Lifeboat Foundation

Scientists from the United States to Australia are using new technology in an ambitious, multi-million-dollar drive to develop a vaccine in record time to tackle China’s coronavirus outbreak.

The new virus has spread rapidly since emerging late last year in China, killing more than 800 people in the mainland and infecting over 37,000. Cases have been reported in two dozen other countries.

Coming up with any vaccine typically takes years, and involves a lengthy process of testing on animals, clinical trials on humans and regulatory approvals.

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A research team has shown that a key difference between neurogenic and non-neurogenic tissues is cross-linking proteins causing stiffness, a discovery that could be used to create new brain injury therapies.

Researchers compared the proteomes of regions in the brain that are neurogenic (neural stem cell niches) and those that are not (cerebral cortex). The scientists hope that by establishing how these tissues are different, future therapies for brain injury may be able to activate tissues to produce new neurons to repair the brain.

For the first time, scientists have sequenced the entire genetic code of a giant squid.

Because the massive creature has never been captured alive, biologists have largely been left in the dark as to how the giant squid grows and behaves. After sequencing its genes, University of Copenhagen and Marine Biological Laboratory researchers found several oddities in the giant squid’s DNA — genes that are rarely found in other invertebrates, for instance — giving scientists new tools with which understand the bizarre animals.

Santa Cruz, CA February 7, 2020 —Research into the novel Wuhan seafood market pneumonia virus, the deadly “coronavirus” that has forced the Chinese government to quarantine more than 50 million people in the country’s dense industrial heartland, will be facilitated by the UC Santa Cruz Genomics Institute. The Genomics Institute’s Genome Browser team has posted the complete biomolecular code of the virus for researchers all over the world to use.

“When we display coronavirus data in the UCSC Genome Browser, it lets researchers look at the virus’ structure and more importantly work with it so they can research how they want to attack it,” said UCSC Genome Browser Engineer Hiram Clawson.

Samples of the virus have been processed in labs all over the world, and the raw information about its genetic code has been sent to the worldwide repository of genomic information at the National Institutes of Health’s National Center for Bioinformatics (NCBI) in Bethesda, Maryland.

The results are in from a human clinical trial using the CRISPR/Cas9 gene-editing system to treat cancer. The study involved editing the immune cells of three cancer patients to better fight tumors, and the results show that the treated cells persist in the body for long periods and didn’t trigger any dangerous side effects.

CRISPR allows scientists to make precise edits to the genes in living cells, removing harmful genes and introducing new beneficial ones. Animal tests of the technique have shown great promise in treating a range of diseases, such as cervical cancer, muscular dystrophy and HIV.

Continue reading “Human clinical trial suggests CRISPR feasible for fighting cancer” »

As the number of older Americans begins to rise, director Eric Verdin is leading his organization’s efforts to combat aging.

O.o!

The first sequenced genome was that of the 3569-nucleotide single-stranded RNA (ssRNA) bacteriophage MS2. Despite the recent accumulation of vast amounts of DNA and RNA sequence data, only 12 representative ssRNA phage genome sequences are available from the NCBI Genome database (June 2019). The difficulty in detecting RNA phages in metagenomic datasets raises questions as to their abundance, taxonomic structure, and ecological importance. In this study, we iteratively applied profile hidden Markov models to detect conserved ssRNA phage proteins in 82 publicly available metatranscriptomic datasets generated from activated sludge and aquatic environments. We identified 15,611 nonredundant ssRNA phage sequences, including 10¹⁵ near-complete genomes. This expansion in the number of known sequences enabled us to complete a phylogenetic assessment of both sequences identified in this study and known ssRNA phage genomes. Our expansion of these viruses from two environments suggests that they have been overlooked within microbiome studies.

Viruses, particularly bacteriophages targeting prokaryotes, are the most diverse biological entities in the biosphere (1, 2). Currently, there are 11,489 genome sequences available in the NCBI (National Center for Biotechnology Information) Viral RefSeq database (version 94). The vast majority of known phage have a double-stranded DNA (dsDNA) genome (3, 4). Recent metagenomic analysis of 145 marine virome sampling sites identified 195,728 DNA viral populations, highlighting that only a fraction of Earth’s viral diversity has been characterized (5). An additional expansion of known phage populations by Roux et al. (6) revealed that not only dsDNA phages but also single-stranded DNA Inoviridae are far more diverse than previously considered. The rapid expansion in viral discovery through metagenomics is enabling a greater understanding of their roles within environments and their evolutionary relationships, which is subsequently causing a revolution in phage taxonomy (7).

Continue reading “Expansion of known ssRNA phage genomes: From tens to over a thousand” »

O.o probs alien o.o circa 2013.

Remember when encyclopaedias were books, and not just websites? You’d have a shelf full of information, packaged into entries, and then into separate volumes. Your genome is organised in a similar way. Your DNA is packaged into large volumes called chromosomes. There are 23 pairs of them, each of which contains a long string of genes. And just as encyclopaedia books are bound in sturdy covers to prevent the pages within from fraying, so too are your chromosomes capped by protective structures called telomeres.

That’s basically how it works in any animal or plant or fungus. The number of chromosomes might vary a lot—fruit flies have 8 while dogs have 78—but the basic organisation is the same.

Continue reading “You Have 46 Chromosomes. This Pond Creature Has 15,600” »