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Category: biotech/medical – Page 831

Our trusted and proven sources were correct once again, as just hours after we broke the news that a Gattaca series is in development at Showtime, The Hollywood Reporter confirmed our exclusive. One of our writers here at Giant Freakin Robot wrote just two weeks ago that the 1997 dystopian sci-fi classic would be perfect as a television series, and it’s amazing how quickly we went from hoping it would happen to confirming that it is. The new series will be coming from the creators of Homeland, Howard Gordan and Alex Gansa.

As noted in our initial report, this is not the first time the film, starring Ethan Hawke, Uma Thurman, and Jude Law, has been optioned as a series. Back in 2009, Sony attempted to turn the movie into a procedural from Gil Grant, a writer on 24 and NCIS. The underrated cult-classic movie is ideal for transforming into a prestige series on a premium network as its themes on transhumanism, genetic manipulation, and a stratified society have become more relevant as technology leaps forwards every year.

In Gattaca, eugenics separates society into “valids” and “in-valids,” even if genetic discrimination is illegal; that hasn’t stopped businesses from profiling, giving the best jobs to the former and only menial labor opportunities to the latter. Ethan Hawke plays Vincent, an in-valid with a heart defect that uses samples from Jude Law’s Jerome Morrow, a paralyzed Olympic champion swimmer that’s also a valid. Using the purloined DNA, Vincent cons his way into a job at Gattaca Aerospace Corporation, eventually being selected as a navigator for a trip to Saturn’s moon, Titan.

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A new University of Illinois project is using advanced object recognition technology to keep toxin-contaminated wheat kernels out of the food supply and to help researchers make wheat more resistant to fusarium head blight, or scab disease, the crop’s top nemesis.

“Fusarium head blight causes a lot of economic losses in wheat, and the associated toxin, deoxynivalenol (DON), can cause issues for human and animal health. The disease has been a big deterrent for people growing wheat in the Eastern U.S. because they could grow a perfectly nice crop, and then take it to the elevator only to have it get docked or rejected. That’s been painful for people. So it’s a big priority to try to increase resistance and reduce DON risk as much as possible,” says Jessica Rutkoski, assistant professor in the Department of Crop Sciences, part of the College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences (ACES) at Illinois. Rutkoski is a co-author on the new paper in the Plant Phenome Journal.

Increasing resistance to any traditionally means growing a lot of genotypes of the crop, infecting them with the disease, and looking for symptoms. The process, known in plant breeding as phenotyping, is successful when it identifies resistant genotypes that don’t develop symptoms, or less severe symptoms. When that happens, researchers try to identify the genes related to and then put those genes in high-performing hybrids of the crop.

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Researchers at Kanazawa University report in ACS Nano how high-speed atomic force microscopy can be used to study the biomolecular mechanisms underlying gene editing.

The DNA of prokaryotes—single-cell organisms, for example bacteria—is known to contain sequences that are derived from DNA fragments of viruses that infected the prokaryote earlier. These sequences, collectively referred to as CRISPR, for “clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats,” play a major role in the antiviral defense system of bacteria, as they enable the recognition and subsequent neutralization of infecting viruses. The latter is done through the enzyme Cas9 (“CRISPR-associated protein 9”), a biomolecule that can locally unwind DNA, check for the existence of the CRISPR sequence and, when found, cut the DNA.

In recent years, CRISPR/Cas9 has emerged as a genome editing tool based on the notion that the Cas9 protein can be activated with artificially created CRISPR-like sequences. Sometimes, however, the wrong target is “caught” by Cas9—when the wrongly identified DNA sequence is too similar to the intended target sequence. It is therefore of crucial importance to fully understand how Cas9 binds to, “interrogates,” and cuts DNA. Mikihiro Shibata from Kanazawa University and colleagues have now succeeded in video-recording the DNA binding and cleaving dynamics of Staphylococcus aureus (a particular bacterium) Cas9 by means of high-speed atomic force microscopy (HS-AFM). Their observations will help to reach a more complete understanding of CRISPR-Cas9 mechanisms.

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An artificial pancreas originally developed at the University of Virginia Center for Diabetes Technology improves blood sugar control in children ages 2 to 6 with type 1 diabetes, according to a new study. Details of the clinical study and its findings have been published in the New England Journal of Medicine.

Trial participants using the artificial pancreas spent approximately three more hours per day in their target blood sugar range compared with participants in a who continued relying on the methods they were already using to manage their .

The Control-IQ system, manufactured by Tandem Diabetes Care, is a diabetes management device that automatically monitors and regulates . The artificial pancreas has an insulin pump that uses advanced control algorithms based on the person’s glucose monitoring information to adjust the insulin dose as needed.

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A multi-state study from the U.S. Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) VISION Network has found that first-generation COVID-19 mRNA vaccines were associated with protection against COVID-19 during periods of omicron BA.4/BA.5 predominance.

The new analysis found that mRNA vaccines were protective against COVID-19-associated hospitalization and ICU admission or in-hospital death and noted less during BA.4/BA.5 predominance compared to earlier omicron variants.

During BA.4/BA.5 predominance, estimated 3-dose vaccine effectiveness against hospitalization was 68 percent between 7-and 119-days post-vaccination. Vaccine effectiveness against hospitalization decreased to 36 percent by 120 days or more post-vaccination.

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A new study published in Nature reports that a technology known as spatial omics can be used to map simultaneously how genes are switched on and off and how they are expressed in different areas of tissues and organs. This improved technology, developed by researchers at Yale University and Karolinska Institutet, could shed light on the development of tissues, as well as on certain diseases and how to treat them.

Almost all cells in the body have the same set of genes and can in principle become any kind of cell. What distinguishes the cells is how the genes in our DNA are used. In recent years, spatial omics have given us a deeper understanding of how cells read the genome in precise locations in tissues. Now, researchers have further evolved this technology to increase knowledge of how tissues develop and how different diseases arise.

A key part of the study is the researchers’ ability to spatially map simultaneously two crucial components of our genetic makeup, the epigenome and the . The epigenome controls the switching mechanisms that turn genes on and off in individual , whereas the transcriptome is the result of those gene expressions and what makes each cell unique.

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Researchers from The University of Queensland have discovered the active compound from an edible mushroom that boosts nerve growth and enhances memory.

Professor Frederic Meunier from the Queensland Brain Institute said the team had identified new active compounds from the mushroom, Hericium erinaceus.

“Extracts from these so-called ‘lion’s mane’ mushrooms have been used in in Asian countries for centuries, but we wanted to scientifically determine their on ,” Professor Meunier said.

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Long-term microgravity exposure causes various biological changes, ranging from bone loss to changes in cardiovascular function.

Towards this, SpaceX’s Dragon cargo ship is set to deliver cardiac tissue chips to the International Space Station (ISS). According to NASA, the cargo spacecraft is expected to autonomously dock with the ISS at 7:52 am EDT Thursday, March 16.

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Scientists have long known that mitochondria play a crucial role in the metabolism and energy production of cancer cells. However, until now, little was known about the relationship between the structural organization of mitochondrial networks and their functional bioenergetic activity at the level of whole tumors.

In a new study, published in Nature, researchers from the UCLA Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center used (PET) in combination with to generate 3-dimensional ultra-resolution maps of mitochondrial networks in of genetically engineered mice.

They categorized the tumors based on mitochondrial activity and other factors using an artificial intelligence technique called , quantifying the mitochondrial architecture across hundreds of cells and thousands of mitochondria throughout the tumor.

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