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Category: biotech/medical – Page 1,891

Advanced Photon Source upgrade will transform the world of scientific research

From chemistry to materials science to COVID-19 research, the APS is one of the most productive X-ray light sources in the world. An upgrade will make it a global leader among the next generation of light sources, opening new frontiers in science.

In the almost 25 years since the Advanced Photon Source (APS), a U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science User Facility, first opened at DOE’s Argonne National Laboratory, it has played an essential role in some of the most pivotal discoveries and advancements in science.

More than 5,000 researchers from around the world conduct experiments at the APS every year, and their work has, among many other notable successes, paved the way for better renewable batteries; resulted in the development of numerous new drugs; and helped to make vehicles more efficient, infrastructure materials stronger and electronics more powerful.

30,000 Volunteer to Get Infected by the Coronavirus | The State of Science

Although the coronavirus vaccine is progressing at a breakneck pace, some people feel that it is not progressing fast enough. As such, they have volunteered in the One Day Sooner movement to get deliberately infected with the coronavirus in order to speed up vaccine development.

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Biological laboratory scientist develops new imaging method

The extraordinary progress that has been achieved in the biomedical sciences in the modern era can be attributed in large measure to imaging technologies that have allowed scientists to observe the structure and function of tissues and organs in the context of their natural tissue environments in greater detail than possible with the naked eye.

But that ability has been limited to a handful of traditional animal model systems, including worms, flies and mice, either by tissue characteristics that make them amenable to imaging (such as a lack of natural pigmentation), or by the fact that the techniques used for preparing microscopic specimens in these models are not broadly applicable to a diverse range animal species.

The development of a new imaging technique by Prayag Murawala, Ph.D., of the MDI Biological Laboratory and his collaborators, however, enables unprecedented insight subcellular structures, tissues, organs and even whole organisms, and—because of its wide applicability—broadens the range of animal models that can be studied, processes that can be explored and biological questions that can be addressed.

Extinct Genetic Strains of Smallpox – World’s Deadliest Virus – Discovered in the Teeth of Viking Skeletons

Scientists have discovered extinct strains of smallpox in the teeth of Viking skeletons — proving for the first time that the killer disease plagued humanity for at least 1400 years.

Smallpox spread from person to person via infectious droplets, killed around a third of sufferers and left another third permanently scarred or blind. Around 300 million people died from it in the 20th century alone before it was officially eradicated in 1980 through a global vaccination effort — the first human disease to be wiped out.

Now an international team of scientists have sequenced the genomes of newly discovered strains of the virus after it was extracted from the teeth of Viking skeletons from sites across northern Europe. The findings have been published in Science today (July 23, 2020).

Cells communicate

Cells work around the clock to deliver, maintain, and control every aspect of life. And just as with humans, communication is a key to their success.

Every essential biological process requires some form of communication among cells, not only with their immediate neighbors but also to those significantly farther away. Current understanding is that this information exchange relies on the diffusion of signaling molecules or on cell-to-cell relays.

Publishing in the journal Developmental Cell, a research team at Kyoto University’s Graduate School of Medicine reports on a novel method of communication relying on ‘mechano-chemical’ signals to control cell movement. The research group focused on a fundamental pathway—MAPK/ERK, or ERK pathway—and were able to demonstrate how the movement of a single cell could trigger a cascading reaction resulting in the migration of a cell collective.

Quadruple DNA Strands Discovered In Healthy Cells For The First Time

When DNA forms, it usually creates the characteristic double-helix that we’ve all come to recognize. However, given the right ingredients, DNA can fold with another pair of strands to create a quadruple-stranded structure that may have some pretty important roles. These structures, called G-quadruplexes (G4), have only been seen in chemistry lab experiments or in some cancer cells, so understanding exactly what their roles are has been difficult, until now.

Scientists have now produced the first visualization of a G-quadruplex formation in live, healthy cells. By developing a fluorescent marker that can bind to G4s, the researchers could track the formation of a quadruplex structure for the first time, with the results published in Nature. This provides confirmation that normal cellular processes produce these structures, and not a process gone haywire like those in cancer.

“For the first time, we have been able to prove the quadruple helix DNA exists in our cells as a stable structure created by normal cellular processes. This forces us to rethink the biology of DNA. It is a new area of fundamental biology, and could open up new avenues in diagnosis and therapy of diseases like cancer,” said one of the lead researchers Dr Marco Di Antonio in a statement.

EU leaders slash science spending in €1.8 trillion deal

Following a marathon EU summit in Brussels, national leaders this morning agreed to a €1.8 trillion, 7-year budget and pandemic recovery fund that will spend €81 billion on Horizon Europe, the main EU research program. That’s far less than what researchers had hoped for—and €13.5 billion less than a proposal 2 months ago from the European Commission, the EU executive arm.

An €81 billion budget for Horizon Europe disappoints researchers.

Statement about nCoV and our pandemic exercise

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In October 2019, the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security hosted a pandemic tabletop exercise called Event 201 with partners, the World Economic Forum and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Recently, the Center for Health Security has received questions about whether that pandemic exercise predicted the current novel coronavirus outbreak in China. To be clear, the Center for Health Security and partners did not make a prediction during our tabletop exercise. For the scenario, we modeled a fictional coronavirus pandemic, but we explicitly stated that it was not a prediction. Instead, the exercise served to highlight preparedness and response challenges that would likely arise in a very severe pandemic. We are not now predicting that the nCoV-2019 outbreak will kill 65 million people. Although our tabletop exercise included a mock novel coronavirus, the inputs we used for modeling the potential impact of that fictional virus are not similar to nCoV-2019.