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Prior studies have linked high blood cholesterol levels to various cancers, including colorectal cancers. However, it hasn’t been clear that lowering cholesterol can prevent colorectal cancers. Now, researchers at Weill Cornell Medicine have found in mice hard-to-detect colorectal pre-cancerous lesions known as serrated polyps, and the aggressive tumors that develop from them, depend heavily on the ramped-up production of cholesterol. Their finding points to the possibility of using cholesterol-lowering drugs to prevent or treat such tumors.

The findings are published in Nature Communications in an article titled, “Enhanced SREBP2-driven cholesterol biosynthesis by PKCλ/ι deficiency in intestinal epithelial cells promotes aggressive serrated tumorigenesis.”

“The metabolic and signaling pathways regulating aggressive mesenchymal colorectal cancer (CRC) initiation and progression through the serrated route are largely unknown,” the researchers wrote. “Although relatively well characterized as BRAF mutant cancers, their poor response to current targeted therapy, difficult preneoplastic detection, and challenging endoscopic resection make the identification of their metabolic requirements a priority. Here, we demonstrate that the phosphorylation of SCAP by the atypical PKC (aPKC), PKCλ/ι promotes its degradation and inhibits the processing and activation of SREBP2, the master regulator of cholesterol biosynthesis.”

A University of Oxford-led study has found that diverse communities of resident commensal gut bacteria collectively protect the human gut from disease-causing microorganisms by consuming the nutrients that the pathogen would need to be able to gain a foothold in the host.

The team used an ecological approach to investigate how colonization by two major bacterial pathogens— Klebsiella pneumoniae and Salmonella enterica serovar Typhimurium (S. Typhimurium)—is influenced by a range of human gut bacteria both in vitro and in gnotobiotic mice. They found that the ecological diversity of the microbiome was important for colonization resistance. While single species of gut microbiota alone had negligible effects on providing effective resistance to pathogens, certain combinations of essential key species within diverse communities exhibited much greater colonization resistance when together.

Having found that these communities block pathogen growth by consuming nutrients that would be required by the pathogen, the team also showed that the concept of nutrient blocking can be used to predict specific sets of commensal microbiota that will resist a novel bacterial pathogen, using genome sequence data alone.

Researchers at the MRC Weatherall Institute of Molecular Medicine’s Laboratory of Gene Regulation, led by Professor Doug Higgs and Dr. Mira Kassouf, have published a study in the journal Cell, in which they reveal another piece of the puzzle of how the code in our DNA is read.

In this study, the authors introduce the concept of “facilitators,” a newly identified type of non-coding DNA that can help to drive gene expression.

All of the in your body contain the same DNA. However, these cells are able to develop into over 200 different types and make up a variety of different specialized tissues such as the skin, the blood, and the brain.

For the first time ever, researchers show how a large language model can help discover novel solutions to long-standing problems in math and computer science.


The card game Set has long inspired mathematicians to create interesting problems.

Now, a technique based on large language models (LLMs) is showing that artificial intelligence (AI) can help mathematicians to generate new solutions.

The AI system, called FunSearch, made progress on Set-inspired problems in combinatorics, a field of mathematics that studies how to count the possible arrangements of sets containing finitely many objects. But its inventors say that the method, described in Nature on 14 December1, could be applied to a variety of questions in maths and computer science.

Researchers at Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Medicine, China, have discovered that shutting down part of the innate immune system increases anti-tumor activity.

In a paper, “Noncanonical MAVS signaling restrains dendritic cell–driven antitumor immunity by inhibiting IL-12,” published in Science Immunology, the team details how exploring the role of mitochondrial antiviral signaling in tumor immunity uncovered unexpected insights into the relationship with immune responses and potential therapeutic implications.

Mitochondrial antiviral-signaling (MAVS) proteins are part of the innate immune system encoded by the nuclear genome found mainly on the mitochondrial outer membrane. Considered a first line of defense against viral infections, they are rapidly produced upon viral recognition and quickly reduced when a virus is cleared from the system.

RELATED: OpenAI CEO Sam Altman celebrates ChatGPT’s first birthday

If the deal with German publisher Axel Springer pulls through, it’s highly likely that reports citing ChatGPT’s decline in accuracy will reduce significantly. OpenAI will also get access current and archived news articles across the publisher’s brands, which it will use to train its LLMs. The chatbots will also refer back to the original source to provide absolute transparency to users. And since its a mutual partnership, Axel Springer will also leverage OpenAI’s resources to further enhance and improve its products.

What are your thoughts on OpenAI’s first attempt to compensate publishers and websites for using their content to train its AI models? Let us know in the comments.