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The CRISPR-Cas9 system has revolutionized genetic manipulations and made gene editing simpler, faster and easily accessible to most laboratories.
To its recognition, this year, the French-American duo Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna have been awarded the prestigious Nobel Prize for chemistry for CRISPR.
For the first time, a targeted gene replacement therapy has been approved in Canada, bringing hope to thousands of people struggling with a genetic condition in which their sight slowly degrades.
The research, out today from the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus and published in * Evolution and Human Behavior*, presents a hypothesis supporting a role for fructose, a component of sugar and high fructose corn syrup, and uric acid (a fructose metabolite), in increasing the risk for these behavioral disorders.
Johnson outlines research that shows a foraging response stimulates risk taking, impulsivity, novelty seeking, rapid decision making, and aggressiveness to aid the securing of food as a survival response. Overactivation of this process from excess sugar intake may cause impulsive behavior that could range from ADHD, to bipolar disorder or even aggression.” “Johnson notes, “We do not blame aggressive behavior on sugar, but rather note that it may be one contributor.”” “The identification of fructose as a risk factor does not negate the importance of genetic, familial, physical, emotional and environmental factors that shape mental health,” he adds.
Huh, want to know more.
“New research suggests that conditions such as attention deficit hyperactivity syndrome (ADHD), bipolar disorder, and even aggressive behaviors may be linked with sugar intake, and that it may have an evolutionary basis.
Summary: New artificial intelligence technology will analyze clinical data, brain images, and genetic information from Alzheimer’s patients to look for new biomarkers associated with the neurodegenerative disease.
Source: University of Pennsylvania
As the search for successful Alzheimer’s disease drugs remains elusive, experts believe that identifying biomarkers — early biological signs of the disease — could be key to solving the treatment conundrum. However, the rapid collection of data from tens of thousands of Alzheimer’s patients far exceeds the scientific community’s ability to make sense of it.
Controlling brains with light.
Thanks to optogenetics, in just ten years we’ve been able to artificially incept memories in mice, decipher brain signals that lead to pain, untangle the neural code for addiction, reverse depression, restore rudimentary sight in blinded mice, and overwrite terrible memories with happy ones. Optogenetics is akin to a universal programming language for the brain.
But it’s got two serious downfalls: it requires gene therapy, and it needs brain surgery to implant optical fibers into the brain.
This week, the original mind behind optogenetics is back with an update that cuts the cord. Dr. Karl Deisseroth’s team at Stanford University, in collaboration with the University of Minnesota, unveiled an upgraded version of optogenetics that controls behavior without the need for surgery. Rather, the system shines light through the skulls of mice, and it penetrates deep into the brain. With light pulses, the team was able to change how likely a mouse was to have seizures, or reprogram its brain so it preferred social company.
Mineral’s plant buggy looks like a platform on wheels, topped with solar panels and stuffed with cameras, sensors, and software.
But maybe there’s a better way—and Mineral wants to find it.
Like many things nowadays, the key to building something better is data. Genetic data, weather pattern data, soil composition and erosion data, satellite data… The list goes on. As part of the massive data-gathering that will need to be done, X introduced what it’s calling a “plant buggy” (if the term makes you picture a sort of baby stroller for plants, you’re not alone…).
It is in fact not a stroller, though. It looks more like a platform on wheels, topped with solar panels and stuffed with cameras, sensors, and software. It comes in different sizes and shapes so that it can be used on multiple types of crops (inspecting tall, thin stalks of corn, for example, requires a different setup than short, bushy soybean plants). The buggy will collect info about plants’ height, leaf area, and fruit size, then consider it alongside soil, weather, and other data.
Researchers know how to make precise genetic changes within the genomes of crops, but the transformed cells often refuse to grow into plants. One team has devised a new solution.
Scientists who want to improve crops face a dilemma: it can be difficult to grow plants from cells after you’ve tweaked their genomes.
A new tool helps ease this process by coaxing the transformed cells, including those modified with the gene-editing system CRISPR-Cas9, to regenerate new plants. Howard Hughes Medical Institute Research Specialist Juan M. Debernardi and Investigator Jorge Dubcovsky, together with David Tricoli at the University of California, Davis Plant Transformation Facility, Javier Palatnik from Argentina, and colleagues at the John Innes Centre, collaborated on the work. The team reports the technology, developed in wheat and tested in other crops, October 12, 2020, in the journal Nature Biotechnology.
“The problem is that transforming a plant is still an art,” Dubcovsky says. The success rate is often low – depending on the crop being modified, 100 attempts may yield only a handful of green shoots that can turn into full-grown plants. The rest fail to produce new plants and die. Now, however, “we have reduced this barrier,” says Dubcovsky, a plant geneticist at UC Davis. Using two genes that already control development in many plants, his team dramatically increased the formation of shoots in modified wheat, rice, citrus, and other crops.
Robots are now assisting in advancing developmental biology.
The study of developmental biology is getting a robotic helping hand.
Scientists are using a custom robot to survey how mutations in regulatory regions of the genome affect animal development. These regions aren’t genes, but rather stretches of DNA called enhancers that determine how genes are turned on and off during development. The team describes the findings—and the robot itself—on October 14 in the journal Nature.
“The real star is this robot,” says David Stern, a group leader at HHMI’s Janelia Research Campus. “It was extremely creative engineering.”
Analysis revealed that variants in the HMGCR gene region, which represent proxies for statin treatment, were associated with overall cancer risk, suggesting that statins could lower overall cancer risk.
Cholesterol-lowering drugs called statins may reduce cancer risk in humans through a pathway unrelated to cholesterol, says a study published today in eLife.
Statins reduce levels of LDL-cholesterol, the so-called ‘bad’ cholesterol, by inhibiting an enzyme called HMG-CoA-reductase (HMGCR). Clinical trials have previously demonstrated convincing evidence that statins reduce the risk of heart attacks and other cardiovascular diseases. But evidence for the potential effect of statins to reduce the risk of cancer is less clear.
“Previous laboratory studies have suggested that lipids including cholesterol play a role in the development of cancer, and that statins inhibit cancer development,” explains lead author Paul Carter, Cardiology Academic Clinical Fellow at the Department of Health and Primary Care, University of Cambridge, UK. “However, no trials have been designed to assess the role of statins for cancer prevention in clinical practice. We decided to assess the potential effect of statin therapy on cancer risk using evidence from human genetics.”
There’s no need to fear arsenic poisoning if you grew up in the Argentinian Andes — hundreds of years of drinking arsenic-laced groundwater will have left you with a genetic tolerance for it.
Geneticists from Lund and Uppsala universities had noticed that certain plants and bacteria could live in environments with lots of arsenic, with natural selection favouring a gene known to improve their ability to metabolise the poison. Curious to see if humans could also gain some kind of arsenic immunity, they looked at a group of people who they knew would have been exposed to the poison over many generations — the indigenous peoples of the Argentinian part of the Andes. Sure enough, a higher-than average proportion of people they studied possessed the AS3MT gene, which lets them flush out toxins faster than “normal” people.
The genetic samples tested for the AS3MT gene came from 346 residents of the small, isolated town of San Antonio de los Cobres, located more than 3,700m above sea level in the Andes. Not only does the bedrock in the surrounding area contain a lot of arsenic which gets into the groundwater, but mining operations from the era of Spanish colonisation onwards have released even more arsenic — so both modern people and mummies dating back 7,000 years have had high levels of arsenic found in their hair and internal organs.