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Category: biotech/medical – Page 2,245

The role that the gut microbiome plays in aging is increasingly being appreciated in the research world as more evidence arrives to support it. A new publication reviews the various supporting evidence and takes a look at the gut microbiome in the context of nutrient-rich diets and how they facilitate the progression of dysbiosis and disease [1].

What is the microbiome?

The microbiome is the varied community of bacteria, archaea, eukarya, and viruses that inhabit our guts. The four bacterial phyla of Firmicutes, Bacteroidetes, Proteobacteria, and Actinobacteria comprise 98% of the intestinal microbiome.

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Humans may not be able to burp properly in space, but we can now edit a genome. For the first time, astronauts aboard the International Space Station (ISS) have used CRISPR-Cas9 to edit the DNA of brewer’s yeast.

The goal wasn’t to create super space yeast. The astronauts were studying how DNA repair mechanisms work in space, so they snipped through strands of the fungus’s genetic code in a number of places to mimic radiation damage.

“The damage actually happens on the space station and the analysis also happens in space,” said Emily Gleason of miniPCR Bio, the company that designed the DNA lab aboard the ISS. “We want to understand if DNA repair methods are different in space than on Earth.”

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Microorganisms like bacteria and fungi are increasingly becoming resistant to our best drugs, which is hurtling us towards a terrifying future where once-easily-treated infections become potentially life-threatening again. In a new approach to this problem, researchers from the University at Buffalo and Temple University have tested an alternative to antibiotics that uses existing drugs to starve a fungal infection of vital nutrients.

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Researchers from Sweden’s Chalmers University of Technology and the University of Gothenburg present a new method which can double the energy of a proton beam produced by laser-based particle accelerators. The breakthrough could lead to more compact, cheaper equipment that could be useful for many applications, including proton therapy.

Proton therapy involves firing a beam of accelerated protons at cancerous tumours, killing them through irradiation. But the equipment needed is so large and expensive that it only exists in a few locations worldwide.

Modern high-powered lasers offer the potential to reduce the equipment’s size and cost, since they can accelerate particles over a much shorter distance than traditional accelerators — reducing the distance required from kilometres to metres. The problem is, despite efforts from researchers around the world, laser generated proton beams are currently not energetic enough. But now, the Swedish researchers present a new method which yields a doubling of the energy — a major leap forward.

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A new study has affirmed the anesthetic drug xenon can help prevent long-term damage associated with traumatic brain injury (TBI). The researchers, from Imperial College London and Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, have effectively demonstrated in mice that if xenon is administered within a few hours of a TBI it can prevent brain tissue damage that would result in long-term cognitive problems.

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Mayo Clinic researchers have demonstrated the safety and feasibility of stem cell therapy for lung transplant recipients with moderate obstructive chronic lung allograft dysfunction (CLAD). A larger clinical study is planned, which might eventually yield regenerative-medicine options for managing acute or chronic CLAD.

“The primary purpose is to improve lung function, or at least arrest the rate of decline in lung function, in transplant patients with progressive obstructive disease that is refractory to medical therapy,” says Cesar A. Keller, M.D., emeritus professor at Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville, Florida.

Although lung transplantation is a life-saving treatment option, chronic rejection is considerably more common than in other solid organ transplants, due to the lungs’ continuous exposure to environmental factors. Within five years of lung transplant, 45 percent of recipients develop obstructive CLAD, also known as bronchiolitis obliterans syndrome (BOS) — which has an associated mortality rate ranging from 25 percent to 56 percent. There is no standardized therapeutic protocol for BOS, and the existing therapies have had variable success.

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