Researchers Figure Out How To Genetically Alter Squid : Shots — Health News Scientists have modified the genes of a squid, and genetically-altered octopuses could be coming soon.
Category: genetics – Page 332
Summary: Researchers successfully applied a gene therapy platform to completely correct brain defects in a large animal model of a human genetic disease.
Source: University of Pennsylvania
A lone genetic mutation can cause a life-changing disorder with effects on multiple body systems. Lysosomal storage diseases, for example, of which there are dozens, arise due to single mutations that affect production of critical enzymes required to metabolize large molecules in cells. These disorders affect multiple organs including, notably, the brain, causing intellectual disability of varying degrees.
TORONTO — In a lab at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto, scientists went on a hunt through the DNA of some 10,000 families — many whom have children with autism.
Through this research, they identified something they call “genetic wrinkles” in DNA itself, a breakthrough they believe could explain why some individuals find themselves on the autistic spectrum.
The hope is that this could be an important new clue into how to diagnose autism spectrum disorder (ASD) early, or even treat it.
An optical fiber made of agar has been produced at the University of Campinas (UNICAMP) in the state of São Paulo, Brazil. This device is edible, biocompatible and biodegradable. It can be used in vivo for body structure imaging, localized light delivery in phototherapy or optogenetics (e.g., stimulating neurons with light to study neural circuits in a living brain), and localized drug delivery.
Another possible application is the detection of microorganisms in specific organs, in which case the probe would be completely absorbed by the body after performing its function.
The research project, which was supported by São Paulo Research Foundation—FAPESP, was led by Eric Fujiwara, a professor in UNICAMP’s School of Mechanical Engineering, and Cristiano Cordeiro, a professor in UNICAMP’s Gleb Wataghin Institute of Physics, in collaboration with Hiromasa Oku, a professor at Gunma University in Japan.
face_with_colon_three circa 2016.
Tough ‘water bears’ defy intense radiation by apparently wrapping their genetic material in a bizarre protein that can also protect human cells.
When our neurons—the principle cells of the brain—die, so do we.
Most neurons are created during embryonic development and have no “backup” after birth. Researchers have generally believed that their survival is determined nearly extrinsically, or by outside forces, such as the tissues and cells that neurons supply with nerve cells.
A research team led by Sika Zheng, a biomedical scientist at the University of California, Riverside, has challenged this notion and reports the continuous survival of neurons is also intrinsically programmed during development.
The thalamus is a “Grand Central Station” for sensory information coming to our brains. Almost every sight, sound, taste and touch we perceive travels to our brain’s cortex via the thalamus. It is theorized that the thalamus plays a major role in consciousness itself. Not only does sensory information pass through the thalamus, it is also processed and transformed by the thalamus so our cortex can better understand and interpret these signals from the world around us.
One powerful type of transformation comes from interactions between excitatory neurons that carry data to the neocortex and inhibitory neurons of the thalamic reticular nucleus, or TRN, that regulate flow of that data. Although the TRN has long been recognized as important, much less has been known about what kinds of cells are in the TRN, how they are organized and how they function.
Now a paper published in the journal Nature addresses those questions. Researchers led by corresponding author Scott Cruikshank, Ph.D., and co-authors Rosa I. Martinez-Garcia, Ph.D., Bettina Voelcker, Ph.D., and Barry Connors, Ph.D., show that the somatosensory part of the TRN is divided into two functionally distinct sub-circuits. Each has its own types of genetically defined neurons that are topographically segregated, are physiologically distinct and connect reciprocally with independent thalamocortical nuclei via dynamically divergent synapses.
Scientists have discovered extinct strains of smallpox in the teeth of Viking skeletons — proving for the first time that the killer disease plagued humanity for at least 1400 years.
Smallpox spread from person to person via infectious droplets, killed around a third of sufferers and left another third permanently scarred or blind. Around 300 million people died from it in the 20th century alone before it was officially eradicated in 1980 through a global vaccination effort — the first human disease to be wiped out.
Now an international team of scientists have sequenced the genomes of newly discovered strains of the virus after it was extracted from the teeth of Viking skeletons from sites across northern Europe. The findings have been published in Science today (July 23, 2020).
Amazing.
The human DNA is a biological internet and superior in many aspects to the artificial one. Russian scientific research directly or indirectly explains phenomena such as clairvoyance, intuition, spontaneous and remote acts of healing, self healing, affirmation techniques, unusual light/auras around people (namely spiritual masters), mind’s influence on weather patterns and much more. In addition, there is evidence for a whole new type of medicine in which DNA can be influenced and reprogrammed by words and frequencies WITHOUT cutting out and replacing single genes.
Only 10% of our DNA is being used for building proteins. It is this subset of DNA that is of interest to western researchers and is being examined and categorized. The other 90% are considered “junk DNA.” The Russian researchers, however, convinced that nature was not dumb, joined linguists and geneticists in a venture to explore those 90% of “junk DNA.” Their results, findings and conclusions are simply revolutionary!
According to them, our DNA is not only responsible for the construction of our body but also serves as data storage and in communication. The Russian linguists found that the genetic code, especially in the apparently useless 90%, follows the same rules as all our human languages. To this end they compared the rules of syntax (the way in which words are put together to form phrases and sentences), semantics (the study of meaning in language forms) and the basic rules of grammar.
Summary: APOEe4, a gene associated with Alzheimer’s disease risk, doesn’t appear to directly affect memory performance or brain activity in older adults without cognitive impairment. However, the gene does seem to influence brain regions and systems that older at-risk adults activate to support successful memory recall.
Source: McGill University
Researchers at McGill University and the Douglas Mental Health University Institute, in collaboration with the StoP-AD Center, have published a new paper in the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease, examining how a known genetic risk factor for late-onset Alzheimer’s disease (AD) influences memory and brain function in cognitively intact older adults with a family history of AD.