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Blog – Page 9140

This is where it gets a little weird.

When the team treated human cells in culture with extract of tardigrade, the GFP-tagged proteins stuck to human DNA just like they stick to tardigrade DNA, and cheerfully started doing what they do best: tamping down oxidative stress. When X-rays hit human cells, they do two kinds of damage. X-rays can cause direct DNA strand breaks, which are mostly single-strand. When they strike water molecules, they can also excite them into producing reactive oxygen species, which also cause single-strand breaks. High enough doses of X-rays can cause double-strand breaks. The damage-suppressing protein Dsup went immediately to work on the culture of human cells, suppressing or repairing single-strand and double-strand breaks by about 40%.

Clearly this means we can consume water bears to gain their powers. The study authors remark that the gene portfolio of the tardigrade represents “a treasury of genes” to improve or augment stress tolerance in other cells. Plug-and-play genetics, anyone?

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Could an exotic super heavy element provide the key to humanity’s future in the stars? According to physicist Bob Lazar, “Element 115” is the fuel source for an alien spacecraft he was hired to reverse-engineer by the U.S. government—and if we can harness its awesome power, it will change our world forever.

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Harvard and Japanese scientists say they’ve made a “landmark” discovery in cancer drug development. In a new study published Monday, they say they have finally found a way to synthesize in bulk a complex class of promising cancer-fighting molecules derived from sea sponges. Their new strategy has already helped speed up research into these molecules, including a planned clinical trial in humans.

Called halichondrins, the molecules were originally discovered by Japanese researchers in the mid-1980s in sea sponges. It became quickly apparent that they were capable of aggressively fighting tumors in both mice and lab dishes containing human cells, and in a way different from other existing treatments.

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Tam Hunt interviews Prof. Morgan Levine about her work with epigenetics and aging.

One of the biggest breakthroughs in biology in the last few decades has been the discovery of epigenetics. Rather than changing the genes themselves, epigenetics change how genes are expressed, allowing our cells to differentiate between their various types.

However, the epigenetics of our cells change over time. There is some debate over how much epigenetic alterations are a cause or a consequence of other age-related damage, but they are one of the primary hallmarks of aging.

Multiple “epigenetic clocks” have been developed over the last decade. These clocks are now displaying an uncanny ability to determine biological age, and Steve Horvath’s GrimAge can predict, with limited accuracy, how much longer a human has to live!

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To understand our brains, scientists need to know their components. This theme underlies a growing effort in neuroscience to define the different building blocks of the brain—its cells.

With the mouse’s 80 million and our 86 billion, sorting through those delicate, microscopic building blocks is no small feat. A new study from the Allen Institute for Brain Science, which was published today in the journal Nature Neuroscience, describes a large profile of mouse neuron types based on two important characteristics of the : their 3D shape and their electrical behavior.

The study, which yielded the largest dataset of its kind from the adult laboratory mouse to date, is part of a larger effort at the Allen Institute to discover the ’s “periodic table” through large-scale explorations of brain . The researchers hope a better understanding of cell types in a healthy mammalian brain will lay the foundation for uncovering the cell types that underlie human brain disorders and diseases.

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Geneticists exploring the dark heart of the human genome have discovered big chunks of Neanderthal and other ancient DNA. The results open new ways to study both how chromosomes behave during cell division and how they have changed during human evolution.

Centromeres sit in the middle of chromosomes, the pinched-in “waist” in the image of a chromosome from a biology textbook. The centromere anchors the fibers that pull chromosomes apart when cells divide, which means they are really important for understanding what happens when goes wrong, leading to cancer or genetic defects.

But the DNA of centromeres contains lots of repeating sequences, and scientists have been unable to properly map this region.

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