Interesting technology looking to revolutionize both medical imaging and brain computer interfacing.
Han from WrySci HX explains the amazing Openwater system, which could rival Neuralink in the Brain Machine Interface space. More below ↓↓↓
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Category: biotech/medical – Page 1632
CIEQSFTTLFACQTAAEIWRAFGYTVKIMVDNGNCRLHVC: these forty letters are a set of instructions for building a sophisticated medical device designed to recognize the flu virus in your body. The device latches onto the virus and deactivates the part of it that breaks into your cells. It is impossibly tiny—smaller than the virus on which it operates—and it can be manufactured, in tremendous quantities, by your own cells. It’s a protein.
Proteins—molecular machines capable of building, transforming, and interacting with other molecules—do most of the work of life. Antibodies, which defend our cells against invaders, are proteins. So are hormones, which deliver messages within us; enzymes, which carry out the chemical reactions we need to generate energy; and the myosin in our muscles, which contract when we move. A protein is a large molecule built from smaller molecules called amino acids. Our bodies use twenty amino acids to create proteins; our cells chain them together, following instructions in our DNA. (Each letter in a protein’s formula represents an amino acid: the first two in the flu-targeting protein above are cysteine and isoleucine.) After they’re assembled, these long chains crumple up into what often look like random globs. But the seeming chaos in their collapse is actually highly choreographed. Identical strings of amino acids almost always “fold” into identical three-dimensional shapes. This reliability allows each cell to create, on demand, its own suite of purpose-built biological tools. “Proteins are the most sophisticated molecules in the known universe,” Neil King, a biochemist at the University of Washington’s Institute for Protein Design (I.P.D.), told me. In their efficiency, refinement, and subtlety, they surpass pretty much anything that human beings can build.
Today, biochemists engineer proteins to fight infections, produce biofuels, and improve food stability. Usually, they tweak formulas that nature has already discovered, often by evolving new versions of naturally occurring proteins in their labs. But “de novo” protein design—design from scratch—has been “the holy grail of protein science for many decades,” Sarel Fleishman, a biochemist at the Weizmann Institute of Science, in Israel, told me. Designer proteins could help us cure diseases; build new kinds of materials and electronics; clean up the environment; create and transform life itself. In 2018, Frances Arnold, a chemical engineer at the California Institute of Technology, shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for her work on protein design. In April, when the coronavirus pandemic was peaking on the coasts, we spoke over video chat. Arnold, framed by palm trees, sat outside her home, in sunny Southern California. I asked how she thought about the potential of protein design. “Well, I think you just have to look at the world behind me, right?” she said. “Nature, for billions of years, has figured out how to extract resources from the environment—sunlight, carbon dioxide—and convert those into remarkable, living, functioning machines. That’s what we want to do—and do it sustainably, right? Do it in a way that life can go on.”
The world is one step closer to having a totally secure internet and an answer to the growing threat of cyber-attacks, thanks to a team of international scientists who have created a unique prototype that could transform how we communicate online.
The invention led by the University of Bristol, revealed today in the journal Science Advances, has the potential to serve millions of users, is understood to be the largest-ever quantum network of its kind, and could be used to secure people’s online communication, particularly in these internet-led times accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Human limitations are part of the reason we conjured up meta-humans with DNA that enables them to do things we could never dream of doing, such as fly, turn invisible, and regenerate.
The West African lungfish sounds like a creature spawned from science fiction. It can regrow its tail and fins if hungry jaws snap a part of it off, much like a salamander. Its incredible regeneration abilities indicate that these particular traits came from a common vertebrate ancestor — and humans are also vertebrates. Now evolutionary biologist Igor Schneider and his research team are trying to understand the mechanism behind this almost paranormal power, and how it could apply to a human.
The removal of one gene renders poxviruses—a lethal family of viral infections that are known to spread from animals to humans—harmless, a new study in the journal Science Advances reports.
During this ground-breaking study, scientists from the Spanish National Research Council and the University of Surrey investigated the immune response of cells to poxviruses. Poxviruses, such as cowpox and monkeypox, can spread to humans from infected animals, causing skin lesions, fever, swollen lymph nodes and even death.
Viruses contain genetic material which helps them outsmart host cells, enabling replication and the spread of the infection. Cells in the body are comprised of molecules that sense the presence of viruses, sometimes via the recognition of their genetic material, and alert the immune system of an upcoming infection. Poxviruses, unlike other viruses, are highly unusual in that they have large DNA genomes that are replicated exclusively in the cell cytosol, an area of the cell full of sensors. How poxviruses manage to stay undetectable has remained unknown.
Artificial intelligence (AI) experts at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and the Baylor College of Medicine report that they have successfully addressed what they call a “major, long-standing obstacle to increasing AI capabilities” by drawing inspiration from a human brain memory mechanism known as “replay.”
First author and postdoctoral researcher Gido van de Ven and principal investigator Andreas Tolias at Baylor, with Hava Siegelmann at UMass Amherst, write in Nature Communications that they have developed a new method to protect—” surprisingly efficiently”— deep neural networks from “catastrophic forgetting;” upon learning new lessons, the networks forget what they had learned before.
Siegelmann and colleagues point out that deep neural networks are the main drivers behind recent AI advances, but progress is held back by this forgetting.
Wouldn’t it be better to have a creature, something furry and warm that had the ability to produce perfect breast milk? A non-sentient, biological organism that has been engineered to produce milk nutritionally equivalent to mother’s milk? A milk Tribble? That type of technology would be awesome for babies.
Karl Schmieder: Is there a biological technology that you wished you had?
Andrew Hessel: I want the enzymatic DNA synthesizer that will be at least a thousand times better than what we have today. Next-generation sequencing technology massively accelerated our ability to read DNA. An enzymatic DNA synthesizer could be the equivalent accelerator for engineered biology. If you can synthesize DNA faster, then you can conduct more experiments and learn faster. That’s what I’d like to see. More people programming life.
In the past decade, researchers have engineered an array of new tools that control the balance of genetic inheritance. Based on CRISPR technology, such gene drives are poised to move from the laboratory into the wild where they are being engineered to suppress devastating diseases such as mosquito-borne malaria, dengue, Zika, chikungunya, yellow fever and West Nile. Gene drives carry the power to immunize mosquitoes against malarial parasites, or act as genetic insecticides that reduce mosquito populations.
Although the newest gene drives have been proven to spread efficiently as designed in laboratory settings, concerns have been raised regarding the safety of releasing such systems into wild populations. Questions have emerged about the predictability and controllability of gene drives and whether, once let loose, they can be recalled in the field if they spread beyond their intended application region.
Now, scientists at the University of California San Diego and their colleagues have developed two new active genetic systems that address such risks by halting or eliminating gene drives in the wild. On Sept.18, 2020 in the journal Molecular Cell, research led by Xiang-Ru Xu, Emily Bulger and Valentino Gantz in the Division of Biological Sciences offers two new solutions based on elements developed in the common fruit fly.
Ira Pastor, ideaXme life sciences ambassador, interviews Rick Bente, MSc, MBA, BS, CEO of Seventh Sense Biosystems.
Ira Pastor Comments:
Getting blood drawn is not a fun activity for many. It can be scary for some (especially if you have children); it can be painful for others (especially where frequent blood draws are required).
Studies show that a remarkable 20% of the population has some degree of fear of needles or injections, and 10% within that number suffer from what is known as Trypanophobia (a psychological term for people with an extreme fear of medical procedures involving injections or hypodermic needles), who on top of their anxiety, completely avoid necessary tests and treatment.
