FOX Business’ Lauren Simonetti details a breakthrough finding in the medical community revealing how artificial intelligence can help detect silent seizures.
Category: biotech/medical – Page 520
An MIT study suggests 3D folding of the genome is key to cells’ ability to store and pass on “memories” of which genes they should express.
Every cell in the human body contains the same genetic instructions, encoded in its DNA. However, out of about 30,000 genes, each cell expresses only those genes that it needs to become a nerve cell, immune cell, or any of the other hundreds of cell types in the body.
Each cell’s fate is largely determined by chemical modifications to the proteins that decorate its DNA; these modification in turn control which genes get turned on or off. When cells copy their DNA to divide, however, they lose half of these modifications, leaving the question: How do cells maintain the memory of what kind of cell they are supposed to be?
A new MIT study proposes a theoretical model that helps explain how these memories are passed from generation to generation when cells divide. The research team suggests that within each cell’s nucleus, the 3D folding of its genome determines which parts of the genome will be marked by these chemical modifications. After a cell copies its DNA, the marks are partially lost, but the 3D folding allows the cell to easily restore the chemical marks needed to maintain its identity. And each time a cell divides, chemical marks allow a cell to restore its 3D folding of its genome. This way, by juggling the memory between 3D folding and the marks, the memory can be preserved over hundreds of cell divisions.
Biotech company Teal Omics founded after researchers develop algorithm that measures how fast individual organs are aging.
Researchers at the Hubrecht Institute have laid the foundation for the development of a gene therapy for the genetic heart disease arrhythmogenic cardiomyopathy (ACM). Their approach, based on replacement of the PKP2 gene, led to significant structural and functional improvements in laboratory models of the disease.
The study by the group of Eva van Rooij was published on 7 December 2023 in Nature Cardiovascular Research. Multiple clinical trials will start in 2024 in the United States to explore the clinical potential of this approach in ACM patients with PKP2 mutations.
ACM is a genetic heart disease that affects 1 in 2,000 to 1 in 5,000 people worldwide. It is characterized by arrhythmias and can lead to sudden cardiac arrest. Current treatment of the disease usually consists of antiarrhythmic drugs and implantable cardioverter-defibrillators (ICDs), which are focused solely on treating the symptoms rather than targeting the root of the problem.
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Takeaways:
• A sudden rise in respiratory ailments in China, particularly among children, has raised global concern. The Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention reported over 3,500 cases of respiratory infection, with Chinese media attributing the outbreak to mycoplasma pneumonia.
• The World Health Organization has been monitoring the situation since mid-October 2023 and has requested more information from China. As of November 24, no unusual or novel pathogens have been reported in the clusters of pneumonia cases.
WASHINGTON, Dec 5 (Reuters) — Hundreds of thousands of people worldwide are killed annually by malaria and other diseases spread through the bite of mosquitoes, insects that date back to the age of dinosaurs. All of these bites are inflicted by females, which possess specialized mouth anatomy that their male counterparts lack.
But it has not always been that way. Researchers said they have discovered the oldest-known fossils of mosquitoes — two males entombed in pieces of amber dating to 130 million years ago during the Cretaceous Period and found near the town of Hammana in Lebanon. To their surprise, the male mosquitoes possessed elongated piercing-sucking mouthparts seen now only in females.
“Clearly they were hematophagous,” meaning blood-eaters, said paleontologist Dany Azar of the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Nanjing Institute of Geology and Paleontology and Lebanese University, lead author of the study published this week in the journal Current Biology. “So this discovery is a major one in the evolutionary history of mosquitoes.”
Takeaways:
• Barry Young, a public health worker in New Zealand, was arrested for allegedly accessing and leaking personal information from work databases. Young claims the data shows that COVID-19 vaccines are causing deaths.
• Young leaked the data to Steve Kirsch, a vaccine critic, who anonymized the data and uploaded it to his Wasabi file storage account. Kirsch claims the data proves that the COVID-19 vaccines have caused more than 10 million deaths worldwide.
Nearly four years into the pandemic, hundreds of Americans are still dying every day from Covid, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention ( CDC).
The virus is responsible for around 1,000 deaths and 15,000 hospitalisations each week, CDC Director Mandy Cohen said during a media briefing on 2 December.
Death rates briefly dipped below 500 per week in July, the lowest rates since the pandemic began, before steadily increasing to as high as 1,400 in September.
Long-term data from a study implemented by the # NIH-funded International Maternal Pediatric Adolescent AIDS Clinical Trials Network showed very early antiretroviral therapy (ART) for infants who acquired HIV in utero enabled some infants to sustain viral suppression for more than two years.
Very early ART for in-utero HIV-1 can achieve sustained virological suppression in association with biomarkers indicating restricted HIV-1 reservoirs by age 2 years, which might enable potential ART-free remission.