Year 2019 😗
Scientists have shown how a drug cocktail of four compounds can convert glia, or support cells, next to damaged neurons into new working neurons.
Category: biotech/medical – Page 1,848
Nanorobots: The Future of Biotechnology
Nanorobots are the next step in biotechnology and could be the hidden clue for curing cancer and other diseases for good. Nanotechnology doesn’t come without…
Discovery of world’s oldest DNA breaks record
Fragments of the DNA were found in an Ice Age sediment in Northern Greenland.
The discovery of two-million-year-old DNA has changed all the history that has been recorded so far. It revealed that we should go back one million years to understand Earth’s environment.
The results of the 41 usable samples were found hidden in clay and quartz.
Beth Zaikenjpg.
Led by St. John College and the University of Cambridge, the microscopic fragments of environmental DNA were found in Ice Age sediment in the northern part of Greenland. By using the latest technology in its field, the study found that the fragments are one million older than a Siberian mammoth bone, which was thought to be the Earth’s oldest.
Robots Will Replace These Workers By 2025
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How soon will we be seeing robots walking about the street? How soon will robots join medical staff in hospitals and aid real people in life or death situations? How soon will robots replace health staff? The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that we will see a global shortfall of 12 million health workers by 2025.
From lifting patients and delivering lab samples, to cleaning and providing companionship, care robots can help with a range of tasks across a hospital or care setting. With nurses spending up to a third of their shift on menial tasks such as collecting equipment, the expectation is that care robots will be able to take ownership of these more mundane jobs, letting health staff focus on more important tasks.
Small Fluorescent Protein Helps to Create More Detailed Biomedical Images
Imaging deep tissues with light is challenging. Visible light is often quickly absorbed and scattered by structures and molecules in the body, preventing researchers from seeing deeper than a millimeter within a tissue. If they do manage to probe further, substances like collagen or melanin often muddy the image, creating the equivalent of background noise through their natural fluorescence. As the authors explained, “Biological tissues have strong optical attenuation in the visible wavelength range (350–700 nm), due to the absorption of hemoglobin and melanin, as well as the tissue scattering, which fundamentally limits the imaging depth of high-resolution optical technologies.”
To wade out from these muddied waters, Yao and collaborator Vladislav Verkhusha, PhD, professor of genetics at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, developed a protein that absorbs and emits longer wavelengths of light in the near-infrared (NIR) spectrum. “Tissue is the most transparent in the 700‑1300 nm window of NIR light,” said Yao. “At those wavelengths, light can penetrate deeper into a tissue, and because there is less natural background fluorescence to filter out, we can take longer exposures and capture clearer images.”
Verkhusha and his lab used a process called directed molecular evolution to engineer their proteins, using photoreceptors normally found in bacteria as the basis for the structure. “The state-of-the-art NIR FPs were engineered from bacterial phytochrome photoreceptors (BphPs),” the team noted. “Applying rational design, we developed 17 kDa cyanobacteriochrome-based near-infrared (NIR-I) fluorescent protein, miRFP718nano.”
Could new cancer drugs come from potatoes and tomatoes?
Everyone knows someone who has had cancer. In 2020, around 19 million new cases—and around 10 million deaths—were registered worldwide. Treatments are improving all the time, but can damage healthy cells or have severe side effects that are hard on patients. In the search for new, more targeted cancer drugs, traditional medicine offers many possible candidates.
A team of Polish scientists led by Magdalena Winkiel at Adam Mickiewicz University, publishing today in Frontiers in Pharmacology, has reviewed the bioactive compounds called glycoalkaloids, found in vegetables like potatoes and tomatoes, to demonstrate their potential to treat cancer.
“Scientists around the world are still searching for the drugs which will be lethal to cancer cells but at the same time safe for healthy cells,” said Winkiel.
Study shows that ketamine switches neuronal activity in the neocortex
Human beings can sometimes experience dissociative states, moments in which they feel disconnected from their body and the world around them. While these states have been linked to many psychiatric conditions, they can also be elicited by the intake of some legal and illegal drugs.
One of the most renowned dissociation-inducing drugs is ketamine, an anesthetic commonly used to sedate patients or reduce pain resulting from medical procedures. In recent years, ketamine has also been found to be a potentially valuable treatment for some cases of depression.
While several studies have investigated the therapeutic effects of this strong anesthetic, so far very little is known about the cellular and neuronal mechanisms behind the dissociative states it produces. A paper by a team of researchers at University of Pennsylvania, recently published in Nature Neuroscience, might shed some light on these so far elusive processes.