A quick scan of your resting brain waves might hold the secret to predicting how intensely you will react to psilocybin, offering doctors a potential new tool for personalizing psychedelic therapy.
Category: biotech/medical – Page 141
MIT Mined Bacteria for the Next CRISPR—and Found Hundreds of Potential New Tools
Now, MIT scientists have released an AI called DefensePredictor that can root out new bacterial defense systems in five minutes, instead of weeks or months. As proof of concept, DefensePredictor churned through hundreds of thousands of proteins in multiple strains of Escherichia coli (E. coli). Over 600 proteins not previously linked to immune defense popped up. Added to a vulnerable strain of bacteria, a subset of these protected them against attack.
“E. coli harbors a much broader landscape of antiphage defense than previously realized, expanding the likely number of systems by multiple orders of magnitude,” wrote the team.
These systems might hold secrets about how immunity evolved. And because the proteins may work in different ways, they could be a goldmine for next-generation precision molecular tools.
A hidden DNA region helps drive frailty, exposing brain and immune links that reshape aging risk
Researchers at McMaster University have identified, for the first time, a novel region of DNA and two associated genes connected to frailty, offering neurological and immune-related insights that might help explain why some older adults are more likely to be frail than others.
The McMaster team’s findings, published in the journal npj Aging, fill an important gap by revealing genetic factors that contribute to the development of frailty. The discovery provides a biological connection to the condition and points toward new avenues for early detection and targeted intervention.
The evolution of high-order genome architecture revealed from 1,000 species
Now online! Comparative Hi-C analysis across 1,025 species reveals that genome architecture has evolved along distinct trajectories, with plants favoring global folding and animals developing checkerboard compartmentalization, yet both converge on spatial organization as a conserved strategy for gene regulation.
Hypertension With High-Risk Features in Cryptogenic Stroke: An Exploratory Analysis of the ARCADIA Randomized Clinical Trial
In an exploratory analysis of the ARCADIA randomized clinical trial, hypertension with high‑risk features was associated with modification of antithrombotic treatment effects after cryptogenic stroke. Among patients without high‑risk hypertension features, apixaban was associated with a lower risk of recurrent ischemic stroke or systemic embolism compared with aspirin.
This secondary analysis of a randomized clinical trial evaluates the association between hypertension with high-risk features and treatment effect.
Microfluidic chip reveals how living glioblastoma slices resist chemotherapy
Combining microchip engineering techniques with cutting-edge gene profiling, scientists at Columbia University have developed a new way to study drug responses in living slices of human brain tumor cells. The system, using a type of chip called a microfluidic device, has already revealed new details about how these aggressive tumors resist chemotherapy drugs and could help researchers develop more effective treatments.
The work grew from earlier efforts to study glioblastoma tumors removed from patients during surgery. “These samples that we’re getting from our colleagues who resect these tumors clinically, they’re alive, and we can actually do experiments directly on those surgical samples,” says Peter Sims, Ph.D., associate professor of systems biology at Columbia and senior author on the new study, which appears in the journal Lab on a Chip.
Long COVID is associated with increased risk of cardiovascular disease
People with long COVID are at increased risk of developing cardiovascular disease, according to a new study from Karolinska Institutet published in eClinicalMedicine. The results show that the risk of conditions such as cardiac arrhythmias and coronary artery disease is higher even among those who were not hospitalized during the acute infection.
Long COVID has become an increasingly significant health problem worldwide, and a growing number of studies suggest that the condition can lead to secondary cardiovascular diseases. To date, research has mainly focused on people who were hospitalized, while the risks for those who stayed at home or were treated at a GP are less well known. In the current study, the researchers investigated how often major cardiovascular events occur in these individuals compared with those without the diagnosis.
Of the just over 1.2 million people aged between 18 and 65 included in the study, around 9,000 had been diagnosed with long COVID, corresponding to 0.7%. Two-thirds of them were women. People who had previously had cardiovascular disease or been hospitalized for COVID-19 were excluded from this group.