Lifeboat Foundation

Oxford Nanopore Technologies is changing the course of genomics through the development of their small and portable DNA sequencer, the MinION, which makes of nanopore technology.

The handheld, portable tricorder from Star Trek was essentially able to scan and record biological data from almost anything, and it could do it anytime and anywhere. Recent technology has been pulling the device out of science fiction and turning it into reality, but none have come close to getting genetic information with the same portability…except for British company Oxford Nanopore Technologies.

Continue reading “Oxford Scientists Made A Pocket-Sized, Portable DNA Sequencer” »

Organoids grown from genetically edited stem cells are giving scientists a new tool to screen drugs and test treatments.

New cure for SMA?!

Spinal muscular atrophy (SMA) is a disease that causes progressive degeneration in the nerve cells that control muscles, thereby causing muscle weakness and eventually death. SMA affects approximately 200,000 people in the U.S., often children. Now, researchers at the University of Missouri are studying a subtype of SMA, spinal muscular atrophy with respiratory distress type 1 (SMARD1), and have developed a gene replacement therapy that can be used to treat and control the disease in the future.

SMARD1 is a rare genetic condition with high mortality rate that develops primarily between the ages of six weeks and six months. The condition targets the spinal cord and leads to atrophy of body muscles and paralysis of the diaphragm, which is responsible for breathing. As the disease progresses, children with a SMARD1 diagnosis become paralyzed and require continuous artificial ventilation. The average life expectancy of a child diagnosed with SMARD1 is 13 months. Currently, there is no cure or effective treatment for this disease.

“Monogenic diseases like SMARD1, a disease that is caused by one gene, are ideal for gene therapy since the goal of the therapy is to replace the missing or defective gene,” said Chris Lorson, an investigator in the Bond Life Sciences Center and a professor of veterinary pathobiology. “Our goals for this study were to develop a vector that would improve the outcomes of the disease and for the vector to be effective in a single dose.”

The more da Vinci’s the better, if you ask me!

An international team of scholars has just unveiled plans to science the shit out of Leonardo da Vinci, the man who gave us the Mona Lisa and envisioned futuristic technologies like helicopters and tanks 500 years ago. Goals of the fledgling “Leonardo Project” include recovering the famous Renaissance figure’s remains and reconstructing his genetic code.

The Leonardo Project brings together geneticists, genealogists, archaeologists, and art historians from Italy, Spain, France, the United States and elsewhere. “This is a fabulous, interdisciplinary project,” said Rhonda Roby, a geneticist at the Craig Venter Institute in California, who will be contributing its expertise in genomic reconstruction to the effort.

Continue reading “The Brilliantly Insane Plan to Reconstruct Leonardo da Vinci’s Genome” »

Here is the impact of today’s IBM QC announcement & if proven real then the following will certainly be fasttracked:

1. IBM is now ahead of everyone in QC

2. China & Russia are now going to heat up their own QC efforts.

Continue reading “What IBM’s new quantum processor means for the future of computing” »

The strength of genome-wide association studies (GWAS) lies in their ability to identify new disease biomarkers through large-scale genomic comparisons of afflicted individuals and unaffected controls. Now, using this powerful technique, an international collaboration of researchers has identified five new gene regions that increase a woman’s risk of developing endometrial cancer—one of the most common cancers to affect women—taking the number of known gene regions associated with the disease to nine.

Endometrial cancer affects the lining of the uterus, typically presenting as an adenocarcinoma. Endometrial cancer is the sixth most common cancer in women worldwide and is the most common cancer of the female reproductive tract in developed countries, with over 320,000 new cases diagnosed in 2012.

Investigators at the University of Cambridge, Oxford University, and QIMR Berghofer Medical Research Institute in Brisbane studied the DNA of over 7000 women with endometrial cancer and 37,000 women without cancer to identify genetic variants that affected a woman’s risk of developing the disease.

Continue reading “Endometrial Cancer Genetic Risk Factors Double” »

The likelihood of giving birth to non-identical twins run in the families, suggests a new study conducted by a team of scientists. The team based their conclusion on the identification of two genetic variants in women who give birth to twins.

A number of factors have previously been linked to why some women give birth to non-identical twins. However, no study ever characterized the properties of the genes the contribute to this outcome.

The latest study looks at the genetic makeup of the mother and explains how mother’s genes can lead to the birth of non-identical twins. During the study, the research team specifically compared the genomes of the non-identical twins’ mothers to look for any common genetic variants between them.

Continue reading “Non-Identical Twins Run In Families: Scientists Find Common Genes” »

Very cool!

As we age, tiny blood vessels in the brain stiffen and sometimes rupture, causing “microbleeds.” This damage has been associated with neurodegenerative diseases and cognitive decline, but whether the brain can naturally repair itself beyond growing new blood-vessel tissue has been unknown. A zebrafish study published on May 3 in Immunity describes for the first time how white blood cells called macrophages can grab the broken ends of a blood vessel and stick them back together.

“Microbleeding occurs very often in the human brain, particularly in elderly people,” says Lingfei Luo, a developmental geneticist at Southwest University in China. “We believe that this macrophage behavior is the major cellular mechanism to repair ruptures of blood vessels and avoid microbleeding in the brain.”

To simulate a human brain microbleed, Luo and his colleagues shot lasers into the brains of live zebrafish to rupture small blood vessels, creating a clean split in the tissue with two broken ends. Then, the researchers used a specialized microscope to watch what happened next.

The article states that European royal houses are all closely related. Well in humanities history it’s thought that over 80% of all marriages were between second cousins or closer. While until the industrial revolution the nobility would have been the only demographic who could travel further than as far as you can walk from your home and back in a day. So until the industrial revolution the nobility were probably the most genetically diverse demographic.

‘Virgin births’ happen in nature more than we thought, says Frank Swain, so what’s stopping human beings from doing the same?