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Common medications can accumulate in gut bacteria, a new study has found, altering bacterial function and potentially reducing the effectiveness of the drug. These interactions—seen for a variety of medications, such as depression, diabetes, and asthma drugs—could help researchers to better understand individual differences in drug effectiveness and side-effects, according to the study published in Nature.

It is known that bacteria can chemically modify some drugs, a process known as biotransformation. This study, led by researchers from the Medical Research Council (MRC) Toxicology Unit at the University of Cambridge and the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Germany, is the first to show that certain species of gut bacteria accumulate human drugs, altering the types of bacteria and their activity.

This could change the effectiveness of the drug both directly, as the accumulation could reduce the availability of the drug to the body, and indirectly, as altered bacterial function and composition could be linked to side-effects.

The groups also explained why in previous studies by other scientists, the chromatin appeared to fill the cell nuclei. “When scientists plate cells on a glass slide in order to study them under a microscope, they change their volume and physically flatten them. This may perturb some of the forces governing chromatin arrangement and reduce the distance between the upper part of the nucleus to its base,” Safran explains.

If you open a biology textbook and run through the images depicting how DNA is organized in the cell’s nucleus, chances are you’ll start feeling hungry; the chains of DNA would seem like a bowl of ramen: long strings floating in liquid. However, according to two new studies—one experimental and the other theoretical—that are the outcome of the collaboration between the groups of Prof. Talila Volk of the Molecular Genetics Department and Prof. Sam Safran of the Chemical and Biological Physics Department at the Weizmann Institute of Science, this image should be reconsidered. Clarifying it is essential since DNA’s spatial arrangement in the nucleus can affect the expression of genes contained within the DNA molecule, and hence the proteins found in the cell.

This story began when Volk was studying how mechanical forces influence cell nuclei in the muscle and found evidence that muscle contractions had an immediate effect on gene expression patterns. “We couldn’t explore this further because existing methods relied on imaging of chemically preserved cells, so they failed to capture what happens in the cell nuclei of an actual working muscle,” she says.

Continue reading “Novel imaging method reveals a surprising arrangement of DNA in the cell’s nucleus” »

A more general definition of entropy was proposed by Boltzmann (1877) as S = k ln W, where k is Boltzmann’s constant, and W is the number of possible states of a system, in the units J⋅K⁻¹, tying entropy to statistical mechanics. Szilard (1929) suggested that entropy is fundamentally a measure of the information content of a system. Shannon (1948) defined informational entropy as \(S=-\sum_{i}{p}_{i}{log}_{b}{p}_{i}\) where p_i is the probability of finding message number i in the defined message space, and b is the base of the logarithm used (typically 2 resulting in units of bits). Landauer (1961) proposed that informational entropy is interconvertible with thermodynamic entropy such that for a computational operation in which 1 bit of information is erased, the amount of thermodynamic entropy generated is at least k ln 2. This prediction has been recently experimentally verified in several independent studies (Bérut et al. 2012; Jun et al. 2014; Hong et al. 2016; Gaudenzi et al. 2018).

The equivalency of thermodynamic and informational entropy suggests that critical points of instability and subsequent self-organization observed in thermodynamic systems may be observable in computational systems as well. Indeed, this agrees with observations in cellular automata (e.g., Langton 1986; 1990) and neural networks (e.g., Wang et al. 1990; Inoue and Kashima 1994), which self-organize to maximize informational entropy production (e.g., Solé and Miramontes 1995). The source of additional information used for self-organization has been identified as bifurcation and deterministic chaos (Langton 1990; Inoue and Kashima 1994; Solé and Miramontes 1995; Bahi et al. 2012) as defined by Devaney (1986). This may provide an explanation for the phenomenon termed emergence, known since classical antiquity (Aristotle, c. 330 BCE) but lacking a satisfactory explanation (refer to Appendix A for discussion on deterministic chaos, and Appendix B for discussion on emergence). It is also in full agreement with extensive observations of deterministic chaos in chemical (e.g., Nicolis 1990; Györgyi and Field 1992), physical (e.g., Maurer and Libchaber 1979; Mandelbrot 1983; Shaw 1984; Barnsley et al. 1988) and biological (e.g., May 1975; Chay et al. 1995; Jia et al. 2012) dissipative structures and systems.

This theoretical framework establishes a deep fundamental connection between cybernetic^{Footnote 1} and biological systems, and implicitly predicts that as more work is put into cybernetic systems composed of hierarchical dissipative structures, their complexity increases, allowing for more possibilities of coupled feedback and emergence at increasingly higher levels. Such high-level self-organization is routinely exploited in machine learning, where artificial neural networks (ANNs) self-organize in response to inputs from the environment similarly to neurons in the brain (e.g., Lake et al. 2017; Fong et al. 2018). The recent development of a highly organized (low entropy) immutable information carrier, in conjunction with ANN-based artificial intelligence (AI) and distributed computing systems, presents new possibilities for self-organization and emergence.

High-energy cosmic rays have proven elusive… but we may have found their source.

Thanks to new research led by the University of Nagoya, scientists have quantified the number of cosmic rays produced in a supernova remnant for the first time. This research has helped resolve a 100-year mystery and is a major step towards determining precisely where cosmic rays come from.

While scientists theorize that cosmic rays originate from many sources — our Sun, supernovae, gamma-ray bursts (GRBs), and active galactic nuclei (sometimes called quasars) — their exact origin has been a mystery since they were first discovered in 1912. Similarly, astronomers have theorized that supernova remnants (the after-effects of supernova explosions) are responsible for accelerating them to nearly the speed of light.

Continue reading “We may finally know where high-energy cosmic rays come from” »

Earlier this year, researchers found a deposit of rare-earth minerals off the coast of Japan that could supply the world for centuries, according to a study.

The study, published in the journal Nature in April 2,018 says the deposit contains 16 million tons of the valuable metals.

Rare-earth minerals are used in everything from smartphone batteries to electric vehicles. By definition, these minerals contain one or more of 17 metallic rare-earth elements (for those familiar with the periodic table, those are on the second row from the bottom).

Continue reading “Japan Discovered a Rare-Earth Mineral Deposit That Can Supply The World For Centuries” »

Dr. The book launch will happen on September 4th, at 3 p.m. (Pacific Time) in Book Passage Ferry Building Store in San Francisco, California!
Please come to have an in-person chat with Dr. Katcher.

Dr. Harold Katcher is one of the discoverers of the human breast cancer gene (BRCA1), and has thousands of citations in the scientific literature, with publications ranging from protein structure to bacteriology, biotechnology, bioinformatics and biochemistry. He was the Academic Director for Natural Sciences for the Asian Division of the University of Maryland Global Campus, and nowadays is Chief Scientific Officer at Yuvan Research Inc., which is working on the development of rejuvenation treatments.

https://www.bookpassage.com/event/harold-katcher-illusion-kn…ding-store.
https://www.ntzplural.com/harold-katcher-launches-book.
https://www.facebook.com/events/553354852782737?ref=newsfeed.

Continue reading “Announcing the in-person book launch of ‘The Illusion of Knowledge: The paradigm shift in aging research that shows the way to human rejuvenation’ with the presence of the author” »

The device offers a far simpler way of monitoring how various chemical compounds form during reactions than the methods currently available to scientists, and the team that built the “camera” says it’s already using it to improve the technology behind solar cells.

Controlling the specific order and process of molecular assembly is notoriously difficult, especially at such tiny scales. Thankfully, the scientists realized that they merely had to plunk its components into room-temperature water — along with whatever molecules they wanted to study — and it would piece itself together automatically.

“We were surprised how powerful this new tool is, considering how straightforward it is to assemble,” first study author and Cambridge chemist Kamil Sokolowski said in a press release.

University of Houston researchers are reporting a breakthrough in the field of materials science and engineering with the development of an electrochemical actuator that uses specialized organic semiconductor nanotubes (OSNTs).

Currently in the early stages of development, the actuator will become a key part of research contributing to the future of robotic, bioelectronic and biomedical science.

“Electrochemical devices that transform electrical energy to mechanical energy have potential use in numerous applications, ranging from soft robotics and micropumps to autofocus microlenses and bioelectronics,” said Mohammad Reza Abidian, associate professor of biomedical engineering in the UH Cullen College of Engineering. He’s the corresponding author of the article “Organic Semiconductor Nanotubes for Electrochemical Devices,” published in the journal Advanced Functional Materials, which details the discovery.

Researchers have made a tiny camera, held together with ‘molecular glue’ that allows them to observe chemical reactions in real time.

The device, made by a team from the University of Cambridge, combines tiny semiconductor nanocrystals called quantum dots and gold nanoparticles using molecular glue called cucurbituril (CB). When added to water with the molecule to be studied, the components self-assemble in seconds into a stable, powerful tool that allows the real-time monitoring of chemical reactions.

The camera harvests light within the semiconductors, inducing electron transfer processes like those that occur in photosynthesis, which can be monitored using incorporated gold nanoparticle sensors and spectroscopic techniques. They were able to use the camera to observe chemical species which had been previously theorized but not directly observed.