Lifeboat Foundation

Swiss startup claims its Neuroplatform is a first for biocomputing.

A new study demonstrates that just a handful of “forgotten” biochemical reactions are needed to transform simple geochemical compounds into the complex molecules of life.

The origin of life on Earth has long been a mystery that has eluded scientists. A key question is how much of the history of life on Earth is lost to time. It is quite common for a single species to “phase out” using a biochemical reaction, and if this happens across enough species, such reactions could effectively be “forgotten” by life on Earth. But if the history of biochemistry is rife with forgotten reactions, would there be any way to tell?

This question inspired researchers from the Earth-Life Science Institute (ELSI) at the Tokyo Institute of Technology, and the California Institute of Technology (CalTech) in the USA. They reasoned that forgotten chemistry would appear as discontinuities or “breaks” in the path that chemistry takes from simple geochemical molecules to complex biological molecules.

Synthetic biology has been game-changing and with generative artificial intelligence, generative biology holds immense potential; let’s just speed it up.

Mirror-image nerve cells, tight bonds between neuron pairs and surprising axon swirls abound in a bit of gray matter smaller than a grain of rice.

Mann, J., Meshkin, H., Zirkle, J. et al. Mechanism-based organization of neural networks to emulate systems biology and pharmacology models. Sci Rep 14, 12,082 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-024-59378-9

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One tool, called Find My Understudied Genes (FMUG), emerged from a study published in March¹, which first explores why interesting, but relatively under-researched, genes are not highlighted in genetic surveys, and then offers FMUG as a remedy.

The second tool is the Unknome database, created by a team led by Matthew Freeman at the University of Oxford, UK, and Sean Munro at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Cambridge, UK, that was described² in 2023.

“We are in the lucky position to know what we don’t know,” says Thomas Stoeger, a biologist at Northwestern University in Chicago, Illinois, and co-author of the FMUG study.

Neuromorphic computing represents an exciting crossover between technology and biology, a frontier where computer science meets the mysteries of the human brain. Designed to mimic the way humans process information, this technology holds the promise to stir a revolution everywhere, from artificial intelligence to robotics. But what exactly is neuromorphic computing and why is it taking the center stage?

When you think of a criminal investigation, you might picture detectives meticulously collecting and analyzing evidence found at the scene: weapons, biological fluids, footprints and fingerprints. However, this is just the beginning of an attempt to reconstruct the events and individuals involved in the crime.

A new study unexpectedly reveals that cells thrive on chaos.