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Summary: Extracting nanosized exosomes from bone marrow stem cells and injecting them into mice, researchers reverse symptoms of multiple sclerosis. Source: UC IrvineA nanotechnology treatment.

Survey finds that ‘normal’ human tissues are riddled with mutations.

A groundbreaking new cell reprogramming device can turn existing cells into any other type of cell, repairing tissue and organs in mice.

Future neutrino experiments may provide tomographic scans of Earth’s interior by viewing solar neutrinos that pass through our planet’s layers.

The Sun showers Earth with neutrinos, but this “glow” doesn’t dim when the Sun goes down. At night, solar neutrinos penetrate Earth, impinging detectors from below. Like x rays in a medical scanner, these planet-traversing neutrinos might offer information about the material they pass through. New theoretical calculations show that future experiments, such as the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE), could characterize the different layers inside Earth with neutrino-based tomography.

Researchers have discovered that the human body’s 3 trillion cells aren’t clones of a single DNA sequence, as is widely believed. Instead, the cells of the human body contain a plethora of altered DNA, called mutations. These multiply to produce patches of tissue, called “somatic clones,” inside the ‘normal’ tissue. The scientific term for this phenomenon is mosaicism.

For centuries biologists have identified new species at a painstakingly slow pace, describing specimens’ physical features and other defining traits, and often trying to fit a species into the tree of life before naming and publishing it. Now, they have begun to determine whether a specimen is likely a novel species in hours—and will soon do so at a cost of pennies. It’s a revolution driven by short stretches of DNA—dubbed barcodes in a nod to the familiar product identifiers—that vary just enough to provide species-distinguishing markers, combined with fast, cheap DNA sequencers.

As massive global effort launches, portable DNA sequencers also allow species identification in the field.

Recent research in the field of mind-body medicine shows there’s a lot more to health than what you eat, and most of it has to do with your mind.

A team of researchers affiliated with the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, MIT and the National Institutes of Health has found that CRISPR-associated transposons can be used to insert custom genes into DNA without cutting it. In their paper published in the journal Science, the group describes their new gene-editing technique and how well it worked when tested in a bacterial genome.

The CRISPR gene editing technique has made headlines in recent years due to its potential for treating hereditary diseases. Unfortunately, despite much research surrounding the technique, it is still not a viable option for use on human patients. This is because the technique is error-prone—when snipping strands of DNA, CRISPR sometimes cuts off-target DNA as well, leading to unintended and unpredictable consequences (and sometimes cancerous tumors). In this new effort, the researchers have found a way to use CRISPR in conjunction with another protein to edit a strand of DNA without cutting it—they are calling it CRISPR-associated transposase (CAST).

Prior research has shown that certain pieces of DNA called transposons are, for unknown reasons, able to reposition themselves in a genome spontaneously—for this reason, they have come to be known as jumping genes. Not long after they were discovered, researchers noted that they might be used for gene editing. This is what the researchers did in the new study. They associated a transposon called Tn7 with the Cas12 enzyme used with CRISPR to edit a section of a bacterial genome. In practice, CRISPR led the Tn7 transposon to the target location in the genome—at that point, the transposon inserted itself into the genome without cutting it.

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LA JOLLA—(June 6, 2019) Scientists once thought that neurons, or possibly heart cells, were the oldest cells in the body. Now, Salk Institute researchers have discovered that the mouse brain, liver and pancreas contain populations of cells and proteins with extremely long lifespans—some as old as neurons. The findings, demonstrating “age mosaicism,” were published in Cell Metabolism on June 6, 2019. The team’s methods could be applied to nearly any tissue in the body to provide valuable information about lifelong function of non-dividing cells and how cells lose control over the quality and integrity of proteins and important cell structures during aging.