Lifeboat Foundation

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Cellular senescence, a state of permanent growth arrest, has emerged as a hallmark and fundamental driver of organismal aging. It is regulated by both genetic and epigenetic factors. Despite a few previously reported aging-associated genes, the identity and roles of additional genes involved in the regulation of human cellular aging remain to be elucidated. Yet, there is a lack of systematic investigation on the intervention of these genes to treat aging and aging-related diseases.

How many aging-promoting genes are there in the human genome? What are the molecular mechanisms by which these genes regulate aging? Can gene therapy alleviate individual aging? Recently, researchers from the Chinese Academy of Sciences have shed new light on the regulation of aging.

Continue reading “Scientists Develop New Gene Therapy Strategy to Delay Aging and Extend Lifespan” »

Circa 2017 using this can lead to near Ironman or foglet bodies with the ability to self heal the human body. It could be used on smartphones to heal people not needing a doctor in the future. This also would allow for the biological singularity to happen.

This device shoots new genetic code into cells to make them change their purpose. Researchers say the chip could someday be used to treat injuries in humans. But they’ve got a long, long way to go.

A once forgotten technology, RNA editing has been gaining traction as a treatment for genetic conditions given its key advantages over CRISPR gene editing.

Since CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing was first reported in 2012, its promise of making gene editing faster, cheaper, and easier than ever before led to an explosion in the number of publications referring to this gene editing technology.

An increasing number of research labs and companies are aiming to translate CRISPR gene editing into therapies for genetic diseases. However, further research has unveiled that there are more limitations to using CRISPR-Cas9 to cure diseases than initially expected. For example, the technology has been reported to introduce off-target changes to the DNA, raising concerns about its safety.

Novel study designed to correct genetic abnormalities of red blood cells.

Cleveland Clinic researchers are enrolling patients in a clinical trial that aims to work toward a cure for sickle cell disease, by changing the patient’s genetics. Sickle cell disease, a genetic blood disorder, is a painful and debilitating condition for which there are few approved therapies.

The multicenter study will evaluate the safety and effectiveness of a single dose of EDIT-301, an experimental one-time gene editing cell therapy that modifies a patient’s own blood-forming stem cells to correct the mutation responsible for sickle cell disease.

Continue reading “Cleveland Clinic Trial to Test Gene Therapy as Treatment of Sickle Cell Disease” »

This video explains the mendel’s law of segregation.

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Biologists in the UK and Austria have discovered 71 new imprinted genes in the mouse genome.

Biologists at the Universities of Bath and Vienna have discovered 71 new ‘imprinted’ genes in the mouse genome, a finding that takes them a step closer to unraveling some of the mysteries of epigenetics – an area of science that describes how genes are switched on (and off) in different cells at different stages in development and adulthood.

To understand the importance of imprinted genes to inheritance, we need to step back and ask how inheritance works in general. Most of the thirty trillion cells in a person’s body contain genes that come from both their mother and father, with each parent contributing one version of each gene. The unique combination of genes goes part of the way to making an individual unique. Usually, each gene in a pair is equally active or inactive in a given cell. This is not the case for imprinted genes. These genes – which make up less than one percent of the total of 20000+ genes – tend to be more active (sometimes much more active) in one parental version than the other.

The metazoan mitochondrial genome (mitogenome) is an ideal model system for comparative and evolutionary genomic research. The typical mitogenome of metazoans encodes a conserved set of 37 genes for 13 protein-coding genes (PCGs), two ribosomal RNA (rRNA) genes, and 22 transfer RNA (tRNA) genes¹, with genome-level characters, such as genome size, gene content, and gene order, display high diversity in some lineages^2,3. Gene rearrangements are observed frequently in some groups, while gene duplication and loss are distributed sporadically in limited lineages such as Bivalvia, Cephalopod, and Afrobatrachia^4,5,6. These remaining duplicate genes and pseudogenes represent important data for exploring the evolutionary history and mechanisms of gene rearrangement and recruitment. For the arrangement of mitochondrial genes, the variation in relative positions of PCGs and rRNA genes are more limited compared with that of tRNA genes across organisms within a phylum⁷. The tRNA genes with characteristics of diverse changes in relative position, gene content, and secondary structure, are considered as an important tool in studying the evolution of mitogenome, in particular to the rearrangement mechanism^8,9,10. Additionally, its variation is usually linked to evolutionary relationships in a wide range of lineages at different taxonomic levels suggesting these features of tRNA could be utilized as useful phylogenetic markers¹¹.

The extensive gene rearrangements (including PCGs and RNA) of insect mitogenomes have been detected in several lineages within the Diptera (Trichoceridae, Cecidomyiidae), Hemiptera (Enicocephalidae), Hymenoptera, Thysanoptera, Psocoptera and Phthiraptera^{12,13,14,15,16,17,18}, while most of investigated mitogenomes share the same gene order with the hypothesized ancestral pancrustacean mitogenome arrangement¹⁹ or possess rare tRNA rearrangement. Previously reported dictyopteran mitogenomes consistently display the typical ancestral gene order and content, however only two species are praying mantises and the rest are cockroaches and termites. Members of the Mantodea, a separate lineage within the Dictyoptera, have evolved many unique morphological and behavioural features as the ambush and pursuit predators^20,21,22. A better understanding of the diversity of mitogenome evolution in this enigmatic order underlines the need for exploring more taxa with the diverse praying mantis.

Herein, we report eight new mitogenomes from Mantodea and describe their general characteristics. Two new gene rearrangements and reassignment of tRNA genes are described, and evolutionary mechanisms for the gene rearrangements and duplication are discussed. Further, we examine the relationship between tRNA gene duplication and codon usage, and investigate whether these tRNA features vary with phylogeny.

A new study led by University of Maryland and UCLA researchers found that DNA from tissue samples can be used to accurately predict the age of bats in the wild. The study also showed age-related changes to the DNA of long-lived species are different from those in short-lived species, especially in regions of the genome near genes associated with cancer and immunity. This work provides new insight into causes of age-related declines.

This is the first research paper to show that animals in the wild can be accurately aged using an epigenetic clock, which predicts age based on specific changes to DNA. This work provides a new tool for biologists studying animals in the wild. In addition, the results provide insight into possible mechanisms behind the exceptional longevity of many bat species. The study appears in the March 12, 2021, issue of the journal Nature Communications.

“We hoped that these epigenetic changes would be predictive of age,” said Gerald Wilkinson, a professor of biology at UMD and co-lead author of the paper. “But now we have the data to show that instead of having to follow animals over their lifetime to be sure of their age, you can just go out and take a tiny sample of an individual in the wild and be able to know its age, which allows us to ask all kinds of questions we couldn’t before.”

:Ibotenic Acid Biosynthesis in the Fly Agaric Is Initiated by Glutamate Hydroxylation.

The fly agaric, Amanita muscaria, is widely known for its content of the psychoactive metabolites ibotenic acid and muscimol. However, their biosynthetic pathway and the respective enzymes are entirely unknown. 50 years ago, the biosynthesis was hypothesized to start with 3‐hydroxyglutamate. Here, we build on this hypothesis by the identification and recombinant production of a glutamate hydroxylase from A. muscaria. The hydroxylase gene is surrounded by six further biosynthetic genes, which we link to the production of ibotenic acid and muscimol using recent genomic and transcriptomic data. Our results pinpoint the genetic basis for ibotenic acid formation and thus provide new insights into a decades‐old question concerning a centuries‐old drug.

Keywords: biosynthesis, enzyme catalysis, fly agaric, hydroxylation, ibotenic acid.