Lifeboat Foundation

From elongated oblongs to near-perfect spheres, vegetables come in almost every size and shape. But what differentiates a fingerling potato from a russet or a Roma tomato from a beefsteak?

Researchers at the University of Georgia College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences have recently found the genetic mechanism that controls the shape of our favorite fruits, vegetables and grains.

In article published this month in the journal Nature Communications, Esther van der Knaap, professor of horticulture, and her team at UGA detail the genetic traits, shared by multiple plants that have been shown to control fruit, leaf and seed shape.

Continue reading “UGA researchers discover genes that give vegetables their shape” »

As advanced as medicine is today, the incidence of cancer diagnoses continues to rise.

Scientists at the International Agency for Cancer Research estimate that, this year, around 18 million people will be diagnosed with cancer, and around 10 million people will die of tumours— while these are the highest figures to date, researchers all over the world are looking for new therapeutic options.

Scientists from Northwestern University in the US recently discovered a kind of genetic “kill code” in cells that could theoretically be used to treat cancer without chemotherapy.

Continue reading “Scientists may have found a way to treat cancer without chemotherapy” »

What is Immortality?

https://www.guidebooktolife.com/are-we-close-to-immortality?…rl10y2xoME

https://upjourney.com/exciting-healthcare-startups-to-watch-…6Ah4-sGT_c

Taking Health Into Your Own Hands – Is Biohacking the Wellness Solution You’ve Been Searching For?

https://www.vitacost.com/blog/home-family/wellness/what-is-b…r-NKrcmFZ0

! A new review on the positive effects on lifespan and health of fasting and calorie restriction.

Nutrient composition and caloric intake have traditionally been used to devise optimized diets for various phases of life. Adjustment of meal size and frequency have emerged as powerful tools to ameliorate and postpone the onset of disease and delay aging, whereas periods of fasting, with or without reduced energy intake, can have profound health benefits. The underlying physiological processes involve periodic shifts of metabolic fuel sources, promotion of repair mechanisms, and the optimization of energy utilization for cellular and organismal health. Future research endeavors should be directed to the integration of a balanced nutritious diet with controlled meal size and patterns and periods of fasting to develop better strategies to prevent, postpone, and treat the socioeconomical burden of chronic diseases associated with aging.

The worldwide increase in life expectancy has not been paralleled by an equivalent increase in healthy aging. Developed and developing countries are facing social and economic challenges caused by disproportional increases in their elderly populations and the accompanying burden of chronic diseases. Geriatricians and gerontologists have contributed greatly to our understanding of the consequences and processes that underlie aging from clinical, social, mental, physical, and biological perspectives. The primary goal of aging research is to improve the health of older persons and to design and test interventions that may prevent or delay age-related diseases. Besides socioeconomic status, energy, environmental quality, and genetics are the most powerful determinants of health and longevity. Although environmental quality and genetics are not under our direct control, energy intake is.

We found that the evolution of anti-predatory defense in the prey species stabilized predator population size but that this was delayed in the presence of the abiotic stressor. This corresponded with a lack or delay in the evolution of resistance to the abiotic stressor. Therefore, the abiotic stressor had a big effect on the eco-evolutionary dynamics, weakening the evo-to-eco link. One might expect that this is caused by competition between (asexual) bacterial lineages possessing different adaptations, decreasing the rate and directionality of evolution under multiple selection pressures. Instead, the genomic investigation showed that different targets (genes or duplicated sites) were repeatedly mutated in the individual and combined treatments. The population genetics thus revealed complex mechanistic underpinnings for a seemingly sensible difference in dynamics. Perhaps a specific type of bacterial cell clumping or another adaptation is favored in the dual-stressor environment because of conferring a degree of resistance to both types of stressors? This could then direct the mutational path away from the optimal adaptations to the individual stressors.

It took us five years to disentangle the complex interplay between ecology and evolution in an experimental system consisting of bacteria, ciliates and antibiotics.

Continue reading “Coming to terms with complexity: Eco-evolutionary dynamics under more than one selection pressure” »

A GENETICALLY modified virus that kills cancer cells and destroys their hiding places has been developed by British scientists.

It targets both cancer cells and healthy cells that are tricked into protecting the cancer from the immune system.

The role of fibroblasts is to hold different types of organs together but they can get hijacked by cancer cells to become cancer-associated fibroblasts or CAFs.

Continue reading “Brit scientists develop genetically modified virus that kills cancer cells” »

“Campesinos” are driving the evolution of maize in North America.

• By Emiliano Rodríguez Mega on November 19, 2018