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Hailey-Hailey disease is a rare, inherited condition characterized by patches of blisters appearing mainly in the skin folds of the arm pits, groin and under the breasts. It is caused by a mutation in the gene that codes for a specific protein involved in the transportation of calcium and manganese ions from the cell cytoplasm and into a sac-like organelle called the Golgi apparatus.

Scientists at Tohoku University, together with colleagues in Japan, have uncovered some aspects of this ’s structure that could help researchers understand how it works. The findings, published in the journal Science Advances, help build the foundations for research into finding treatments for Hailey-Hailey disease and other neurodegenerative conditions.

The protein the team studied is called secretory pathway Ca2+/Mn2+-ATPase, or SPCA for short. It is located in the Golgi apparatus, a cellular sac-like structure that plays a crucial role in protein quality control before they are released into cells. The Golgi apparatus also acts like a sort of calcium ion storage container. Calcium ions are vital for cell signaling processes and are important for proteins to function properly, so maintaining the right calcium ion balance inside cells is necessary for their day-to-day activities.

A team of chemists and computer scientists from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne, the University of California and Institut des Sciences et Ingenierie Chimiques, Ecole, have developed an ecosystem of tools to boost machine-learning-based design of metal-organic frameworks.

In their study, reported in the journal ACS Central Science, Kevin Maik Jablonka, Andrew Rosen, Aditi Krishnapriyan and Berend Smit coded tools to convert data into machine learning inputs to create a system to boost machine-learning frameworks.

Reticular chemistry is the science of designing and synthesizing porous crystalline materials with certain predefined structures and properties (building blocks). These materials, known as (MOFs) have applications in gas storage, separation, catalysis, sensing and drug delivery.

A team of Rutgers University scientists dedicated to pinpointing the primordial origins of metabolism – a set of core chemical reactions that first powered life on Earth – has identified part of a protein that could provide scientists clues to detecting planets on the verge of producing life.

The research, published on March 10 in the journal Science Advances.

<em>Science Advances</em> is a peer-reviewed, open-access scientific journal that is published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). It was launched in 2015 and covers a wide range of topics in the natural sciences, including biology, chemistry, earth and environmental sciences, materials science, and physics.

Genetic Engineering extends far beyond the controversial news headlines that obsess over ‘designer babies’. In the science community, gene-editing tools like CRISPR and PRIME editing will do nothing less than save the planet.

The Rise Of Genetic Engineering (2022)
Writers: Kyle McCabe, Christopher Webb Young.
Stars: Rodolphe Barrangou, George Church, Mary Beth Dallas.
Genre: Documentary.
Country: United States.
Language: English.
Release Date: August 24, 2022 (United States)

Synopsis:
Genetic Engineering extends far beyond the controversial news headlines that obsess over ‘designer babies’. In the science community, gene-editing tools like CRISPR and PRIME editing will do nothing less than save the planet.

Methods like this allow scientists to alter and ‘re-program’ the genetics of living organisms.

This episode shows scientists at large using gene-editing technologies to revolutionize the food supply chain, bolstering food crops to prevent famines, and even speed up reforestation efforts that will reverse global warming. Genetic Engineering in farm animals is helping scientists to ‘select’ desirable traits, like physical features and gender. Incredibly, one scientist is using gene-editing technologies to resurrect the DNA of extinct species, like the Wooly Mammoth!

Despite some public concern, gene-editing is definitely a cause for hope in the fight against genetic disorders in humans. It’s already reversing a type of congenital blindness in children. And with the hyper-precision afforded by PRIME editing being prepared for clinical trials, a much more hopeful world will be revealed for families in the future.

Researchers led by Prof. Zhou Wu from the University of Chinese Academy of Sciences (UCAS) and Prof. Sokrates T. Pantelides of Vanderbilt University have pushed the sensitivity of single-atom vibrational spectroscopy to the chemical-bonding-configuration extreme, which is critical for understanding the correlation of lattice vibrational properties with local atomic configurations in materials.

Using a combination of experimental and theoretical approaches, the researchers demonstrated the effect of chemical-bonding configurations and the atomic mass of impurity atoms on local vibrational properties at the single-atom level.

The study was published in Nature Materials.

A research team led by Prof. Xue Yuanchao from the Institute of Biophysics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences has developed a new method for global profiling of in-situ RNA–RNA contacts associated with a specific RNA-binding protein (RBP) and revealed positional mechanisms by which PTBP1-associated RNA loops regulate cassette exon splicing.

This study was published online in Molecular Cell on March 22.

In , the same pre-mRNA can produce multiple protein isoforms to execute similar or different biological functions through . Several longstanding models proposed that RBPs may regulate alternative splicing by modulating long-range RNA–RNA interactions (RRI). However, direct experimental evidence was lacking.

The secret to a perfect croissant is the layers—as many as possible, each one interspersed with butter. Similarly, a new material with promise for new applications is made of many extremely thin layers of metal, between which scientists can slip different ions for various purposes. This makes them potentially very useful for future high-tech electronics or energy storage.

Until recently, these materials—known as MXenes, pronounced “max-eens”—were as labor-intensive as good croissants made in a French bakery.

But a new breakthrough by scientists with the University of Chicago shows how to make these MXenes far more quickly and easily, with fewer toxic byproducts.