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The physics of cell communication: ISTA scientists successfully model cell dynamics.

Like us, cells communicate. Well, in their own special way. Using waves as their common language, cells tell one another where and when to move. They talk, they share information, and they work together – much like the interdisciplinary team of researchers from the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (ISTA) and the National University of Singapore (NUS). They conducted research on how cells communicate – and how that matters to future projects, e.g. application to wound healing.

Biology may evoke images of animals, plants, or even theoretical computer models. The last association might not immediately come to mind, yet it is crucial in biological research. Complex biological phenomena, even the minutest details, can be understood through precise calculations. ISTA Professor Edouard Hannezo utilizes these calculations to comprehend physical principles in biological systems. His team’s recent work provides new insights into how cells move and communicate within living tissue.

Scientists at Stanford University have found a way to induce cell death in cancer cells with a method that could be effective in around 50% of cancers. In a paper, “Rewiring cancer drivers to activate apoptosis,” published in Nature, the team describes a new class of molecules called transcriptional/epigenetic CIPs (TCIPs) that can activate apoptosis with the help of cancer growth gene expressions within the cancer cells.

The researchers designed small molecules that bind specific transcriptional suppressors to transcription activators. The most potent molecule created, TCIP1, works by linking small molecules that bind BCL6 to those that bind transcriptional activators BRD4.

One of the components that makes cancer cells cancerous is that they ignore signals from surrounding healthy tissues to stop growing and to initiate apoptosis or cell death. The apoptosis pathways still exist but are actively blocked in certain types of cancer where the transcription factor B cell lymphoma 6 (BCL6) binds to the promoters of apoptosis genes and suppresses their expression through epigenetic mechanisms.

Organizations are building resilient supply chains with a “phygital” approach, a blend of digital and physical tools. In recent years, the global supply chain has been disrupted due to the covid-19 pandemic, geopolitical volatility, overwhelmed legacy systems, and labor shortages. The National Association of Manufacturers (NAM), an industrial advocacy group, warns the disruption isn’t over— NAM’s spring 2023 survey found 90% of respondents saw significant (52.5%) or partial (39%) supply chain disruption during the past two years. Just 0.5% of respondents reported no disruption at all. Digitization presents an opportunity to overcome supply chain disruption by making data flow more efficiently, using technology and data standards to break barriers between disparate systems.

“Phygital merges two worlds together, where standards provide an interoperable system of defined data structures,” says Melanie Nuce-Hilton, senior vice president of innovation and partnerships at GS1 US, a member of GS1, a global not-for-profit supply chain standards organization. “The approach is intended to deliver multiple benefits—improved supply chain visibility for traceability and inventory management, better customer experiences across online and offline interactions, and the potential for better circularity and waste reduction by maintaining linkages between products and their data throughout their lifecycle,” she says.

Presented by VAST Data

With access to just a sliver of the 2.5 quintillion bytes of data created every day, AI produces what often seem like miracles that human intellect can’t match — identifying cancer on a medical scan, a viable embryo for IVF, new ways of tackling climate change and the opioid crisis and on and on. However, that’s not true intelligence; rather, these AI systems are just designed to link data points and report conclusions, to power increasingly disruptive automation across industries.

While generative AI is trending and GPT models have taken the world by storm with their astonishing capabilities to respond to human prompts, do they truly acquire the ability to perform reasoning tasks that humans find easy to execute? It’s important to understand that the current AI the world is working with has little understanding of the world it exists in, and is unable to build a mental model that goes beyond regurgitating information that is already known.

Hints from the bowhead whale genome published nearly a decade ago predicted that the mammals may use this alternate strategy (SN: 1/6/15). “But you need actual experiments to actually validate those predictions,” Tollis says.

In the lab, study coauthor Vera Gorbunova at the University of Rochester in New York and her colleagues ran an assortment of experiments on cells harvested from bowhead whale tissue, as well as on cells from humans, cows and mice.

The whale cells were both efficient and accurate at repairing double-strand breaks in DNA, damage that severs both strands of the DNA double helix. Whale repair restored broken DNA to like-new condition more often than cells from other mammals, the team found. In those animals, mends to the genome tended to be sloppier, like a poorly patched pair of jeans. The team also identified two proteins in bowhead whale cells, CIRBP and RPA2, that are part of the DNA repair crew.

Analysis of intracranial EEG from epilepsy patients suggests three neural patterns associated with spatial attention and consciousness, and implicate high-level visual areas and lateralized fronto-parietal networks in shaping human conscious experience.

Pigs are generally considered to have high intelligence, and new research shows that they may also be empathic to other members of their social groups, helping them during instances of need. But is this behavior truly unselfish, or is it driven by goal-specific motivations?

To investigate, researchers from the Research Institute for Farm Animal Biology in Germany and Austria’s University of Veterinary Medicine Institute of Animal Welfare Science have studied helping behavior among social groups of domestic pigs. Their work, titled “Spontaneous helping in pigs is mediated by helper’s social attention and distress signals of individuals in need,” is published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

In the wild, animals will often help members of their social groups in times of distress, defending them against predators or releasing them from traps, snares, or other types of confinement. There is no general consensus over whether such helping behavior is truly empathic, or whether it might be driven by a more selfish motivation.

Click image for animation of DBS for post-stroke rehabilitation

A first-in-human trial of deep brain stimulation (DBS) for post-stroke rehabilitation patients by Cleveland Clinic researchers has shown that using DBS to target the dentate nucleus – which regulates fine-control of voluntary movements, cognition, language, and sensory functions in the brain – is safe and feasible.

Continue reading “Cleveland Clinic Study Shows Deep Brain Stimulation Encouraging for Stroke Patients” »