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Category: biotech/medical – Page 1524

“BAT said KBP had cloned a portion of the genetic sequence of coronavirus and developed a potential antigen, which is then inserted into tobacco plants for reproduction.”

😲😲😲

While large pharmaceutical companies are already producing vaccines, [the company British American Tobacco] believes its own can be produced in six weeks, compared with the several months it takes using conventional methods.

This, the company claims, is because of proprietary technology that allows elements of the vaccine to gather quickly on tobacco plants.

Continue reading “COVID vaccine made from GMO tobacco? It’s now in human trials” | >

“The research was conducted by overexpressing two different genes, the AVP1 and OsSIZ1.”

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One group of Texas Tech University researchers has found a way to double fiber yield for cotton in semi-arid areas like that of West Texas, where drought, heat and salinity are working against farmers.

Hong Zhang is a professor of Plant Molecular Biology and Plant Biotechnology at Texas Tech. A few years ago, his group published a paper showing that he could increase cotton yield by 35%-40% in dryland conditions.

Continue reading “Tweaking two genes in cotton doubles crop yields—and may do the same in wheat, rice and corn” | >

✨ ′′ Using a high speed 5 G network, a London surgeon has performed remote experimental surgery for a banana based in the U.S. state of California.

This evolution opens up prospects for complicated remote surgeries without going through the trouble of future travel.
#IEEE_BAU_RAS

✨‏باستخدام شبكة 5G فائقة السرعة قام جرّاح في لندن بإجراء عملية جراحية تجريبية عن بُعد لموزة موجودة في ولاية كاليفورنيا الأمريكية.

‏هذا التطور يفتح الآفاق لإجراء عمليات جراحية معقدة عن بعد دون تكبد عناء السفر مستقبلاً.” #IEEE_BAU_RAS

Continue reading “IEEE BAU Robotics and Automation Chapter” | >

An expert panel is meeting Thursday to consider whether the Food and Drug Administration should issue a second emergency use authorization for a Covid-19 vaccine, this one made by Moderna. It is almost a foregone conclusion that it will. But the hearing still promises to tell us more about the vaccine and its use. The FDA gave Moderna’s vaccine a favorable review in the leadup to the meeting, all but guaranteeing the Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee will recommend an EUA be granted. It’s also widely expected the FDA will issue the EUA on Friday.

The authorization will mark the second Covid-19 vaccine cleared by the agency — and amount to one more step toward curbing the pandemic.

Read more | >

Mice, fruit flies and dogs are common creatures of laboratories across the country, valuable to researchers for their genetic proximity to humans. But what about lampreys?

A new Yale School of Public Health study has enlisted this unlikely and slimy ally in the fight against .

By carefully tracing the evolution of a select number of cancer-causing genes in a variety of species, the researchers evaluated which animals are—and are not—effective in gauging how an analog of those genes in humans can lead to cancer. What they found is surprising: such as lampreys share significant similarities in these certain genes compared to humans, while do not. Their findings, published in the journal Genome Biology and Evolution, will help molecular biologists and other scientists as they work to find potential cures to certain cancers, such as lymphoma.

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Summary: A new method identified a large set of gene regulatory regions in the brain, selected throughout human evolution.

Source: Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics.

With only 1% difference, the human and chimpanzee protein-coding genomes are remarkably similar. Understanding the biological features that make us human is part of a fascinating and intensely debated line of research. Researchers at the SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics and the University of Lausanne have developed a new approach to pinpoint, for the first time, adaptive human-specific changes in the way genes are regulated in the brain.

Read more | >

Circa 2015

Conventional particle accelerators are typically big machines that occupy a lot of space. Even at more modest energies, such as that used for cancer therapy and medical imaging, accelerators need large rooms to accommodate the required hardware, power supplies and radiation shielding.

A new discovery by physicists at the University of Maryland could hold the key to the construction of inexpensive, broadly useful, and portable particle accelerators in the very near future. The team has accelerated electron beams to nearly the speed of light using record-low laser energies, thus relieving a major engineering bottleneck in the development of compact particle accelerators. The work appears in the November 6, 2015 issue of the journal Physical Review Letters.

“We have accelerated high-charge electron beams to more than 10 million electron volts using only millijoules of laser pulse energy. This is the energy consumed by a typical household lightbulb in one-thousandth of a second.” said Howard Milchberg, professor of Physics and Electrical and Computer Engineering at UMD and senior author of the study. “Because the laser energy requirement is so low, our result opens the way for laser-driven particle accelerators that can be moved around on a cart.”

Continue reading “New discovery could enable portable particle accelerators” | >

Chemists at Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg (MLU) have developed a way to integrate liquids directly into materials during the 3D printing process. This allows, for example, active medical agents to be incorporated into pharmaceutical products or luminous liquids to be integrated into materials, which allow monitoring of damage. The study was published in Advanced Materials Technologies.

3D is now widely used for a range of applications. Generally, however, the method is limited to materials which are liquefied through heat and become solid after printing. If the finished product is to contain liquid components, these are usually added afterwards. This is time-consuming and costly. “The future lies in more complex methods that combine several production steps,” says Professor Wolfgang Binder from the Institute of Chemistry at MLU. “That is why we were looking for a way to integrate liquids directly into the material during the .”

To this endeavor, Binder and his colleague Harald Rupp combined common 3D printing processes with traditional printing methods such as those used in inkjet or laser printers. Liquids are added drop by drop at the desired location during the extrusion of the basic material. This allows them to be integrated directly and into the material in a targeted manner.

Read more | >