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Category: biotech/medical – Page 289

Building blocks of life discovered in Bennu asteroid rewrite origin story

Amino acids, the building blocks necessary for life, were previously found in samples of 4.6-billion-year-old rocks from an asteroid called Bennu, delivered to Earth in 2023 by NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission. How those amino acids—the molecules that create proteins and peptides in DNA—formed in space was a mystery, but new research led by Penn State scientists shows they could have originated in an icy-cold, radioactive environment at the dawn of Earth’s solar system.

According to the researchers, who published new findings in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, some amino acids in the asteroid Bennu samples likely formed in a different way than was previously thought, in the harsh conditions of the early solar system.

Bioengineers build branched, perfusable kidney collecting ducts using 3D bioprinting

The human kidney filters about a cup of blood every minute, removing waste, excess fluid, and toxins from it, while also regulating blood pressure, balancing important electrolytes, activating Vitamin D, and helping the body produce red blood cells. This broad range of functions is achieved in part via the kidney’s complex organization. In its outer region, more than a million microscopic units, known as nephrons, filter blood, reabsorb necessary nutrients, and secrete waste in the form of urine.

To direct urine produced by this enormous number of blood-filtering units to a single ureter, the kidney establishes a highly branched three-dimensional, tree-like system of “collecting ducts” during its development. In addition to directing urine flow to the ureter and ultimately out of the kidney, collecting ducts reabsorb water that the body needs to retain, and maintain, the body’s balance of salts and acidity at healthy levels.

Finding ways to recreate this system of collecting ducts is the focus of researchers and bioengineers who are interested in understanding how duct defects cause certain kidney diseases, underdeveloped kidneys, or even the complete absence of a kidney. Being able to fabricate the kidney’s plumbing system from the bottom up would be a giant step toward tissue replacement therapies for many patients waiting for a kidney donation: In the U.S. alone, 90,000 patients are on the kidney transplant waiting list. However, rebuilding this highly branched fluid-transporting ductal system is a formidable challenge and not possible yet.

A kidney drug may help restore fertility in premature ovarian insufficiency

A common kidney medication could be the key to treating a type of infertility that affects up to 3% of women under 40, according to a study published in Science.

Premature ovarian insufficiency (POI) is a condition where the ovaries stop functioning properly, leading to low estrogen levels and follicles that often fail to develop or respond to fertility treatments. This leaves the eggs in a dormant state. Current treatments are limited to managing symptoms such as hot flashes and night sweats.

For years, scientists focused on the eggs themselves, but researchers led by Tianren Wang and Kui Liu from the University of Hong Kong suspected the problem could be the environment the eggs live in (the ovarian stroma).

DeepChopper model improves RNA sequencing research by mitigating chimera artifacts

Scientists in the laboratory of Rendong Yang, Ph.D., associate professor of Urology, have developed a new large language model that can interpret transcriptomic data in cancer cell lines more accurately than conventional approaches, as detailed in a recent study published in Nature Communications.

Long-read RNA sequencing technologies have transformed transcriptomics research by detecting complex RNA splicing and gene fusion events that have often been missed by conventional short-read RNA-sequencing methods.

Among these technologies includes nanopore direct RNA sequencing (dRNA-seq), which can sequence full-length RNA molecules directly and produce more accurate analyses of RNA biology. However, previous work suggests this approach may generate chimera artifacts—in which multiple RNA sequences incorrectly join to form a single RNA sequence—and limit the reliability and utility of the data.

Microfluidic method boosts control and separation of tiny particles—a promising tool for medical research

In nanoscale particle research, precise control and separation have long been a bottleneck in biotechnology. Researchers at the University of Oulu have now developed a new method that improves particle separation and purification. The promising technique could be applied, for example, in cancer research.

Separating nanosized particles remains a persistent challenge in biotechnology. Once particle size drops below a few hundred nanometers, their behavior becomes dominated by diffusion—the random walk of particles. This weakens the forces used to guide them, causing separation accuracy to collapse.

A microfluidics research group led by Professor Caglar Elbuken at the University of Oulu has developed a new solution to the problem. The method significantly improves the separation and purification of both small synthetic particles and nanoscale vesicles secreted by living cells.

Ordered ‘supercrystal’ could make lasers faster, smaller and more efficient

An advance from Monash University could pave the way for faster, smaller, and more energy-efficient lasers and other light-based technologies. Engineers have developed a new type of perovskite material arranged into an ordered “supercrystal.” In this structure, tiny packets of energy called excitons work together rather than individually, allowing the material to amplify light far more efficiently. The findings, published in Laser & Photonics Reviews, could have applications in communications, sensors, and computing, improving the performance of devices that rely on light, such as sensors in autonomous vehicles, medical imaging, or electronics.

Corresponding author Professor Jacek Jasieniak at Monash Materials Science and Engineering highlighted the potential for faster, more energy-efficient optical devices. “What’s exciting here is that we’re not changing the material itself, but how it’s organized. By assembling nanocrystals into an ordered supercrystal, the excitations created by light can cooperate rather than compete, which allows light to be amplified much more efficiently,” Professor Jasieniak said.

Dr. Manoj Sharma, who led the experimental work at Monash, said their approach revealed new possibilities in nanocrystal assemblies. “By assembling nanocrystals into a highly ordered supercrystal, we show that optical gain is no longer limited by single-particle biexcitons, which are inefficient and prone to energy losses, but instead arises from collective excitonic interactions across the whole structure,” Dr. Sharma said.

Can medical AI lie? Large study maps how LLMs handle health misinformation

Medical artificial intelligence (AI) is often described as a way to make patient care safer by helping clinicians manage information. A new study by the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and collaborators confronts a critical vulnerability: when a medical lie enters the system, can AI pass it on as if it were true?

Analyzing more than a million prompts across nine leading language models, the researchers found that these systems can repeat false medical claims when they appear in realistic hospital notes or social-media health discussions.

The findings, published in The Lancet Digital Health, suggest that current safeguards do not reliably distinguish fact from fabrication once a claim is wrapped in familiar clinical or social-media language. The paper is titled “Mapping LLM Susceptibility to Medical Misinformation Across Clinical Notes and Social Media.”

The role of the Cer1 transposon in horizontal transfer of transgenerational memory

Could a hybrid biohardware using neural orgamoids and silicon make minduploading easier.

Animals face both external and internal dangers: pathogens threaten from the environment, and unstable genomic elements threaten from within. C. elegans protects itself from pathogens by “reading” bacterial small RNAs, using this information to both induce avoidance and transmit memories for four generations. Here, we found that memories can be transferred from either lysed animals or from conditioned media to naive animals via Cer1 retrotransposon-encoded virus-like particles. Moreover, Cer1 functions internally at the step of transmission of information from the germline to neurons and is required for learned avoidance. The presence of the Cer1 retrotransposon in wild C. elegans strains correlates with the ability to learn and inherit small-RNA-induced pathogen avoidance. Together, these results suggest that C.

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