Humans have been selectively breeding cats and dogs for thousands of years to make more desirable pets. A new startup called the Los Angeles Project aims to speed up that process with genetic engineering to make glow-in-the-dark rabbits, hypoallergenic cats and dogs, and possibly, one day, actual unicorns.
The Los Angeles Project is the brainchild of biohacker Josie Zayner, who in 2017 publicly injected herself with the gene-editing tool Crispr during a conference in San Francisco and livestreamed it. “I want to help humans genetically modify themselves,” she said at the time. She’s also given herself a fecal transplant and a DIY Covid vaccine and is the founder and CEO of The Odin, a company that sells home genetic-engineering kits.
Now, Zayner wants to create the next generation of pets. “I think, as a human species, it’s kind of our moral prerogative to level up animals,” she says.
Expert sommeliers can take a whiff of a glass of wine and tell you a lot about what’s in your pinot noir or cabernet sauvignon. A team of physicists at CU Boulder and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have achieved a similar feat of sensing, only for a much wider range of substances.
The group has developed a new laser-based device that can take any sample of gas and identify a huge variety of the molecules within it. It is sensitive enough to detect those molecules at minute concentrations all the way down to parts per trillion.
Its design is also simple enough that researchers could employ the method quickly and at a low cost in a range of settings, from diagnosing illnesses in human patients to tracking greenhouse gas emissions from factories.
A new analysis out of Sweden reports that disinfecting water with chlorine creates chemical byproducts that can increase the risk of bladder cancer by 33% and colorectal cancer by 15%.
The culprit appears to be trihalomethanes (THMs), which are made up of four compounds — chloroform, bromodichloromethane, dibromochloromethane and bromoform. THMs are found in nearly all public water systems in the US and European Union.
Exciting news is coming out of Baylor College in the fight against breast cancer as they announce two ground breaking advancements that could revolutionize patient care. FOX 26’s Melissa Wilson spoke with Dr. Alastair Thompson to hear more details.
Based on a systematic analysis of environmental exposures associated with aging and mortality in the UK Biobank, the relative contributions of such exposures and genetic risk for mortality and a range of age-related diseases were compared, highlighting the potential beneficial effects of environment-focused interventions.
“Our findings suggest that senescent cells maintain their large size through improved adhesion to the extracellular matrix via AP2A1 and integrin β1 movement along enlarged stress fibers,” Chantachotikul said.
The link between AP2A1 and senescent cells, the researchers said, means the protein has the potential to be used as a marker for cellular aging.
The team also believes that the findings may offer a new target for future treatments of age-related diseases.
Abstract: The human brain sets us apart as a species, with its size being one of its most striking features. Brain size is largely determined during development as vast numbers of neurons and supportive glia are generated. In an effort to better understand the events that determine the human brain’s cellular makeup, and its size, we use a human model system in a dish, called cerebral organoids. These 3D tissues are generated from pluripotent stem cells through neural differentiation and a supportive 3D microenvironment to generate organoids with the same tissue architecture as the early human fetal brain. Such organoids are allowing us to tackle questions previously impossible with more traditional approaches. Indeed, our recent findings provide insight into regulation of brain size and neuron number across ape species, identifying key stages of early neural stem cell expansion that set up a larger starting cell number to enable the production of increased numbers of neurons. We are also investigating the role of extrinsic regulators in determining numbers and types of neurons produced in the human cerebral cortex. Overall, our findings are pointing to key, human-specific aspects of brain development and function, that have important implications for neurological disease.
About this series: The Cambridge Neuroscience Interdisciplinary Seminar Series provides a forum for neuroscientists across Cambridge and beyond to discuss contemporary and interdisciplinary research topics and issues.
The seminars are open to both members of the University, external academics and members of the public. We have tried to reflect the diversity of people’s interests at the University with our programme, and the breadth of the research taking place in Cambridge. Registration and more details are available here: http://talks.cam.ac.uk/show/index/125062
UCLA Broad Stem Cell Research Center member Ranmal Samarasinghe, MD, PhD presents his work using brain organoids to create better models of neurological disorders. An Assistant Professor in UCLA’s Neurology department, Dr. Samarasinghe splits his time between the clinic, seeing patients who have neurological conditions like epilepsy and autism, and in the lab working to create more detailed disease models using brain organoids. In this video, Dr. Samarasinghe discusses how brain organoids are becoming more sophisticated in their ability to replicate irregular brain wave patterns seen in conditions like Rett syndrome, an epilepsy primarily associated with infants. Ultimately, he hopes these stem cell-based models can be used to screen new drugs and discover new treatments for diseases like epilepsy.
Learn more about Dr. Samarasinghe’s work here: https://stemcell.ucla.edu/member/sama… the full “The Power of Regenerative Medicine: Future Treatments for Brain Disease” webinar: • The Power of Regenerative Medicine: F…
While these are two separate chronic conditions, they are linked as about one in every three adults with type 2 diabetes also has chronic kidney disease.
Additionally, both conditions are associated with an increased risk for cardiovascular complications such as stroke and heart attack.
FDA clears Stanford Medicine-spawned sepsis test, developed using machine learning, that leverages publicly available medical datasets from around the world.
