologist and Multinational Clinical Trials Chair at the Peter Munk Cardiac Centre and Dr. Naveen Pereira, Professor of Medicine and cardiologist at Mayo Clinic, studied the effectiveness of genetic-guided therapy in patients that have had PCIs when compared to conventional therapy.

Read more | >

Obesity is the main cause of type 2 diabetes and related chronic illnesses that together will kill more people around the globe this year than the COVID-19 coronavirus. Scientists at Joslin Diabetes Center have delivered a proof of concept for a novel cell-based therapy against this dangerous condition.

The potential therapy for obesity would transplant HUMBLE (human brown-like) , human white fat cells that have been genetically modified to become similar to heat-generating , says Yu-Hua Tseng, Ph.D., a Senior Investigator in Joslin’s Section on Integrative Physiology and Metabolism.

Brown fat cells burn energy instead of storing energy as white fat cells do, says Tseng, senior author on a paper about the work in Science Translational Medicine. In the process, brown fat can lower excessive levels of glucose and lipids in the blood that are linked to metabolic diseases such as .

Read more | >