Lifeboat Foundation

Scientists have enhanced the efficiency of CRISPR/Cas9 gene editing by threefold using interstrand crosslinks, without resorting to viral material for delivery. This approach boosts the cell’s natural repair mechanisms, allowing for more accurate and efficient gene editing, potentially improving disease research and preclinical work.

Gene editing is a powerful method for both research and therapy. Since the advent of the Nobel Prize-winning CRISPR/Cas9 technology, a quick and accurate tool for genome editing discovered in 2012, scientists have been working to explore its capabilities and boost its performance.

Researchers in the University of California, Santa Barbara biologist Chris Richardson’s lab have added to that growing toolbox, with a method that increases the efficiency of CRISPR/Cas9 editing without the use of viral material to deliver the genetic template used to edit the target genetic sequence. According to their new paper published in the journal Nature Biotechnology, their method stimulates homology-directed repair (a step in the gene editing process) by approximately threefold “without increasing mutation frequencies or altering end-joining repair outcomes.”

The first protein-based nano-computing agent that functions as a circuit has been created by Penn State researchers. The milestone puts them one step closer to developing next-generation cell-based therapies to treat diseases like diabetes and cancer.

Traditional synthetic biology approaches for cell-based therapies, such as ones that destroy cancer cells or encourage tissue regeneration after injury, rely on the expression or suppression of proteins that produce a desired action within a cell. This approach can take time (for proteins to be expressed and degrade) and cost cellular energy in the process. A team of Penn State College of Medicine and Huck Institutes of the Life Sciences researchers are taking a different approach.

“We’re engineering proteins that directly produce a desired action,” said Nikolay Dokholyan, G. Thomas Passananti Professor and vice chair for research in the Department of Pharmacology. “Our protein-based devices or nano-computing agents respond directly to stimuli (inputs) and then produce a desired action (outputs).”

So it is confirmed that the new variant of covid 19 virus is here but the actual spike now is in China. But will most likely spread globally much how previous viruses have done. Be sure to be prepared for another pandemic. Anyway what may be the possible cure would be new bioengineering techniques with crispr to eventually be immune to the virus like I have posted in some genetically engineered cells recently were made. But rest assured this could lead to a global pandemic because the current variant is taxing our current vaccination measures.

The country once had some of the harshest Covid restrictions on the planet, but the response from the government and the public is relatively muted this time.

In short blood dilution is very, very good for you.

In this talk, Dr. Irina Conboy discusses the role of repair and regeneration in lifespan and healthspan, contending that these factors, rather than entropy and time progression, truly govern our aging process. She describes the research her team is pursuing, investigating whether improving the efficiency of bodily repair in older individuals could effectively make them younger. She suggests that biological age could potentially be reversed and discusses heterochronic parabiosis and plasma dilution as potential ways to accomplish that. Conboy highlights recent research suggesting that old blood has a greater impact on cellular health and function than young blood. She presents her team’s experimental research on the rejuvenation effects of plasma dilution, demonstrating its significant impact on reducing senescence, neuroinflammation, and promoting neurogenesis in the brains of old mice.

Continue reading “Decoding the Aging Process: The Impact of Blood Dilution on Biological Age (Irina Conboy at EARD)” »

Year 2022 This new protein Newtic1 holds promise to fully understanding limb regeneration in humans. Still though genetic engineering will be needed to fully integrate the ability for limb and body part regeneration.

The animal kingdom exhibits a plethora of unique and surprising phenomena or abilities that include, for some animals, the ability to regenerate body parts irrespective of age. Now, researchers from Japan have discovered that the mechanisms behind this peculiar ability in newts have a few surprises of their own.

Quantum biology explores how quantum effects influence biological processes, potentially leading to breakthroughs in medicine and biotechnology. Despite the assumption that quantum effects rapidly disappear in biological systems, research suggests these effects play a key role in physiological processes. This opens up the possibility of manipulating these processes to create non-invasive, remote-controlled therapeutic devices. However, achieving this requires a new, interdisciplinary approach to scientific research.

Imagine using your cell phone to control the activity of your own cells to treat injuries and diseases. It sounds like something from the imagination of an overly optimistic science fiction writer. But this may one day be a possibility through the emerging field of quantum biology.

Continue reading “Quantum Biology: Unlocking the Mysteries of How Life Works” »

Year 2022

Experiments such as this one cannot be funded with federal research dollars, though they break no U.S. laws. The work was conducted in China, not because it was illegal in the United States, the researchers said, but because the monkey embryos, which are difficult to procure and expensive, were available there. The experiment used a total of 150 embryos, which were obtained without harming the monkeys, “just like in the IVF procedure,” Tan said.

But such experiments, which combine human cells with those of animals, are nevertheless controversial. This work, and other work by Izpisua Belmonte, has moved so rapidly, bioethicists have had trouble keeping up.

Continue reading “International team creates first chimeric human-monkey embryos” »

Imagine using your cellphone to control the activity of your own cells to treat injuries and disease. It sounds like something from the imagination of an overly optimistic science fiction writer. But this may one day be a possibility through the emerging field of quantum biology.

Over the past few decades, scientists have made incredible progress in understanding and manipulating biological systems at increasingly small scales, from protein folding to genetic engineering. And yet, the extent to which quantum effects influence living systems remains barely understood.

Continue reading “Quantum physics proposes a new way to study biology—the results could revolutionize our understanding of how life works” »

A new publication in the May issue of Nature Aging by researchers from Integrated Biosciences, a biotechnology company combining synthetic biology and machine learning to target aging, demonstrates the power of artificial intelligence (AI) to discover novel senolytic compounds, a class of small molecules under intense study for their ability to suppress age-related processes such as fibrosis, inflammation and cancer.

The paper, “Discovering small-molecule senolytics with deep neural networks,” authored in collaboration with researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, describes the AI-guided screening of more than 800,000 compounds to reveal three drug candidates with comparable efficacy and superior medicinal chemistry properties than those of senolytics currently under investigation.

“This research result is a significant milestone for both longevity research and the application of artificial intelligence to drug discovery,” said Felix Wong, Ph.D., co-founder of Integrated Biosciences and first author of the publication. “These data demonstrate that we can explore chemical space in silico and emerge with multiple candidate anti-aging compounds that are more likely to succeed in the clinic, compared to even the most promising examples of their kind being studied today.”