People who reach a very old age may have their genes to thank. Genetic variants that help to prevent DNA mutations and repair any that do occur have been found in supercentenarians and semi-supercentenarians – people who reach the ages of 110 and 105, respectively.
“DNA repair mechanisms are extremely efficient in these people,” says Claudio Franceschi at the University of Bologna in Italy. “It is one of the most important basic mechanisms for extending lifespan.”
The human cells grew inside all 132 of the embryos after just 24 hours. After ten days, 103 chimeric embryos remained. By day 19, however, only three chimeras were left alive – and they were then terminated.
“This knowledge will allow us to go back now and try to re-engineer these pathways that are successful for allowing appropriate development of human cells in these other animals,” Juan Carlos Izpisua Belmonte, genetics professor at the Salk Institute for Biological Sciences in La Jolla, California and co-author of the study, told NPR.
“We are very, very excited,” he added.
Genetic treatments are difficult to produce without facilities.
After Kelli Luginbuhl finished her PhD, her advisor, Duke bioengineer and PhaseBio co-founder Ashutosh Chilkoti, sat her down and asked if she wanted to launch and then run a company. Chilkoti had a once-obscure technology he and the venture capitalist Joe McMahon thought could form the basis of his second company and finally pay huge dividends. Luginbuhl knew the tech from years in his lab and was already looking for biotech jobs. It all added up.
Three years, some strategizing, and 10 or so pitch meetings later, the trio is launching Isolere Bio, with $7 million in seed funding led by Northpond Ventures and technology they believe can allow gene therapy companies to vastly increase the number of doses they can produce. It’s one potential solution to a slow-boiling crisis that has become increasingly acute, as new companies struggle to get the materials they need for trials and some common diseases remain theoretically unfixable by gene therapy, because companies would never be able to make enough doses for that many patients.
The problem is partially that the facilities don’t yet exist to produce this much of gene therapy. Experts, however, also point to antiquated manufacturing processes.
After a decade of fighting for regulatory approval and public acceptance, a biotechnology firm has released genetically engineered mosquitoes into the open air in the United States for the first time. The experiment, launched this week in the Florida Keys — over the objections of some local critics — tests a method for suppressing populations of wild Aedes aegypti mosquitoes, which can carry diseases such as Zika, dengue, chikungunya and yellow fever.
Biotech firm Oxitec launches controversial field test of its insects in Florida after years of push-back from residents and regulatory complications.
Unlocking The Potential Of Salt and Drought Tolerant Crops And Seawater Agriculture — Professor Dr. Mark Tester — Center for Desert Agriculture, King Abdullah University of Science and Technology; Co-founder & CSO, Red Sea Farms.
Professor Dr. Mark Tester is Professor, Plant Science, and Associate Director, Center for Desert Agriculture, Biological and Environmental Science and Engineering Division, of King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) in Saudi Arabia.
Prior to joining King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in February 2013, Professor Tester was a professor of plant physiology at the University of Adelaide and the Australian Centre for Plant Functional Genomics from 2009 to 2013. He has a PhD from the University of Cambridge in plant sciences.
In a study at The University of Alabama, aging fruit flies died faster than younger flies from a viral infection because of different genetic responses, lowering the older flies’ tolerance to the infection.
The findings published recently in G3: Genes, Genomes, Genetics add to the understanding of innate immunity, the first line of defense against infections, which is not fully understood in humans, and prove the fruit fly, Drosophila, is a good candidate for aging immunity studies that could lead to advancements in treating viral infections in older humans.
“We are living in times where there is a substantial increase in aging populations, and we know there is a decline of immune function in humans as we age,” said Dr. Stanislava Chtarbanova, UA assistant professor of biological sciences whose lab led the study. “This is the first study to use the fly for investigating age-dependent, anti-viral responses. Our lab can leverage this genetic model to study the molecular mechanisms underlying aging immunity.”
GMO 🦟
More than 20 million genetically modified mosquitoes are coming to the Florida Keys this year, in a landmark project by British biotech company Oxitec and Monroe County’s Mosquito Control District.
Muscle stem cells enable our muscle to build up and regenerate over a lifetime through exercise. But if certain muscle genes are mutated, the opposite occurs. In patients suffering from muscular dystrophy, the skeletal muscle already starts to weaken in childhood. Suddenly, these children are no longer able to run, play the piano or climb the stairs, and often they are dependent on a wheelchair by the age of 15. Currently, no therapy for this condition exists.
“Now, we are able to access these patients’ gene mutations using CRISPR-Cas9 technology,” explains Professor Simone Spuler, head of the Myology Lab at the Experimental and Clinical Research Center (ECRC), a joint institution of the Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine in the Helmholtz Association and Charité — Universitätsmedizin Berlin. “We care for more than 2000 patients at the Charité outpatient clinic for muscle disorders, and quickly recognized the potential of the new technology.” The researchers immediately started working with some of the affected families, and have now presented their results in the journal JCI Insight. In the families studied, the parents were healthy and had no idea they possessed a mutated gene. The children all inherited a copy of the disease mutation from both parents.
For the first time, scientists have succeeded in extracting and analyzing Neandertal chromosomal DNA preserved in cave sediments.
The field of ancient DNA has revealed important aspects of our evolutionary past, including our relationships with our distant cousins, Denisovans, and Neandertals. These studies have relied on DNA from bones and teeth, which store DNA and protect it from the environment. But such skeletal remains are exceedingly rare, leaving large parts of human history inaccessible to genetic analysis.
To fill these gaps, researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology developed new methods for enriching and analyzing human nuclear DNA from sediments, which are abundant at almost every archaeological site. Until now, only mitochondrial DNA has been recovered from archaeological sediments, but this is of limited value for studying population relationships. The advent of nuclear DNA analyses of sediments provides new opportunities to investigate the deep human past.
Paper references for Levine’s Phenotypic Age calculator and aging.ai:
An epigenetic biomarker of aging for lifespan and healthspan:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29676998/
Population Specific Biomarkers of Human Aging: A Big Data Study Using South Korean, Canadian, and Eastern European Patient Populations:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29340580/
