Lifeboat Foundation

University of Sydney research provides new evidence that nanoparticles, which are present in many food items, may have a substantial and harmful influence on human health.

The study investigated the health impacts of food additive E171 (titanium dioxide nanoparticles) which is commonly used in high quantities in foods and some medicines as a whitening agent. Found in more than 900 food products such as chewing gum and mayonnaise, E171 is consumed in high proportion everyday by the general population.

Published in Frontiers in Nutrition, the mice study found that consumption of food containing E171 has an impact on the gut microbiota (defined by the trillions of bacteria that inhabit the gut) which could trigger diseases such as inflammatory bowel diseases and colorectal cancer.

Continue reading “Common food additive E171 found to affect gut microbiota” »

Looking for perfect heat and lots of it? Gene engineers in Brazil think they might be able to create eye-watering tomatoes.

Hot stuff: Even though chili peppers and tomato plants diverged from a common ancestor millions of years ago, tomatoes still possess the genetic pathway needed to make capsaicinoids, the molecules that make chilis hot.

Now, Agustin Zsögön from the Federal University of Viçosa in Brazil writes in the journal Trends in Plant Science that gene-editing tools like CRISPR could turn it back on.

Continue reading “CRISPR might soon create spicy tomatoes” »

Viruses are masterful invaders. They cannibalize host cells by injecting their genetic material, often making thousands of copies of themselves in a single cell to ensure their replication and survival.

Some RNA viruses insert their genetic material as a single piece, while others chop it up into pieces. The latter are aptly named segmented viruses.

Such segmented RNA viruses—including several that cause human diseases like influenza—have been a longstanding enigma to researchers: How do they accomplish the precise copying and insertion of each segment? How do they ensure that individual segments are all copied by the same enzyme while ensuring that each segment can make different amounts of RNA? Such exquisite regulation is critical to make the correct levels of the viral proteins necessary for successful replication.

Continue reading “Study uncovers key mechanism that allows some of the world’s deadliest viruses to replicate” »

Scientists might have found an early detection method for some forms of dementia, according to new research by the University of Arizona and the University of Toronto’s Baycrest Health Sciences Centre.

According to the study published in the journal Neuropsychologia last month, patients with a rare neurodegenerative brain disorder called Primary Progressive Aphasia, or PPA, show abnormalities in brain function in areas that look structurally normal on an MRI scan.

“We wanted to study how degeneration affects function of the brain,” said Aneta Kielar, the study’s lead author and assistant professor in the UA Department of Speech, Language and Hearing Sciences.

Continue reading “Detecting dementia’s damaging effects before it’s too late” »

Chikungunya virus, once confined to the Eastern Hemisphere, has infected more than 1 million people in the Americas since 2013, when mosquitoes carrying the virus were discovered in the Caribbean. Most people who become infected develop fever and joint pain that last about a week. But in up to half of patients, the virus can cause severe arthritis that persists for months or years. There is no treatment to prevent the short-lived infection from persisting into chronic arthritis.

Now, researchers have uncovered information that could help stop the debilitating condition. A team at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis has snapped high-resolution pictures of the virus latched onto a protein found on the surface of cells in the joints. The protein used in the study was taken from mice, but people have the same protein, and the virus interacts with the mouse and human proteins in virtually identical ways.

The structures, published May 9 in the journal Cell, shows in atomic-level detail how the virus and cell-surface protein fit together – data that promises to accelerate efforts to design drugs and vaccines to prevent or treat arthritis caused by chikungunya or related viruses.

Continue reading “Snapshot of chikungunya could lead to drugs, vaccines for viral arthritis” »

University of Sydney research provides new evidence that nanoparticles, which are present in many food items, may have a substantial and harmful influence on human health.

The study investigated the health impacts of food additive E171 (titanium dioxide nanoparticles) which is commonly used in high quantities in foods and some medicines as a whitening agent. Found in more than 900 food products such as chewing gum and mayonnaise, E171 is consumed in high proportion everyday by the general population.

Published in Frontiers in Nutrition, the mice study found that consumption of food containing E171 has an impact on the gut microbiota (defined by the trillions of bacteria that inhabit the gut) which could trigger diseases such as inflammatory bowel diseases and colorectal cancer.

Continue reading “Common food additive found to affect gut microbiota” »

The human body has powerful healing abilities. But treating brain disorders is no easy task, as brain cells—neurons—have limited ability to regenerate. Nonetheless, stem cells are a form of natural backup, a vestige of our days as still-developing embryos.

The difficulty is that with age, neural stem cells ‘fall asleep’ and become harder to wake up when repairs are needed. Despite efforts to harness these cells to treat neurological damage, scientists have until recently been unsuccessful in decoding the underlying ‘sleep’ mechanism.

Now, researchers at Kyoto University studying brain chemistry in mice have revealed the ebb and flow of gene expression that may wake neural stem cells from their slumber. These findings, which may also apply to stem cells elsewhere in the body, were recently published in the journal Genes & Development.

Continue reading “Awakening stem cells to unlock the brain’s regenerative potential” »

As cancer cells respond to cues in their microenvironment, they can enter a highly plastic state in which they are susceptible to transdifferentiation into a different type of cell. Researchers at the University of Basel in Switzerland exploited this critical phase, known as an epithelial-mesenchymal transition (EMT), to coax breast cancer cells in mice to turn into harmless fat cells. The proof-of-concept study appears January 14 in the journal Cancer Cell.

“The breast cancer cells that underwent an EMT not only differentiated into fat cells, but also completely stopped proliferating,” says first author Gerhard Christofori, professor of biochemistry at the University of Basel. What’s more, the primary tumor did not metastasize. “As far as we can tell from long-term culture experiments, the cancer cells-turned-fat cells remain fat cells and do not revert back to breast cancer cells,” he says.

Epithelial cells undergoing EMT regress from terminally differentiated cells to a more immature state reminiscent of stem cells. EMT is essential for embryonic development, during which stem cells differentiate into a variety of cell types throughout the body, and for tissue regeneration such as wound healing. EMT and the inverse process, mesenchymal-epithelial transition (MET), are implicated in cancer’s ability to metastasize.

Continue reading “Breast cancer cells in mice tricked into turning into fat cells” »

An algorithm similar to the ones used by Netflix and Spotify to recommend content can predict who will DIE or have a heart attack with 90% accuracy…

Nearly 1,000 patients complaining of chest pain were assessed and treated at Turku PET Centre, Finland and their data used to train the LogitBoost algorithm.

Continue reading “Algorithm detects who will DIE from a heart attack with 90% accuracy” »