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Category: biotech/medical – Page 201

Strangers whose brains respond alike to movie clips often become friends later, study finds

People often bond with strangers over the books they read or the movies they watch and build friendships that last. Scientists may now have some insight into why this happens. A study published in Nature Human Behaviour found that participants who responded similarly to the same movie clips even before meeting were more likely to become friends later.

As part of the experiment, MRI brain scans were taken of 41 graduate students who had never met each other before, while they were shown clips of movies based on science, food, sports, environment, and .

A total of 214 were analyzed—200 cortical regions associated with functions, such as movement, perception, and sensory processing, and 14 subcortical regions that control movement, autonomic functions, and emotions.

Scientists Say They’ve Created a New Form of Life More Perfect Than the One Nature Made

Scientists at the Medical Research Council’s Laboratory of Molecular Biology say they’ve engineered a bacteria whose genetic code is more efficient than any other lifeform on Earth.

They call their creation “Syn57,” a bioengineered strain of E. coli — yes, the same bad boy that can make you extremely sick if you eat an undercooked hot dog — which uses seven less codons than all life on earth. A codon, put simply, is a three-letter sequence found in DNA and RNA which delivers instructions for amino acids, a fundamental “building block” of life.

For the past billions years or so, all known life on earth has used 64 codons. Scientists cracked the code detailing which codons corresponded to which amino acids — mapping the standard genetic code, in other words — in 1966, revealing only 20 total amino acids.

Cell-mapping tool provides insightful multi-layered view of cancer behavior

Researchers at VCU Massey Comprehensive Cancer Center have developed a new computational tool called Vesalius, which could help clinicians understand the complex relationships between cancer cells and their surrounding cells, leading to potential discoveries regarding the development of hard-to-treat cancers.

Findings from a new study, published in Nature Communications, could help guide the identification of predictive biomarkers for multiple cancers and better inform the effectiveness of different treatment options based on individuals’ specific type of disease.

Rajan Gogna, Ph.D., member of the Developmental Therapeutics research program at Massey and assistant professor in the VCU School of Medicine’s Department of Human and Molecular Genetics, and a team of collaborators were driven by the goal of interpreting extensive amounts of data in a meaningful way.

Rare bone disorder traced to deficiency of an ‘enzyme-rescue metabolite’ in new study

Living cells contain a world of complex parts, which are constantly in motion. Many functions of these parts are still not fully understood, but likely harbor answers to many of our questions about how diseases work and how we might reverse them. One such case has been brought to light.

Enzymes act as catalysts for various processes within cells, but in some cases, they become inactivated by mistakes or environmental factors. When this happens, the processes that the enzymes facilitate may be compromised and lead to disease, depending on what processes are affected.

According to a new study published in Nature, Catel–Manzke syndrome—a causing shortened bones, heart defects, cleft palate and finger malformation—may be a result of an inactivated , called dTDP-D-glucose 4,6-dehydratase (TGDS).

Gut neurons help body fight inflammation with immune-regulating molecule

Neurons in the gut produce a molecule that plays a pivotal role in shaping the gut’s immune response during and after inflammation, according to a new study by Weill Cornell Medicine investigators. The findings suggest that targeting these neurons and the molecules they produce could open the door to new treatments for inflammatory bowel disease and other disorders driven by gut inflammation.

Hundreds of millions of neurons make up the enteric nervous system, the “second brain” of the body, where they orchestrate essential functions of the gut such as moving food through the intestines, nutrient absorption and blood flow. While this system is known for regulating these fundamental processes, its role in controlling intestinal inflammatory responses has remained far less clear.

In their study, reported August 15 in Nature Immunology, the investigators focused on group 2 innate lymphoid cells (ILC2s), immune cells that reside within the linings of the gut. Their previous work revealed that ILC2s are a major source of a tissue-healing growth factor called amphiregulin and have the capacity to receive neuronal signals that modulate their function and can impact disease progression and recovery.

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