Summary: Researchers demonstrate how a single injection of fibroblast growth factor 1 (FGF1) can restore blood sugar levels to normal for extended periods in rodent models of type 2 diabetes. Studies show how FGF1 affects specific neurons and perineuronal nets to help restore blood sugar levels to normal, thus sending diabetes into remission.
Source: UW Health
In rodents with type 2 diabetes, a single surgical injection of a protein called fibroblast growth factor 1 can restore blood sugar levels to normal for weeks or months. Yet how this growth factor acts in the brain to generate this lasting benefit has been poorly understood.
Men’s delayed immune-system responses to the coronavirus could put them at higher risk of dying from COVID-19 than women, according to a study from University of Washington researchers. They found that, for women under the age of 60, their immune systems produced a near immediate defense against the virus. However, for men of all ages, it took an average of three days for their bodies to deploy T cells (white blood cells that sense and destroy virus-infected cells) to fight the novel coronavirus. note: estrogen and progesterone are in clinical trials as treatment, along with over 300 drugs.
It took three days for men infected with COVID-19 to develop immune system responses, while women’s bodies began to fight the virus right away.
The head of the World Health Organisation has called on countries to invest in their public health systems, as he stressed that the world must be better prepared for the next pandemic.
“This will not be the last pandemic,” WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told a press conference Monday, “but when the next pandemic comes, the world must be ready, more ready than it was this time.”
He said too many countries had neglected their basic public health systems in recent years and called on governments to “invest in public health as an investment in a healthier and safer future.”
The new structure works by mapping the backbones of amino acids to locations of chemicals in the Protein Data Bank involved in interactions with them. The researchers note that only recently has the data bank come to hold enough information to allow for its use in such an application. And they also note that the technique and structure can also be used to produce delivery vehicles based on proteins and also small molecule applications…
A pair of researchers at the University of California, San Francisco, has developed a new protein structure that allows for simplifying the process of custom-designing proteins. In their paper published in the journal Science, Nicholas Polizzi and William DeGrado discuss their structural unit and how they used it. Anna Peacock, with the University of Birmingham, has published a Perspective piece outlining the work by the team in California in the same journal issue.
One of the things that chemists are asked to do is custom design proteins for use in certain special applications. As the researchers note, doing so is considered to be very challenging. It usually involves a considerable amount of trial and error which generally translates to high development costs. In this new effort, the researchers have devised a new unit of protein structure to help with such projects. They call it a van der Mer structure and describe how it can be used to directly map ligand chemical group functionality to peptide residue backbone coordinates.
To come up with the new structure, the research pair poured through and analyzed thousands of protein structures in the Protein Data Bank. Their approach differed from the norm in that they ignored the positioning of side chains for the amino acid residue and instead focused on the chemical groups that contacted the residues. Using this method, they were able to design two new proteins that could be used to identify a drug called apixaban. Notably, their approach involved making just six sequences. Prior to their work, such a process would have typically taken many more.
Cooking foods at temperatures higher than boiling produces advanced glycation end (AGE) products, which induce insulin resistance and inflammation, and shorten lifespan in mice. Similar data exists in humans for the effect of AGE products on insulin resistance and inflammation, and a higher dietary AGE product intake is associated with cancer in both men and women. Accordingly, reducing dietary AGE product intake may be an important strategy for improving health and increasing lifespan in people.
The achievement opens a pathway for development of the first practical and efficient devices to generate and detect light at terahertz wavelengths—between infrared light and microwaves. Such devices could be used in applications as diverse as communications in outer space, cancer detection, and scanning for concealed weapons.
The research could also enable exploration of the basic physics of matter at infinitesimally small scales and help usher in an era of quantum metamaterials, whose structures are engineered at atomic dimensions.
A team of researchers from Stowers Institute for Medical Research, Howard Hughes Medical Institute and Stanford University has discovered conserved regeneration-responsive enhancers linked to tail regeneration in fish common to two species. In their paper published the journal Science, the group describes their genetic study of two fish species and what they learned about the role of conserved regeneration-responsive enhancers in allowing the fish to regenerate tail parts.
As the researchers note, some species are able to regenerate parts of their body when they are lost. For instance, lizards can regrow lost tails, while many other animals, including most mammals, cannot regrow damaged body parts. Despite much research, scientist have not been able to explain this. In this new effort, the researchers have found what they believe to be a major clue—conserved regeneration-responsive enhancers.
Prior research has shown that DNA sequences include non-coding bits called enhancers, which, as their name implies, play a role in enhancing gene activity. In this new effort, the researchers wondered if there might be certain enhancers involved in the regeneration response in fish—in this case, African killifish and zebrafish. They noted that prior research had shown that the two species split from the same genetic branch approximately 230 million years ago—a short enough period to allow them to see changes to their DNA that allowed both to regenerate the ends of their tails if they were bitten off by predators—or cut off by researchers.
Summary: Lessons from other historic pandemics show social tension accumulated throughout epidemics lead to significant episodes of rebellion.
Source: Bocconi University
If you have not been hearing much of the French Gilets Jaunes or of the Italian Sardines in the last few months, it’s because “the social and psychological unrest arising from the epidemic tends to crowd-out the conflicts of the pre-epidemic period, but, at the same time it constitutes the fertile ground on which global protest may return more aggressively once the epidemic is over,” writes Massimo Morelli, Professor of Political Science at Bocconi, in a paper recently published in Peace Economics, Peace Science and Public Policy.
Methods: In this review, due to their promise, we focus on inorganic nanomaterials [such as hollow mesoporous silica nanoparticles (HMSNs), tungsten sulfide quantum dots (WS2QDs), and gold nanorods (AuNRs)] combining PTT with CHT, RT or IT in one treatment, aiming to provide a comprehensive understanding of PTT-based combinational cancer therapy. Results: This review found much evidence for the use of inorganic nanoparticles for PTT-based combinational cancer therapy. Conclusion: Under synergistic effects, inorganic nanomaterial-based combinational treatments exhibit enhanced therapeutic effects compared to PTT, CHT, RT, IT or PDT alone and should be further investigated in the cancer field.
Applications of inorganic nanomaterials in photothermal therapy based on combinational cancer treatment — pubmed.
