Lifeboat Foundation

What does the New Year have in store for #CRISPR? This blog presents 5 CRISPR-enabled breakthroughs to look for in 2017. (Partner content via Synthego)

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Orcs? 😁

The breakthrough could one day lead to farm-grown organ transplants.

They could be used for guided pollination… or for surveillance.

Today scientists at the Institute for Research in Biomedicine (IRB Barcelona) present a study in Cell (“The in vivo architecture of the exocyst provides structural basis for exocytosis”) where they have been able to observe protein nanomachines (also called protein complexes)—the structures responsible for performing cell functions—for the first time in living cells and in 3D. This work has been done in collaboration with researchers at the University of Geneva in Switzerland and the Centro Andaluz de Biología del Desarrollo in Seville.

On the left, in vivo image of nanomachines using current microscopy techniques; on the right, the new method allows 3D observation of nanomachines in vivo and provides 25-fold improvement in precision (O. Gallego, IRB Barcelona)

DURHAM, N.C. — Mechanical engineers at Duke University have demonstrated a tiny whirlpool that can concentrate nanoparticles using nothing but sound. The innovation could gather proteins and other biological structures from blood, urine or saliva samples for future diagnostic devices.

Early diagnosis is key to successfully treating many diseases, but spotting early indicators of a problem is often challenging. To pick out the first warning signs, physicians usually must concentrate scarce proteins, antibodies or other biomarkers from small samples of a patient’s body fluid to provide enough of a signal for detection.

While there are many ways to accomplish this today, most are expensive, time-consuming or too cumbersome to take to the field, and they might require trained experts. Duke engineers are moving to develop a new device that addresses these obstacles.

The brain is the fattiest organ in your body made up of 60% fat, the dry part that is. 75% of your brain is actually water which houses 100,000 miles of blood vessels that use up 20% of all your oxygen and blood. It’s an amazing piece of hardware. Of all the moonshot projects out there, the ones that relate to augmenting the brain are perhaps the most fascinating. Companies like Kernel have actually succeeded in writing long-term memories to a chip – well, at least 80% of them. When that number hits 100%, the sky is the limit to what we can do with the brain.

If you want a graphic image of what the future holds, imagine a robotic arm on top of your table (no wires) moving its fingers or trying to grab something powered only by someone’s thought. After all those Terminator movies, this could be a bit creepy. You may not get Terminator at your doorstep just yet, but someone with neuroprosthesis might just be ringing your doorbell a few years from now.

Neuroprosthetics or neuroprosthesis is a field of biomedical engineering and neuroscience concerned with the development of neural prostheses which are a series of devices that can substitute your brain’s motor, sensory or cognitive functionality that might have been damaged as a result of an injury or a disease.

Continue reading “Neuroprosthetics: Brain Interface Applied in Neurology” »

In Brief:

• The Multiple Sclerosis Foundation estimates that more than 400,000 people in the United States and about 2.5 million people around the world have MS.
• A new drug, Ocrelizumab, is the first known drug shown to work against the primary progressive form of MS by altering the immune system to slow damage to the brain.

Multiple sclerosis (MS) is an unpredictable and potentially disabling disease that cripples the central nervous system. It’s a widespread neurological condition that hits young adults, usually between the ages of 20 and 40, caused by an immune system disorder that mistakes a part of the brain as a hostile foreign object and attacks it. Though there are treatments available, particularly for its second state, multiple sclerosis remains incurable.

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