Feature image credits: Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center
It was a life-changing day for 12 patients living in the United States when they found that their cancer had vanished, thanks to a small clinical trial. Of the total number of patients, these were the patients who completed the trial.
The New York Times reported that a drug named Dostarlimab was administered to these patients — all suffering from rectal cancer — over six months. All 12 patients entered remission after the period.
Year 2020 This type of parasite that feeds on salmon actually doesn’t need oxygen to live. Which means eventually there could be even gene editing that could essentially allow humans to not need as much air or could be independent of oxygen but only need anaerobic metabolisms perhaps. Really this can only expand our understanding of new ways to evolve humans to the next level.
Although aerobic respiration is a hallmark of eukaryotes, a few unicellular lineages, growing in hypoxic environments, have secondarily lost this ability. In the absence of oxygen, the mitochondria of these organisms have lost all or parts of their genomes and evolved into mitochondria-related organelles (MROs). There has been debate regarding the presence of MROs in animals. Using deep sequencing approaches, we discovered that a member of the Cnidaria, the myxozoan Henneguya salminicola, has no mitochondrial genome, and thus has lost the ability to perform aerobic cellular respiration. This indicates that these core eukaryotic features are not ubiquitous among animals. Our analyses suggest that H. salminicola lost not only its mitochondrial genome but also nearly all nuclear genes involved in transcription and replication of the mitochondrial genome. In contrast, we identified many genes that encode proteins involved in other mitochondrial pathways and determined that genes involved in aerobic respiration or mitochondrial DNA replication were either absent or present only as pseudogenes. As a control, we used the same sequencing and annotation methods to show that a closely related myxozoan, Myxobolus squamalis, has a mitochondrial genome. The molecular results are supported by fluorescence micrographs, which show the presence of mitochondrial DNA in M. squamalis, but not in H. salminicola. Our discovery confirms that adaptation to an anaerobic environment is not unique to single-celled eukaryotes, but has also evolved in a multicellular, parasitic animal. Hence, H. salminicola provides an opportunity for understanding the evolutionary transition from an aerobic to an exclusive anaerobic metabolism.
Prasang Chandorkar was excited about turning a new leaf in his life after meeting Wachika on a matrimonial website. They soon got engaged and started planning their life ahead.
But little did they know what was in store for them. Soon after the engagement, in November 2021, Prasang was diagnosed with cancer. This brought his life to a standstill.
Researcher Geetha Manjunath quit her job to launch Thermalytix, an AI solution that offers a radiation free and non invasive way to detect breast cancer in women.
Pharmaceutical synthesis is often quite complex; simplifications are needed to speed up the initial phase of drug development and lower the cost of generic production. Now, in a study recently published in Science, researchers from Osaka University have discovered a chemical reaction that could transform drug production because of its simplicity and utility.
Pharmaceuticals generally contain a few tens of atoms and a similar number of chemical bonds between the atoms. Thus, designing complex drug architectures from simple precursors using the techniques of organic chemistry usually requires careful planning and tedious, incremental steps.
The gold standard in drug synthesis is to create, in one step, as many chemical bonds as possible. In principle, adding one carbon atom—by forming four bonds in one step—to a drug precursor can be a means of doing so. Unfortunately, atomic carbon is generally too unstable for use in common chemical reaction conditions. This is the problem that the researchers sought to address.
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The origins and workings of consciousness have remained among science’s greatest unanswered mysteries. How did it begin? What sparks it?
The maker of EzriCare Artificial Tears said it was recalling the eye drops after U.S. health authorities linked the product to a drug-resistant bacteria strain.
The study was undertaken by Yasuhiro Oba’s team from Hokkaido University in Japan and astrochemists at NASA. A few years ago, Oba developed a technique to delicately excavate and separate different chemical compounds found in meteorite dust.
Using their mild extraction technique that uses cold water instead of acids, scientists found life-creating bases and compounds in four meteorite samples from Australia, US state of Kentucky, and Canadian province of British Columbia.
The discovery of these compounds in meteorites means that it is possible life on Earth as it stands today was created by compounds that came from outer space.
Bill Gates, the Microsoft founder turned philanthropist, has called for a global response team to be set up to carry out surveillance for pathogens that can potentially ring in the next pandemic, Financial Times reported.
Long before COVID-19 struck, Gates warned the world of an imminent pandemic and the need to prepare ourselves to face it. Gates has been vocal about the long delays involved in the vaccine development process and the lack of equity in vaccine distribution in the world. So far, he has also been right about how the COVID-19 pandemic will play out and has pandemic avoiding strategies in his new book.
Prairie voles lacking functional receptors for oxytocin form normal social bonds, a finding that could explain the hormone’s clinical failures.