Lifeboat Foundation

For the first time, scientists used CRISPR treatment inside the human body to treat a patient with genetic blindness.

Canadian firm says it could make 10 million doses per month — if its innovative production method wins FDA approval.

A Canadian company says that it has produced a COVID −19 vaccine just 20 days after receiving the coronavirus’s genetic sequence, using a unique technology that they soon hope to submit for FDA approval.

Medicago CEO Bruce Clark said his company could produce as many as 10 million doses a month. If regulatory hurdles can be cleared, he said in a Thursday interview, the vaccine could start to become available in November 2021.

Lifespan.io

Today, we are going to take a look at the companies working on resetting cellular aging through a reprogramming approach that directly targets a core reason we age.

First wave 🌊.

Your questions answered — an update (11−03−2020): Professor Neil Ferguson on the current status of the COVID-19 Coronavirus outbreak, case numbers, intervention measures and challenges countries are currently facing.

Continue reading “Update on COVID-19 outbreak with Professor Neil Ferguson” »

Just as there is a mysterious dark matter that accounts for 85 percent of our universe, there is a “dark” portion of the human genome that has perplexed scientists for decades. A study published March 9, 2020, in Genome Research identifies new portions of the fruit fly genome that, until now, have been hidden in these dark, silent areas.

The collaborative paper titled “Gene Expression Networks in the Drosophila Genetic Reference Panel” is the culmination of years of research by Clemson University geneticists Trudy Mackay and Robert Anholt. Their groundbreaking findings could significantly advance science’s understanding of a number of genetic disorders.

The “dark” portion refers to the approximate 98 percent of the genome that doesn’t appear to have any obvious function. Only 2 percent of the human genome codes for proteins, the building blocks of our bodies and the catalysts of the chemical reactions that allow us to thrive. Scientists have been puzzled by this notion since the 1970s when gene sequencing technologies were first developed, revealing the proportion of coding to noncoding regions of the genome.

Circa 2015 o.o take their Gene’s and could make immunity greater for stomaches.

Vultures have a unique genetic make-up allowing them to digest carcasses and guard themselves against constant exposure to pathogens in their diet, according to the first Eurasian vulture genome published in the open access journal Genome Biology. The study also finds that this species of Asian vulture is more closely related to the North American bald eagle than previously thought.

The cinereous vulture or black vulture, Aegypius monachus, is the largest bird of prey, and an iconic bird in the Far East. The species plays a key role in the ecosystem by removing rotting carcasses, thus preventing the spread of disease.

As their feeding habits involve constant exposure to pathogens, vultures are suspected to have strong immune systems, having evolved mechanisms to prevent infection by the microbes found in their diet. Despite the potential interest in the immune system of scavengers, little is known about the genetic variations involved in vultures’ immune processes.

Over many years, the Mazmanian laboratory has described how Bacteroides fragilis in the gut produces beneficial molecules that protect mice from inflammatory bowel disease and autism-like symptoms. Like a densely populated city, a vast majority of the B. fragilis in the gut live within the central part of the intestinal tube, called the lumen. However, the Mazmanian laboratory discovered in 2013 that some B. fragilis reside in the bacterial equivalent of small towns, nestled into microscopic pockets within the tissue walls lining the tube. These sparse populations are protected by mucus and are largely unaffected by antibiotics, suggesting that they act as population reservoirs that ensure long-term colonization.

“For humans, where we live can dictate how we behave—for example, a person living in a city likely has a different everyday life than a person living in a small rural community,” says former graduate student Gregory Donaldson (PhD ‘18), the first author on the new paper. “For the bacteria that we study, the intestines represent their entire world, so we wanted to know how differently they behave depending on how far away from the intestinal surface they are.”

Though they may live in different habitats within the gut, these B. fragilis populations all have the same genetic code. What may differ, however, is how they express those genes—is a bacterium expressing a gene for replication and division, for example, or perhaps for an enzyme that digests food? Donaldson aimed to measure and compare gene expression in these two populations (intestinal wall tissue and lumen of the gut) to determine what, if any, differences were seen.

Continue reading “Mapping Bacterial Neighborhoods in the Gut” »

O„.o.

So much emphasis has been placed on human genome editing that other types of genetic editing are falling through the cracks.

In a new publication in Nature Plants, assistant professor of Plant Science at the University of Maryland Yiping Qi has established a new CRISPR genome engineering system as viable in plants for the first time: CRISPR-Cas12b. CRISPR is often thought of as molecular scissors used for precision breeding to cut DNA so that a certain trait can be removed, replaced, or edited. Most people who know CRISPR are likely thinking of CRISPR-Cas9, the system that started it all. But Qi and his lab are constantly exploring new CRISPR tools that are more effective, efficient, and sophisticated for a variety of applications in crops that can help curb diseases, pests, and the effects of a changing climate. With CRISPR-Cas12b, Qi is presenting a system in plants that is versatile, customizable, and ultimately provides effective gene editing, activation, and repression all in one system.

“This is the first demonstration of this new CRISPR-Cas12b system for plant genome engineering, and we are excited to be able to fill in gaps and improve systems like this through new technology,” says Qi. “We wanted to develop a full package of tools for this system to show how useful it can be, so we focused not only on editing, but on developing gene repression and activation methods.”

It is this complete suite of methods that has ultimately been missing in other CRISPR systems in plants. The two major systems available before this paper in plants were CRISPR-Cas9 and CRISPR-Cas12a. CRISPR-Cas9 is popular for its simplicity and for recognizing very short DNA sequences to make its cuts in the genome, whereas CRISPR-Cas12a recognizes a different DNA targeting sequence and allows for larger staggered cuts in the DNA with additional complexity to customize the system. CRISPR-Cas12b is more similar to CRISPR-Cas12a as the names suggest, but there was never a strong ability to provide gene activation in plants with this system. CRISPR-Cas12b provides greater efficiency for gene activation and the potential for broader targeting sites for gene repression, making it useful in cases where genetic expression of a trait needs to be turned on/up (activation) or off/down (repression).