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Category: biotech/medical – Page 1,726

MIT Method Offers Inexpensive Imaging With Unprecedented Accuracy – At the Scale of Virus Particles

Using an ordinary light microscope, MIT engineers have devised a technique for imaging biological samples with accuracy at the scale of 10 nanometers — which should enable them to image viruses and potentially even single biomolecules, the researchers say.

The new technique builds on expansion microscopy, an approach that involves embedding biological samples in a hydrogel and then expanding them before imaging them with a microscope. For the latest version of the technique, the researchers developed a new type of hydrogel that maintains a more uniform configuration, allowing for greater accuracy in imaging tiny structures.

This degree of accuracy could open the door to studying the basic molecular interactions that make life possible, says Edward Boyden, the Y. Eva Tan Professor in Neurotechnology, a professor of biological engineering and brain and cognitive sciences at MIT, and a member of MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research and Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research.

Signals From Muscle Protect From Dementia

Summary: Mimicking a muscular stress system can provide neuroprotection against aging in both the brain and retina. The signal helps prevent the buildup of misfolded protein aggregates.

Source: St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital.

How do different parts of the body communicate? Scientists at St. Jude are studying how signals sent from skeletal muscle affect the brain.

Florida Becomes 3rd U.S. State To Identify New Coronavirus Variant

Welcome to 2021! We left 2020 with COVID-19, yet it continues into the new year; on top of it the virus produced a much more contagious asshole!!!

The evolved strain of COVID-19, known as B.1.1.7, has shown itself in the USA as well as other countries.

Two male members of the Colorado National Guard tested positive for the new strain — referred to as B.1.1.7 or VUI-202012/01 — and neither reported international travel. At least one of the two men is in his 20s.

“The individual is a male in his 20s with no history of travel. The Department is working with the CDC on this investigation,” Florida Department of Health officials announced Thursday.

Can Your Gut Microbiome Help You Age Slower?

The more diverse your microbiome, the healthier you are. While diet is often presented to be the deciding factor in your microbiome diversity, the story isn’t so simple. Studies show that nutrition can determine 5%-20% of your gut microbiome, which is enough to concern yourself with, but not enough to rely on as the sole determinant of your microbiome’s health.

Does your gut microbiome have an impact on your longevity? And if so, what can you to live longer? It’s complicated.

Brain cell clusters, grown in lab for more than a year, mirror changes in a newborn’s brain

Stanford University neurobiologist Sergiu Pașca has been making brain organoids for about 10 years, and his team has learned that some of these tissue blobs can thrive in a dish for years. In the new study, they teamed up with neurogeneticist Daniel Geschwind and colleagues at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), to analyze how the blobs changed over their life spans…

…They noticed that when an organoid reached 250 to 300 days old—roughly 9 months—its gene expression shifted to more closely resemble that of cells from human brains soon after birth. The cells’ patterns of methylation—chemical tags that can affix to DNA and influence gene activity—also corresponded to increasingly mature human brain cells as the organoids aged, the team reports today in Nature Neuroscience.

Organoids develop genetic signatures of postnatal brains, possibly broadening their use as disease models.

A Sleep Disorder Associated With Shift Work May Affect Gene Function

Sleep deprivation causes an inflammatory response that results in negative health outcomes.

Summary: Study sheds light on DNA methylation related to sleep deprivation in those with shift-work disorder.

Source: University of Helsinki

Long-term sleep deprivation is detrimental to health, increasing the risk of psychiatric and somatic disorders, such as depression and cardiovascular diseases. And yet, little is known about the molecular biological mechanisms set in motion by sleep deprivation which underlie related adverse health effects.

In a recently published study, the University of Helsinki, the Finnish Institute for Health and Welfare, the Finnish Institute of Occupational Health and the Finnair airline investigated dynamic changes to DNA methylation in shift workers. DNA methylation denotes epigenetic regulation that modifies gene function and regulates gene activity without changing the sequence of bases in the DNA.

Researchers invent new gene-editing tool

Researchers can now control the order in which CAS9 makes edits to cell DNA instead of performing all edits at once.

Researchers from the University of Illinois Chicago have discovered a new gene-editing technique that allows for the programming of sequential cuts—or edits—over time.

CRISPR is a gene-editing tool that allows scientists to change the DNA sequences in and sometimes add a desired sequence or genes. CRISPR uses an enzyme called Cas9 that acts like scissors to make a cut precisely at a desired location in the DNA. Once a cut is made, the ways in which cells repair the DNA break can be influenced to result in different changes or edits to the DNA sequence.

The discovery of the gene-editing capabilities of the CRISPR system was described in the early 2010s. In only a few years, scientists became enamored with the ease of guiding CRISPR to target almost any DNA sequence in a cell or to target many different sites in a cell in a single experiment.

Targeting senescent cells: approaches, opportunities, challenges

Cellular senescence is a hallmark of aging, whose onset is linked to a series of both cell and non-cell autonomous processes, leading to several consequences for the organism. To date, several senescence routes have been identified, which play a fundamental role in development, tumor suppression and aging, among other processes. The positive and/or negative effects of senescent cells are directly related to the time that they remain in the organism. Short-term (acute) senescent cells are associated with positive effects; once they have executed their actions, immune cells are recruited to remove them. In contrast, long-term (chronic) senescent cells are associated with disease; they secrete pro-inflammatory and pro-tumorigenic factors in a state known as senescence-associated secretory phenotype (SASP). In recent years, cellular senescence has become the center of attention for the treatment of aging-related diseases. Current therapies are focused on elimination of senescent cell functions in three main ways: i) use of senolytics; ii) inhibition of SASP; and iii) improvement of immune system functions against senescent cells (immunosurveillance). In addition, some anti-cancer therapies are based on the induction of senescence in tumor cells. However, these senescent-like cancer cells must be subsequently cleared to avoid a chronic pro-tumorigenic state. Here is a summary of different scenarios, depending on the therapy used, with a discussion of the pros and cons of each scenario.

Keywords: cellular senescence, senolytics, senomorphics, immunosurveillance, anti-aging therapies.

Cellular senescence is a stress response mechanism induced by different types of insults such as telomere attrition, DNA damage, and oncogenic mutations, among others [1]. First described in cultured human diploid fibroblasts after successive rounds of division [2], its main hallmarks are irreversible growth arrest, alterations of cell size and morphology, increased lysosomal activity, expression of anti-proliferative proteins, resistance to apoptosis, activation of damage-sensing signaling routes. Another important characteristic is the regulated secretion of interleukins (ILs), inflammatory factors, chemokines, proteases and growth factors, termed the senescence-associated secretory phenotype (SASP) [3].