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Category: biotech/medical – Page 1,601

Scientists create artificial cells that mimic living cells’ ability to capture, process, and expel material

Researchers have developed artificial cell-like structures using inorganic matter that autonomously ingest, process, and push out material—recreating an essential function of living cells.

Their article, published in Nature, provides a blueprint for creating “cell mimics,” with potential applications ranging from to environmental science.

A fundamental function of living is their ability to harvest energy from the environment to pump molecules in and out of their systems. When energy is used to move these molecules from areas of lower concentration to areas of higher concentration, the process is called active transport. Active transport allows cells to take in necessary molecules like glucose or amino acids, store energy, and extract waste.

One antibody stops all strains of COVID-19 from infecting cells

A newly discovered antibody was able to neutralize not only all strains of COVID-19, but other coronaviruses known to cause respiratory infections in humans — a potential silver bullet for a whole class of deadly, flu-like viruses.

Mutant viruses: As viruses spread, they undergo tiny genetic mutations, and when we find a unique version of the virus, we call it a new strain.

Occasionally, new strains appear that can spread more easily, evade the immune system, or cause more severe disease.

Multiple Sclerosis Linked to Infection in Adolescence

This makes sense, as we believe that inflammation in the central nervous system can start the autoimmune process (when a person’s immune system attacks part of their body) that causes MS.

Summary: A new study links viral infections including mononucleosis and pneumonia experienced during adolescence with an increased risk of developing multiple sclerosis.

Source: The Conversation

Multiple sclerosis (MS) is most often diagnosed between the ages of 20 and 50. Certain genes put a person at greater risk of getting this disease of the central nervous system, but scientists are still trying to understand the triggers.

My colleagues and I have been studying these triggers for many years. Our earlier research found that pneumonia in adolescence is associated with a raised risk of MS, so we decided to investigate whether other types of infection are associated with the condition.

High Fat Diets Break the Body Clock — This May Be the Underlying Cause of Obesity

Thus, the researchers propose that disturbance in the DVC’s timekeeping leads to obesity, rather than being the result of excessive body weight.

When rats are fed a high fat diet, this disturbs the body clock in their brain that normally controls satiety, leading to over-eating and obesity. That’s according to new research published in The Journal of Physiology.

The number of people with obesity has nearly tripled worldwide since 1975.[1] In England alone, 28% of adults are obese and another 36% are overweight.[2] Obesity can lead to several other diseases such as Type 2 diabetes, heart disease, stroke, and some types of cancer.[3]

This new research may be a cornerstone for future clinical studies that could restore the proper functioning of the body clock in the brain, to avoid overeating.

New Cultured Meat Factory Will Churn Out 5,000 Bioreactor Burgers a Day

“After demonstrating that cultured meat can reach cost parity faster than the market anticipated, this production facility is the real game-changer,” said Yaakov Nahmias, Future Meat Technologies founder and chief scientific officer, in a press release. “This facility demonstrates our proprietary media rejuvenation technology in scale, allowing us to reach production densities 10-times higher than the industrial standard.”

Cultured meat is made by extracting cells from animal tissue and giving them nutrients, oxygen, and moisture while keeping them at the same temperature they’d be at inside an animal’s body. The cells divide and multiply then start to mature, with muscle cells joining to create muscle fibers and fat cells producing lipids. The resulting nuggets of meat can be used to make processed products like burgers or sausages. Structured cuts of meat with blood vessels and connective tissue, like steak or chicken breast, require scaffolds, and researchers are creating these with biomaterials, like cellulose from plants. Companies are working on several varieties of more elaborate cultured products, from bacon to salmon.

As reported by Bloomberg, Future Meat aims to start offering its products in US restaurants by the end of next year—but must get approval from the FDA first. On top of that approval, public opinion is another hurdle the company and its competitors will need to clear before they see widespread success; for every person who’s opposed to factory farming, there’s a person who’s squeamish about the idea of meat grown in a bioreactor, despite the avian (or bovine, or porcine) lives being spared. Getting these consumers to view cultured meat favorably will be a matter of education, taste/texture as compared to the ‘real thing,’ and cost competitiveness.

WHO says Covid will mutate like the flu and is likely here to stay

“I think this virus is here to stay with us and it will evolve like influenza pandemic viruses, it will evolve to become one of the other viruses that affects us,” Dr. Mike Ryan, executive director of the World Health Organization’s Health Emergencies Program, said at a press briefing.

Covid-19 could become endemic like the flu and circulate in the population at low levels.

Multiplexed ion beam imaging (MIBI) for characterization of the tumor microenvironment across tumor types

Circa 23 March 2020

The ways in which a neoplastic cell arises and evades the immune system is the result of a departure from the systems biology that governs health. Understanding this biology requires methods that can resolve the heterogeneity of cell types, determine their states, whether they are activated (e.g., HLA-DR high) or suppressed (e.g., PD-1 high), and map their relationships or distances to one another. MIBI provides single cell resolution and sensitivity to phenotypically characterize the complex tissue environments including the TME. Executed similarly to IHC yet with the capability to profile 40+ markers simultaneously, MIBI is broadly applicable to a wide range of analyses performed in anatomic pathology including cell classification, spatial characterization, and assessment of marker expression. The MIBIscope produces data (multilayer TIFF files) that can be accessed by many analysis platforms currently available, such as those found in commercial software packages such as Fiji, Halo, and VisioPharm or freely available bioinformatic packages developed with open-source programming languages (e.g., R, Python).

All tumor types were stained, imaged, and analyzed using a single staining panel and standardized protocol. The workflow is flexible such that slides can be stained in batches and stored until imaged on the MIBIscope. Stained slides are typically stored under vacuum but protection from light is not necessary as the labels are stable metal isotopes rather than light-sensitive fluorophores. Once imaged it is possible to reimage the tissue as only a modest depth of the tissue is sputtered and analyzed during a single acquisition [16]. One limitation of the current project performed with an earlier version of the MIBIScope is the relatively small FOV size (500 μm by 500 μm) needed for images with 0.5 µm resolution. The current MIBIScope enables FOVs of 800 μm by 800 μm to be imaged in 70 min at fine resolution (650 nm). The resolution can be controlled at the instrument and acquisition at a slightly lower resolution than used in this study (1 μm) can be performed in 17 min. The 800 μm FOV captures 82% of a 1 mm TMA core. FOVs across cores of a TMA can be selected and then imaged in a single run. For whole sections it is possible to acquire adjacent images and stitch the images together using techniques commonly performed with other imaging technologies [22]. The need for tiling is particularly acute for imaging brain sections where multiple FOVs are collected to generate a larger image. Together with researchers at Stanford University, we are currently developing tiling methods to map large regions of brain tissue which will be described in a future publication. Because MIBI is still an early technology, the underlying methods for each stage of the processing pipeline are constantly evolving and improving, not just for accuracy but for generality. While the methods themselves are evolving, the pipeline tasks, at a high level, such as mass calibration, filtering, etc., are defined and have been automated through the MIBI/O software, and, as importantly, allows for appropriate user input when necessary. As more data becomes available, and the user base of MIBI grows, data processing should become more standardized.

The immediate utility of MIBI will be for understanding the biological mechanisms present in disease microenvironments. The results demonstrate the ability to detect a range of marker expression across many tumor types. The images can be segmented to define cell boundaries and then the expression of phenotypic markers used to classify cell instances into their cell class, such as proliferating tumor cells or nonproliferating tumor cells and various immune cells. Additional markers have been used on other sample sets to further define myeloid cell subsets, B cell subsets and stromal elements including vascular endothelial cells. This study also demonstrated the possibilities for calculating distances between different cell subsets including tumor and immune cells in addition to PD-1 and PD-L1 expressing immune cell subsets.

Novel imaging method reveals a surprising arrangement of DNA in the cell’s nucleus

The groups also explained why in previous studies by other scientists, the chromatin appeared to fill the cell nuclei. “When scientists plate cells on a glass slide in order to study them under a microscope, they change their volume and physically flatten them. This may perturb some of the forces governing chromatin arrangement and reduce the distance between the upper part of the nucleus to its base,” Safran explains.

If you open a biology textbook and run through the images depicting how DNA is organized in the cell’s nucleus, chances are you’ll start feeling hungry; the chains of DNA would seem like a bowl of ramen: long strings floating in liquid. However, according to two new studies—one experimental and the other theoretical—that are the outcome of the collaboration between the groups of Prof. Talila Volk of the Molecular Genetics Department and Prof. Sam Safran of the Chemical and Biological Physics Department at the Weizmann Institute of Science, this image should be reconsidered. Clarifying it is essential since DNA’s spatial arrangement in the nucleus can affect the expression of genes contained within the DNA molecule, and hence the proteins found in the cell.

This story began when Volk was studying how mechanical forces influence cell nuclei in the muscle and found evidence that muscle contractions had an immediate effect on gene expression patterns. “We couldn’t explore this further because existing methods relied on imaging of chemically preserved cells, so they failed to capture what happens in the cell nuclei of an actual working muscle,” she says.

To address this issue, Dr. Dana Lorber, a research associate in Volk’s group, led the design of a device that makes it possible to study muscle nuclei in live fruit fly larvae. The device holds the tiny, translucent larva within a groove that allows it to contract and relax its muscles but keeps its movement constrained so that it can be scanned by a fluorescence microscope. Using the device, the researchers obtained images of the internal, linearly-organized complexes of DNA and its proteins (known as chromatin), surrounded by the membrane of the muscle nuclei.