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Category: genetics – Page 33

The reason? While sunny regions naturally provide enough light to grow crops, areas with colder winters often need grow lights and greenhouses part of the year. This increases energy consumption, logistical headaches, and ultimately, food costs.

In their paper, Jiao and colleagues argue for a new method that could dramatically revamp farming practices to reduce land use and greenhouse gas emissions.

Dubbed “electro-agriculture,” the approach uses solar panels to trigger a chemical reaction that turns ambient CO2 into an energy source called acetate. Certain mushrooms, yeast, and algae already consume acetate as food. With a slight genetic tweak, we could also engineer other common foods such as grains, tomatoes, or lettuce to consume acetate.

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Every cell is beholden to a phenomenon called cell fate, a sort of biological preset determined by genetic coding. Burgeoning cells take their developmental cues from a set of core genetic instructions that shape their structure and function and how they interact with other cells in the body.

To you or me, it’s biological law. But to a group of researchers at Stanford Medicine, it’s more of a suggestion. Unconstrained by the rules of evolution, these scientists are instead governed by a question: What if?

What if you could eat a vaccine? Or create a bacterium that could also detect and attack cancer? What if furniture could grow from a seed?

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Yay face_with_colon_three

Researchers discovered that PLK1 triggers a process ensuring centromere preservation during cell division by activating the Mis18 complex and controlling CENP-A loading. This finding is key to understanding how cells correctly divide their genetic material, preventing diseases like cancer.

Scientists have resolved a decade-long mystery about the mechanism that maintains the centromere, the crucial region responsible for ensuring accurate DNA division during cell division.

A study revealed that a protein, known as PLK1, triggers a process that coordinates key proteins at the right place and time during cell division – ensuring each new cell has a centromere in the right location.

Continue reading “Scientists Unravel Key to the Centromere’s Eternal Life, Solving Decades-Old Mystery” | >

Intestinal stem cells play an important role in maintaining intestinal homeostasis and repairing damaged epithelial tissue. These cells function in a regenerative manner to generate new tissue throughout the growth phase and repair damaged tissue during the aging process.101 The interactions between the gut microbiome and intestinal stem cells are crucial because, if this interaction is comprehended, it may be possible to address various disorders that require stem cell therapy, heal wounds, and improve the durability of organ transplants.101 A recent study showed a connection between hematopoietic stem cells and the microbiome through altering metabolic stress.66 Therefore, the microbiota is crucial for maintaining microbial homeostasis, regulating metabolism, and the innate and adaptive immune systems.101 Furthermore, the study reveals that compositional alterations in the gut microbiome driven by dysbiosis are related to stem cell aging, metabolic dysregulations, stem cells’ epigenetic instability, and abnormal immune system activation.66

In the field of anti-aging, stem cells are regarded to have great potential. In numerous organs, it has been demonstrated that as we age, stem cells lose their capacity for self-renewal and differentiation and run out of resources.89 The emergence of anti-aging medications should address the dysregulation caused by aging that affects stem cells’ capacity for differentiation and self-renewal by re-regulating intrinsic and extrinsic variables. The host microbiome, hormones, local immune system, systemic inflammation, and niche structure are just a few examples of microenvironmental and systemic factors that influence stem cell aging.66

Endogenous ethanol is a class of microbiological metabolites. Proteobacteria, including E. coli and other Enterobacteriaceae, produce ethanol with bacterial origins. High endogenous ethanol levels in the human hippocampus inhibit proliferating stem cells and reduce progenitor and stem cells.102 Additionally, when more ethanol accumulates in the gut, it enhances the permeability of the gut by disrupting epithelial tight junctions, particularly zonula occludens. This enables the movement of pathogenic microbes, their endotoxins, and ethanol across the epithelial layer, causing more immediate and adverse effects on tissues. As a result, the stem cell reserve depletes, hastening the aging process and compensating for damaged tissues.103

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With liquid biopsies, detecting cancer and tracking treatment progress can be as easy as taking a blood test. This is an increasingly popular way of monitoring cancer, because it’s much less invasive than solid tumour biopsies. And liquid biopsies can become even more sensitive if they capture methylation information as well as genetic data.

Usually, liquid biopsies for cancer rely on the detection of small amounts of DNA that are shed from a tumour into the bloodstream. But especially in the disease’s early stages, circulating tumour DNA (ctDNA) levels are very low and point mutations linked to cancer can be easy to miss.

“If we want to develop assays to detect cancer earlier, we need very sensitive detection of these rare tumour fragments,” says Charlotte Proudhon, group leader at the Research Institute for Environmental and Occupational Health in Rennes, France, whose team are among those now developing liquid biopsy methods that include epigenetic markers, such as methylation.

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A new University of Maryland-led discovery could spur the development of new and improved treatments for Hutchinson-Gilford progeria syndrome (HGPS), often simply called “progeria”—a rare genetic disorder with no known cure that causes accelerated aging in children.

Publishing in the journal Aging…

Researchers identify protein that could improve cardiovascular health of those with progeria.

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