Lifeboat Foundation

Dual color optogenetic control of neural populations.

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2023 was the year that CRISPR gene-editing sliced its way out of the lab and into the public consciousness—and American medical system. The Food and Drug Administration recently approved the first gene-editing CRISPR therapy, Casgevy (or exa-cel), a treatment from CRISPR Therapeutics and partner Vertex for patients with sickle cell disease. This comes on the heels of a similar green light by U.K. regulators in a historic moment for a gene-editing technology whose foundations were laid back in the 1980s, eventually resulting in a 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for pioneering CRISPR scientists Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier.

That decades-long gap between initial scientific spark, widespread academic recognition, and now the market entry of a potential cure for blood disorders like sickle cell disease that afflict hundreds of thousands of people around the world is telling. If past is prologue, even newer CRISPR gene-editing approaches being studied today have the potential to treat diseases ranging from cancer and muscular dystrophy to heart disease, birth more resilient livestock and plants that can grapple with climate change and new strains of deadly viruses, and even upend the energy industry by tweaking bacterial DNA to create more efficient biofuels in future decades. And novel uses of CRISPR, with assists from other technologies like artificial intelligence, might fuel even more precise, targeted gene-editing—in turn accelerating future discovery with implications for just about any industry that relies on biological material, from medicine to agriculture to energy.

With new CRISPR discoveries guided by AI, specifically, we can expand the toolbox available for gene editing, which is crucial for therapeutic, diagnostic, and research applications… but also a great way to better understand the vast diversity of microbial defense mechanisms, said Feng Zhang, another CRISPR pioneer, molecular biologist, and core member at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard in an emailed statement to Fast Company.

7 month treatment, 6 years returned according to a methylation clock, mostly in people who’s biological age was greater than their calendar age.

Dr. Brian Kennedy presents 4 molecules which show promising effects in both healthspan & lifespan in this video. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37289866/http… https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37637… https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37925… https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35584… https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35050… https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28199… https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37904… https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37697… https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37217… https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34952… https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34847…

Continue reading “4 MOST Promising Longevity Molecules You NEED To Know” »

ICYMI: In a groundbreaking achievement, researchers have successfully created a chimeric monkey with two different sets of DNA through the injection of stem cells from one monkey embryo into another of the same species.

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Scientists based in China have successfully created a chimeric monkey.

Continue reading “China creates world’s first chimeric monkey with fluorescent eyes, fingertips” »

Occam’s razor—the principle that when faced with competing explanations, we should choose the simplest that fits the facts—is not just a tool of science. Occam’s razor is science, insists a renowned molecular geneticist from the University of Surrey.

In a paper published in the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, Professor Johnjoe McFadden argues Occam’s razor—attributed to the Surrey-born Franciscan friar William of Occam (1285–1347)—is the only feature that differentiates science from superstition, pseudoscience or fake news.

Professor McFadden said, “What is science? The rise of issues such as vaccine hesitancy, climate skepticism, alternative medicine, and mysticism reveals significant levels of distrust or misunderstanding of science among the general public. The ongoing COVID inquiry also highlights how scientific ignorance extends into the heart of government. Part of the problem is that most people, even most scientists, have no clear idea of what science is actually about.”

A microbial sensor that helps identify and fight bacterial infections also plays a key role in the development of blood stem cells, providing a valuable new insight in the effort to create patient-derived blood stem cells that could eliminate the need for bone marrow transplants.

The discovery by a research team led by Raquel Espin Palazon, an assistant professor of genetics, development and cell biology at Iowa State University, is published in Nature Communications. It builds on prior work by Espin Palazon showing that the inflammatory signals that prompt a body’s immune response have an entirely different role in the earliest stages of life, as vascular systems and blood are forming in embryos.

Espin Palazon said knowing that embryos activate the microbial sensor, a protein known as Nod1, to force vascular endothelial cells to become blood stem cells could help develop a method to make blood stem cells in a lab from a patient’s own blood.

Optogenetics has revolutionized neuroscience understanding by allowing spatiotemporal control over cell-type specific neurons in neural circuits. However, the sluggish development of noninvasive photon delivery in the brain has limited the clinical application of optogenetics. Focused ultrasound (FUS)-derived mechanoluminescence has emerged as a promising tool for in situ photon emission, but there is not yet a biocompatible liquid-phase mechanoluminescence system for spatiotemporal optogenetics. To achieve noninvasive optogenetics with a high temporal resolution and desirable biocompatibility, we have developed liposome (Lipo@IR780/L012) nanoparticles for FUS-triggered mechanoluminescence in brain photon delivery. Synchronized and stable blue light emission was generated in solution under FUS irradiation due to the cascade reactions in liposomes.

A team of researchers around Berlin mathematics professor Michael Joswig is presenting a novel concept for the mathematical modeling of genetic interactions in biological systems. Collaborating with biologists from ETH Zurich and Carnegy Science (U.S.), the team has successfully identified master regulators within the context of an entire genetic network.

The research results provide a coherent theoretical framework for analyzing biological networks and have been published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

It is a longstanding goal of biologists to determine the key genes and species that have a decisive impact on evolution, ecology, and health. Researchers have now succeeded in identifying certain genes as master regulators in biological networks. These key regulators exert greater control within the system and steer essential cellular processes. Previous studies have mainly focused on pairwise interactions within the system, which can be strongly affected by genetic background or biological context.

USC Dornsife’s CReATiNG technique revolutionizes synthetic biology by facilitating the cost-effective construction of synthetic chromosomes, promising significant advancements in various scientific and medical fields.

A groundbreaking new technique invented by researchers at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Science may revolutionize the field of synthetic biology. Known as CReATiNG (Cloning Reprogramming and Assembling Tiled Natural Genomic DNA), the method offers a simpler and more cost-effective approach to constructing synthetic chromosomes. It could significantly advance genetic engineering and enable a wide range of advances in medicine, biotechnology, biofuel production, and even space exploration.

Simplifying Chromosome Construction