Reverse the aging process and live decades longer? Transfer your brain onto a database and achieve digital immortality? Humans one day may have such options.
Category: genetics – Page 167
Europe was covered in thick ice sheets around the time of the last glacial maximum around 20,000 years ago, during which time sea levels were more than a hundred metres lower than today.
Shielding themselves from the frigid conditions in western Europe, cave-dwelling humans occupied rock shelters and caverns and in one site near Granada in Spain, archaeologists have unearthed remains providing the oldest human genome recorded in the region.
This 23,000-year-old genome from Cueva del Malalmuerzo is the oldest found in the Andalusian region and one of the oldest recorded. Researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology have connected these genetic remains to those of a 35,000-year-old Belgian specimen found in 2016.
Forget about He Jiankui, the Chinese scientist who created gene-edited babies. Instead, when you think about gene editing you should think of Victoria Gray, the African-American woman who says she’s been cured of her sickle-cell disease symptoms.
This week in London, scientists are gathering for the Third International Summit on Human Genome Editing. It’s gene editing’s big event, where researchers get to awe the audience with their new ability to modify DNA—and ethicists get to worry about what it all means.
As COVID has demonstrated, when pathogens are moving through the population, we adjust, limiting interactions, even isolating, and generally changing the way we associate with one other. Humans are not alone. New research from Harvard scientists provides some insight into how pathogens change animal social behaviors.
“Extreme environmental conditions have a very strong influence on all animals,” said Yun Zhang, a professor in the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology. But while this behavior has been seen in animals from simple fruit flies all the way up to primates, researchers have not understood what happens inside an individual animal’s brain that leads to infection-induced changes in social behavior.
In their new paper, published in Nature, Zhang and colleagues studied the small roundworm C. elegans, which exists in nature with two sexes: hermaphrodites that produce both eggs and sperm, and males. Under normal conditions, the hermaphrodites are loners, preferring to self-reproduce over mating with males. However, Zhang’s team found that the hermaphrodite worms infected by a pathogenic strain of the bacterium Pseudomonas aeruginosa became more interested in one another and increased their mating with males.
In a recent article published in the journal Nutrition, researchers in Australia summarized how diet could help decrease low-density lipoprotein cholesterol (LDLc) or triglyceride concentrations in polygenic hypercholesterolemia.
Study: A Review of Low-Density Lipoprotein-Lowering Diets in the Age of Anti-Sense Technology. Image Credit: Ralwell / Shutterstock.
Elevated LDLc or dyslipidemia, including high levels of total cholesterol, increases the risk of cardiometabolic disorders and cardiovascular diseases (CVDs), especially ischemic heart disease (IHD), if not managed in time. Pharmacological treatment is sometimes a prerequisite for cases with complex dyslipidemia with a genetic component. Subsequently, pharmacological research yielded several highly effective drugs based on monoclonal antibody (mAb) therapy, some of which researchers even reviewed in this paper.
NAD Test #2: Impact of NMN?
Posted in biotech/medical, genetics
