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Category: biotech/medical – Page 5

One DNA letter can trigger complete sex reversal

Researchers at Bar-Ilan University have discovered that changing just one letter in DNA can completely alter sex development in mice. In the new study, published in Nature Communications, a single-letter insertion in a non-coding regulatory region caused XX mice, which would normally develop as females, to develop instead as males with testis and male genitalia.

The finding is especially striking because the mutation was not made in a gene itself, but in a distant stretch of DNA that helps control a key developmental gene. The study highlights the major role of the non-coding genome —the 98% of DNA that does not make proteins but helps regulate when and how genes are turned on and off.

“This is a remarkable finding because such a tiny change—just one DNA letter out of approximately 2.8 billion—was enough to produce a dramatic developmental outcome,” said Dr. Nitzan Gonen, from the Goodman Faculty of Life Sciences and Institute of Nanotechnology and Advanced Materials at Bar-Ilan University. “It shows that non-coding DNA can have a profound effect on development and disease.”

Enucleated cells with Nectin-1 overexpression capture HSV-1 and promote viral elimination for herpes simplex encephalitis therapy

Zhou et al. describe an antiviral strategy for herpes simplex encephalitis that employs enucleated MSCs overexpressing Nectin-1 as decoys. This strategy effectively sequesters the virus and prevents its intracellular replication. Ultimately, they undergo programmed apoptosis, thereby facilitating macrophage-mediated clearance. This strategy offers a therapeutic approach for refractory viral infections.

Exercise induces sex-specific assembly of mitochondrial supercomplexes

Mitochondrial supercomplexes assembly in exercise.

The function of supercomplexes (SCs) formed from mitochondrial electron transport chain (ETC) is not well understood.

The researchers demonstrate that exercise dynamically modulates the assembly of mitochondrial respiratory complexes into supercomplexes (SCs) in human skeletal muscle, with this remodeling being sex dependent.

The authors found that males increased the assembly of complex III (CIII) into SCs, particularly high molecular weight SCs (HMWSCs), in an intensity-dependent manner within skeletal muscle. Females showed a stable content of both HMWSCs and I+III2 SCs during exercise.

This highlights the importance of accounting for biological sex when studying mitochondrial adaptations to exercise. sciencenewshighlights ScienceMission https://sciencemission.com/mitochondrial-supercomplexes-and-exercise

Huertas et al. demonstrate that exercise dynamically modulates the assembly of mitochondrial respiratory complexes into supercomplexes in human skeletal muscle, with this remodeling being sex dependent. This highlights the importance of accounting for biological sex when studying mitochondrial adaptations to exercise.

Continue reading “Exercise induces sex-specific assembly of mitochondrial supercomplexes” | >

The global burden of childhood and adolescent cancer (age 0–19 years) from 1990 to 2023: a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2023

Acute lymphoid leukemia and brain and central nervous system cancers were estimated to be the greatest contributors to new childhood cancer cases in 0–19-year-olds in 2023.

A new comprehensive study published in The Lancet from researchers at IHME and St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital — Science and Medicine examined the burden of childhood and adolescent cancer from 1990 to 2023, aiming to inform effective cancer policy planning around the globe.

Read the study.

Childhood cancer was the eighth-leading cause of childhood deaths and the ninth-leading cause of DALYs among all cancers in 2023. Globally, in 2023, there were an estimated 377 000 incident childhood cancer cases, 144 000 deaths, and 11·7 million DALYs due to childhood cancer.

Artificial intelligence in cardiovascular imaging: risks, mitigations and the path to safe implementation

Artificial intelligence (AI) is rapidly transforming cardiovascular imaging by automating tasks such as image segmentation, feature extraction, and risk prediction — leading to significant improvements in diagnostic precision and efficiency. However, the integration of AI into clinical workflows comes with critical risks that must be addressed to ensure safe and reliable patient care.

This review explores the technical, clinical, and ethical challenges of AI in cardiovascular imaging, particularly highlighting the risks of model errors, data drift and inappropriate usage. We also examine concerns about explainability, the potential for deskilling of healthcare professionals, generalisability across diverse populations, and accountability in AI implementation.

We present real-world examples of where these risks have been realised, along with attempts at mitigations, including the adoption of explainable AI techniques, rigorous validation frameworks to ensure fairness and broad applicability, continuous performance monitoring, and transparency at every stage of model development and deployment.

Why can’t humans regenerate limbs? New research offers a clue

Say you accidentally cut the tip of your finger off. Especially if this happened to you as a child, there’s a good chance it would regrow—skin, nail and all. The same is true for other mammals such as monkeys and mice. Unfortunately, however, our regenerative abilities stop there. While some other creatures, most notably salamanders and starfish, can regenerate entire limbs, mammals don’t have this evolutionary superpower.

Part of the reason why our cells only have a limited ability to regenerate may have to do with our genes. But according to new research, two key environmental mechanisms may be at play, too.

Oxygen and hyaluronic acid may play a role in tissue recovery and regeneration, two new studies suggest.

By Jackie Flynn Mogensen edited by Claire Cameron.

Scientists discover f-block metals yield new oxygen-binding chemistry

Iron and oxygen bind together throughout the body. Most famously, iron binds dioxygen, or two oxygens paired with each other, in hemoglobin that transports oxygen through blood. But iron-oxo compounds, as they’re called, are found in many other places throughout the body. For example, the highly reactive iron-oxo is used in liver enzymes that metabolize drugs.

Rice University chemist Raúl Hernández Sánchez was interested in how oxygen could react with other types of metals—ones that reside on the lowest section of the periodic table, known as f-block metals, with lanthanides on the upper row and actinides on the lower.

If lanthanides could bind with oxygen, he theorized, it would form a highly reactive lanthanide-oxo compound that potentially could be used as a synthetic replacement for iron-oxo, opening up a new toolbox for small molecule chemists interested in studying these biological reactions.

When AI meets muscle: Context-aware electrical stimulation guides humans through new movements

Imagine traveling in a foreign country, reaching for a window you’ve never seen before, and instead of struggling to open it, you feel your own muscles gently guide you through the motion, as if an invisible teacher was there, lending their know-how. Now picture that same sensation helping you twist open a child-proof pill bottle, operate a camera, or perform tasks you’ve never practiced before.

This is not science fiction. It’s the vision realized by Ph.D. students Yun Ho and Romain Nith, under the supervision of associate professor Pedro Lopes in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Chicago. Their work, recently honored with the Best Paper Award at the ACM CHI 2026 conference, is turning heads across the human-computer interaction community.

The study is also published on the arXiv preprint server.

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