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Category: biotech/medical – Page 1377

Fluorescent sensors glow brightly under UV light if infection starts to set in. Researchers have developed smart wound dressings with built-in nanosensors that glow to alert patients when a wound is not healing properly.

The multifunctional, antimicrobial dressings feature fluorescent sensors that glow brightly under UV light if infection starts to set in and can be used to monitor healing progress.

The smart dressings, developed by a team of scientists and engineers at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia, harness the powerful antibacterial and antifungal properties of magnesium hydroxide.

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A potentially life-saving treatment for heart attack victims has been discovered from a very unlikely source — the venom of one of the world’s deadliest spiders.

A drug candidate developed from a molecule found in the venom of the Fraser Island (K’gari) funnel web spider can prevent damage caused by a heart attack and extend the life of donor hearts used for organ transplants. The discovery was made by a team led by Dr Nathan Palpant and Professor Glenn King from The University of Queensland (UQ) and Professor Peter Macdonald from the Victor Chang Cardiac Research Institute.

Dr Palpant, from UQ’s Institute for Molecular Bioscience (IMB), said the drug candidate worked by stopping a ‘death signal’ sent from the heart in the wake of an attack.

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Scientists have waited months for access to highly accurate protein structure prediction since DeepMind presented remarkable progress in this area at the 2020 Critical Assessment of Structure Prediction, or CASP14, conference. The wait is now over.

Researchers at the Institute for Protein Design at the University of Washington School of Medicine in Seattle have largely recreated the performance achieved by DeepMind on this important task. These results will be published online by the journal Science on Thursday, July 15.

Unlike DeepMind, the UW Medicine team’s method, which they dubbed RoseTTAFold, is freely available. Scientists from around the world are now using it to build models to accelerate their own research. Since July, the program has been downloaded from GitHub by over 140 independent research teams.

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Today, in a peer-reviewed paper published in the prestigious scientific journal Nature, DeepMind offered further details of how exactly its A.I. software was able to perform so well. It has also open-sourced the code it used to create AlphaFold 2 for other researchers to use.

But it’s still not clear when researchers and drug companies will have easy access to AlphaFold’s structure predictions.

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Researchers at UC San Francisco have successfully developed a “speech neuroprosthesis” that has enabled a man with severe paralysis to communicate in sentences, translating signals from his brain to the vocal tract directly into words that appear as text on a screen.

The achievement, which was developed in collaboration with the first participant of a clinical research trial, builds on more than a decade of effort by UCSF neurosurgeon Edward Chang, MD, to develop a technology that allows people with paralysis to communicate even if they are unable to speak on their own. The study appears July 15 in the New England Journal of Medicine.

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That said, the Borgs do clearly contain metabolic genes, which might be able to boost the energy metabolisms of Methanoperedens that host them. If so, these unique genetic elements could provide new insights into reducing methane emissions, which is a major aim for climate change mitigation plans.

These ‘Borg’ elements assimilated genes from other organisms, and could be used to help fight climate change.

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Summary: Aromatic turmerone, a compound derived from turmeric essential oil, and its derivatives directly affect dopamine neurons to generate neuroprotective properties in tissue culture models of Parkinson’s disease.

Source: Kumamoto University.

Researchers from Kumamoto University, Japan have found that a component derived from turmeric essential oil, aromatic turmerone (ar-turmerone), and its derivatives act directly on dopaminergic nerves to create a neuroprotective effect on tissue cultures of a Parkinson’s disease model.

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Summary: Using human stem cells to develop a brain organoid model, researchers were able to show exposure to a common pesticide synergizes with an autism-linked gene mutation. The study provides clear evidence that genetics and environment may combine to disrupt neurodevelopment.

Source: Johns Hopkins University.

Researchers at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health have shown in a brain organoid study that exposure to a common pesticide synergizes with a frequent autism-linked gene mutation.

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University of California San Diego scientists have now developed several genetic editing tools that help pave the way to an eventual gene drive designed to stop Culex mosquitoes from spreading disease. Gene drives are designed to spread modified genes, in this case those that disable the ability to transmit pathogens, throughout the targeted wild population.

Genetics toolkit targets less researched Culex mosquitoes, which transmit West Nile virus and avian malaria.

Since the onset of the CRISPR genetic editing revolution, scientists have been working to leverage the technology in the development of gene drives that target pathogen-spreading mosquitoes such as Anopheles and Aedes species, which spread malaria, dengue, and other life-threatening diseases.

Continue reading “Researchers Create New CRISPR Genetic Tools to Help Contain Mosquito Disease Transmission” | >