Lifeboat Foundation

Doug Millay, Ph.D., a scientist with the Division of Molecular Cardiovascular Biology at Cincinnati Children’s has dedicated his career to revealing the most fundamental mechanisms of skeletal muscle development. He has been a leader in characterizing how two “fusogens” called Myomaker and Myomerger mediate the entry of stem cells into mature muscle cells to build the tissue that humans depend upon for movement, breathing, and survival.

Now, some of the basic discoveries made by Millay and colleagues are translating into a potential treatment for people living with Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD). Their latest research, published April 12, 2023, in the journal Cell, reveals that in mice, modified viruses, engineered with Myomaker and Myomerger, result in specific fusion with muscle cells. These viruses can therefore be used as a vector to deliver a vital gene needed for muscle function that is mutated in people with DMD.

A key unknown prior to this work was whether proteins like Myomaker and Myomerger, which mainly function on cells, could even work on viruses. First author Sajedah Hindi, Ph.D., also with the Division of Molecular Cardiovascular Biology at Cincinnati Children’s and a leading member of the research team, took on the challenge to test this idea.

The opportunities for improving healthcare with AI are massive,” said Professor Ayers. “AI-augmented care is the future of medicine.

Israeli company Steakholder Foods has announced that it successfully 3D printed the first ready-to-cook cultivated grouper fish product.

Sourcing human tissue samples for biological investigations isn’t always easy. While they are ethically obtained through organ donation or from tissue that’s removed during surgical procedures, scientists are finding them increasingly difficult to get hold of.

And it’s not just because there’s a limited supply of human tissue samples. There’s also restricted availability of the specific size and type of tissue samples needed for the many projects taking place at any given time.

Continue reading “Scientists Built a Machine From Lego That Can Grow Human Skin” »

Protein-coding sequence differences have failed to fully explain the evolution of multiple mammalian phenotypes. This suggests that these phenotypes have evolved at least in part through changes in gene expression, meaning that their differences across species may be caused by differences in genome sequence at enhancer regions that control gene expression in specific tissues and cell types. Yet the enhancers involved in phenotype evolution are largely unknown. Sequence conservation–based approaches for identifying such enhancers are limited because enhancer activity can be conserved even when the individual nucleotides within the sequence are poorly conserved. This is due to an overwhelming number of cases where nucleotides turn over at a high rate, but a similar combination of transcription factor binding sites and other sequence features can be maintained across millions of years of evolution, allowing the function of the enhancer to be conserved in a particular cell type or tissue. Experimentally measuring the function of orthologous enhancers across dozens of species is currently infeasible, but new machine learning methods make it possible to make reliable sequence-based predictions of enhancer function across species in specific tissues and cell types.

The human body relies heavily on electrical charges. Lightning-like pulses of energy fly through the brain and nerves and most biological processes depend on electrical ions traveling across the membranes of each cell in our body.

These electrical signals are possible, in part, because of an imbalance in electrical charges that exists on either side of a cellular membrane. Until recently, researchers believed the membrane was an essential component to creating this imbalance. But that thought was turned on its head when researchers at Stanford University discovered that similar imbalanced electrical charges can exist between microdroplets of water and air.

Now, researchers at Duke University have discovered that these types of electric fields also exist within and around another type of cellular structure called biological condensates. Like oil droplets floating in water, these structures exist because of differences in density. They form compartments inside the cell without needing the physical boundary of a membrane.

People’s ability to regenerate bones declines with age and is further decreased by diseases such as osteoporosis. To help the aging population, researchers are looking for new therapies that improve bone regeneration.

Now, an interdisciplinary team of researchers from the Biotechnology Center (BIOTEC) and the Medical Faculty of TU Dresden along with a group from Max Bergmann Center of Biomaterials (MBC) developed novel bio-inspired molecules that enhance bone regeneration in mice. The results were published in the journal Biomaterials.

As people age, their ability to regenerate bones decreases. Fractures take longer to heal and diseases like osteoporosis only add to it. This represents a serious health challenge to the aging population and an increasing socioeconomic burden for the society. To help combat this issue, researchers are looking for new therapeutic approaches that can improve bone regeneration.

Using Zoonomia’s data, researchers have also constructed a phylogenetic tree that estimates when each mammalian species diverged from its ancestors⁵. This analysis lends support to the hypothesis that mammals had already started evolutionarily diverging before Earth was struck by the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs about 65 million years ago — but that they diverged much more rapidly afterwards.

Only the beginning

The Zoonomia Project is just one of dozens of efforts to sequence animal genomes. Another large effort is the Vertebrate Genomes Project (VGP), which aims to generate genomes for roughly all 71,000 living vertebrate species, which include mammals, reptiles, fish, birds and amphibians. Although the two projects are independent of one another, many researchers are a part of both, says Haussler, who is a trustee of the VGP.

New research offers a path toward transplants that can fix damage from a heart attack without causing life-threatening arrhythmias.

The story of how the structure of DNA was found is one of team science from which one member was unforgivably excluded.