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DNA repair discovery could improve biotechnology

A team of researchers from Michigan State University’s College of Veterinary Medicine has made a discovery that may have implications for therapeutic gene editing strategies, cancer diagnostics and therapies and other advancements in biotechnology.

Kathy Meek, a professor in the College of Veterinary Medicine, and collaborators at Cambridge University and the National Institutes of Health have uncovered a previously unknown aspect of how DNA double-stranded breaks are repaired.

A large protein kinase called DNA-PK starts the DNA repair process; in their new report, two distinct DNA-PK protein complexes are characterized, each of which has a specific role in DNA repair that cannot be assumed by the other.

Groundbreaking Biomaterial Heals Tissues From the Inside Out

The substance can be administered via intravenous injection and holds the possibility of being used in the treatment of conditions such as heart attacks and traumatic brain injury, among others.

An innovative biomaterial has been developed that, when injected intravenously, reduces inflammation and stimulates cell and tissue repair. The efficacy of this biomaterial in treating heart attack-induced tissue damage was demonstrated through successful testing on both rodent and large animal models. The researchers also provided proof of concept, based on a rodent study, suggesting that the biomaterial may prove beneficial in the treatment of traumatic brain injury and pulmonary arterial hypertension.

“This biomaterial allows for treating damaged tissue from the inside out,” said Karen Christman, a professor of bioengineering at the University of California San Diego, and the lead researcher on the team that developed the material. “It’s a new approach to regenerative engineering.”

3D bioprinting inside the human body could be possible thanks to new soft robot

Engineers from UNSW Sydney have developed a miniature and flexible soft robotic arm which could be used to 3D print biomaterial directly onto organs inside a person’s body.

3D bioprinting is a process whereby biomedical parts are fabricated from so-called bioink to construct natural tissue-like structures.

Bioprinting is predominantly used for research purposes such as tissue engineering and in the development of new drugs — and normally requires the use of large 3D printing machines to produce cellular structures outside the living body.

Paper Advanced Sciences:

Advanced soft robotic system for in situ 3D bioprinting and endoscopic surgery.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/advs.

Feasibility of mapping the human brain with expansion x-ray microscopy

Hey folks, I’m excited to share a new essay with y’all on my proposed route towards nanoscale human brain connectomics. I suggest that synchrotron ‘expansion x-ray microscopy’ has the potential to enable anatomical imaging of the entire human brain with sub-100 nm voxel size and high contrast in around 1 year for a price of roughly $10M. I plan to continue improving this essay over time as I acquire more detailed information and perform more calculations.

For a brief history of this concept: I started exploring this idea during undergrad (working with a laboratory-scale x-ray microscope), but was cut short by the pandemic. Now, I’m working on a PhD in biomedical engineering centered on gene therapy and synthetic biology, but I have retained a strong interest in connectomics. I recently began communication with some excellent collaborators who might be able to help move this technology forward. Hoping for some exciting progress!


By Logan Thrasher Collins.

PDF version

This video explores Artificial Super Intelligence and how it will change the world

Watch this next video about the Future of Artificial Intelligence (2030 — 10,000 A.D.+): https://youtu.be/cwXnX49Bofk.
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SOURCES:
• Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence (Max Tegmark): https://amzn.to/3xrU351
• The Future of Humanity (Michio Kaku): https://amzn.to/3Gz8ffA
• The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (Ray Kurzweil): https://amzn.to/3ftOhXI

Official Discord Server: https://discord.gg/R8cYEWpCzK
Patreon Page: https://www.patreon.com/futurebusinesstech.

💡 Future Business Tech explores the future of technology and the world.

https://youtu.be/cwXnX49Bofk.

Examples of topics I cover include:
• Artificial Intelligence & Robotics.
• Virtual and Augmented Reality.
• Brain-Computer Interfaces.
• Transhumanism.
• Genetic Engineering.

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Surpassing All Existing Designs — Researchers Develop High-Voltage Microbattery With Exceptional Energy and Power Density

A persistent technological challenge has been the difficulty in scaling down the electrochemical performance of large-format batteries to smaller, microscale power sources, hindering their ability to power microdevices, microrobots, and implantable medical devices. However, researchers at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign have overcome this challenge by developing a high-voltage microbattery (9 V) with exceptional energy and power density, unparalleled by any existing battery design.

Material Science and Engineering Professor Paul Braun (Grainger Distinguished Chair in Engineering, Materials Research Laboratory Director), Dr. Sungbong Kim (Postdoc, MatSE, current assistant professor at Korea Military Academy, co-first author), and Arghya Patra (Graduate Student, MatSE, MRL, co-first author) recently published a paper detailing their findings in Cell Reports.

<em>Cell Reports</em> is a peer-reviewed scientific journal that published research papers that report new biological insight across a broad range of disciplines within the life sciences. Established in 2012, it is the first open access journal published by Cell Press, an imprint of Elsevier.

Gene correction as a therapy for frontotemporal dementia (FTD) and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) caused by the C9orf72 mutation

Year 2020 face_with_colon_three


Frontotemporal dementia (FTD) and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) are two fatal and incurable neurodegenerative diseases linked by a shared genetic cause – a heterozygous hexanucleotide (GGGGCC) repeat expansion in a single allele of the C9orf72 gene. The goal of this work is to develop novel CRISPR based therapeutic gene editing technologies and test whether gene editing can reverse the cellular pathology caused by this repeat expansion in patient derived cells. The results of these studies will advance our use of CRISPR technologies for therapeutic editing in FTD/ALS, inform our understanding of the regulation of C9orf72 gene, and will be applicable to many other repeat expansion and single gene disorders.

The math behind engineering living things (TMEB #3)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=caT3j

The math behind Evo-devo~

Created by Prompt Suathim (2nd year undergrad, Integrated Science, UBC)

Uri Alon’s Book:

Jim Collins paper:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/12654725_Constructi…ichia_coli.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-017-01498-0

The math behind fly development: