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Blurred genome boundaries emerge as a new layer of Alzheimer’s biology

Researchers from Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Computer Science, the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine and the University of Washington have shed new light on Alzheimer’s disease that could point to new directions for treatment.

In a paper published in Science, researchers from SCS’s Ray and Stephanie Lane Computational Biology Department, Pitt’s Department of Neurobiology and collaborating institutions show that 3D genome architecture is organized differently in certain brain cells from people with Alzheimer’s disease, uncovering a previously underexplored layer of the disease’s biology.

The research team linked genome folding to gene activity and brain tissue organization in Alzheimer’s disease. The team did this with single-cell technology, spatial mapping of brain tissue and a new deep-learning model.

The perfect pesticide?

A native of the Rocky Mountains, the beetle now occurs across the Northern Hemisphere, causing more than half a billion dollars of crop losses each year. It’s a master of resistance, making it hard to control. The pest was an early driver of research into chemical pesticides starting in the 1930s. Ever since, it has evolved immunity to one compound after another—now more than 50 pesticides, representing all major types of active ingredients.

“They were chewing through treated plants like it was nothing,” Andrei Alyokhin, an entomologist at the University of Maine, says of the moment, in 2001, when farmers in Maine noticed that a still-new class of pesticides, neonicotinoids, were no longer controlling the beetle. Finding additional tools has been “increasingly difficult,” he adds.

This year, however, U.S. farmers will have a new weapon against the pest, one that works in an entirely different way from traditional pesticides and that proponents say should be safer for people and the environment. Based on a mechanism called RNA interference (RNAi), the spray targets a vital gene in the Colorado potato beetle. The gene target is unique to the pest and its close relatives, which should prevent damage to pollinators and other species. “You can … hit the insect you want to kill with precision,” says Subba Reddy Palli, an entomologist at the University of Kentucky who published a review last year in Frontiers in Insect Science describing the development of RNA-based pesticides. “You cannot get anything better than this.”

Artery-on-a-chip helps predict stroke risk

Predicting an individual’s risk of ischemic stroke is difficult because thrombosis embolization—the process of a blood clot detaching from the area where it formed, traveling and then sticking in another blood vessel—is based on factors unique to each person.

In a study published in Cell Biomaterials, researchers developed a tool to address this challenge: an artery-on-a-chip platform that can replicate a patient’s specific vascular structure and blood flow dynamics, called a “physical twin.”

“This idea was born out of a critical clinical gap,” says author Lining Arnold Ju of the University of Sydney in Australia. “We know that even patients at ‘low risk’ can suffer from severe or fatal strokes. We wanted to find a better way to predict this risk.”

Distributional regression using generalized additive models for location, scale and shape

Distributional regression models entire conditional response distributions. In this Primer, Merder et al. discuss how distributional regression is used to predict uncertainty and extreme conditions in ways often missed by classical regression and machine learning approaches.

Northwestern University Researchers Demonstrate Quantum Entanglement Over Busy Telecom Fiber

Kumar and his team measured entanglement fidelity above 94%, confirming it survived the journey at a level impossible for a classical communications system to reproduce.

The study is a part of a broader shift toward integrating quantum technologies with existing telecommunications systems. Kumar and coauthor Jordan Thomas recently explored that evolution in a feature article for Optics & Photonics News.

Next, the team plans to perform quantum teleportation between remote nodes across a real-world telecommunications network. While Kumar has already performed teleportation in his lab, he wants to demonstrate it over a metropolitan fiber carrying commercial traffic.

Premature blood stem cell aging in sickle cell disease may be reversible

Sickle cell disease causes premature aging of blood stem cells, which scientists may be able to address with a special class of drugs, according to a new study from St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. Patients with sickle cell disease experience higher rates of blood stem cell dysfunction and blood cancers compared with their peers, though the reason has been unclear.

The St. Jude researchers found that blood stem cells from young patients with sickle cell disease have features of aging, likely increasing the risk of other complications. Giving senolytics, which target aging-related processes, improved disease symptoms in model systems, with implications for curative gene therapies. The findings were published in Science Translational Medicine.

“We saw that blood stem cells from even young patients with sickle cell disease have many markers of senescence or aging,” said senior co-corresponding author Shannon McKinney-Freeman, Ph.D., St. Jude Department of Hematology.

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