Lifeboat Foundation

Summary: A subset of taste cells may play a key role in the body’s immune response to harmful oral microbes. The findings could help taste loss associated with infections, aging, and dysregulation of the oral microbiome caused by chemotherapy.

Source: University of Nebraska Lincoln.

Taste cells are heavily exposed to the microbes in the mouth, but their role in helping the body respond to those microbes has not yet been studied in detail.

Many life-saving drugs directly interact with DNA to treat diseases such as cancer, but scientists have struggled to detect how and why they work—until now.

In a paper published in the journal Nature Biotechnology, University of Cambridge researchers have outlined a new DNA sequencing method that can detect where and how small molecule drugs interact with the targeted genome.

“Understanding how drugs work in the body is essential to creating better, more effective therapies,” said co-first author Dr. Zutao Yu from the Yusuf Hamied Department of Chemistry. “But when a therapeutic drug enters a cancer cell with a genome that has three billion bases, it’s like entering a black box.”

Year 2022 face_with_colon_three

A new technique to restore the organs in a body all at once could one day help get much-needed organs to those waiting on the transplant list.

Part 1: the future of medicine: nanobots part 2: a new era in mental health: nanobots part 3: the healing power of nanobots part 4: the genetic and data-connected revolution: nanobots part 5: the end of plastic surgery: nanobots part 6: the fertility revolution: nanobots part 7: the job-specific human: nanobots part 8: the end of education as we know it: nanobots part 9: the rise of programmable matter: nanobots part 10: the next generation of humans: nanobots.

Nanotechnology is a rapidly evolving field with the potential to revolutionize medicine in the future. One of the most promising applications of nanotechnology is the use of nanobots in medicine. Nanobots are microscopic robots that can be programmed to perform specialized activities such as disease diagnosis and treatment. They can be used to diagnose and treat a wide range of conditions, including mental illnesses such as depression and anxiety, as well as physical injuries and illnesses.

One of the most interesting potential applications of nanobots in medicine is the treatment of mental illnesses. Mental illnesses are among the most common and devastating diseases of our time. They can be programmed to constantly map the brain and correct faults as they develop. Alzheimer’s disease may theoretically be treated if a person was implanted with nanobots at birth.

Abstract. Understanding adaptation to the local environment is a central tenet and a major focus of evolutionary biology. But this is only part of the adaptionist story. In addition to the external environment, one of the main drivers of genome composition is genetic background. In this perspective, I argue that there is a growing body of evidence that intra-genomic selective pressures play a significant part in the composition of prokaryotic genomes and play a significant role in the origin, maintenance and structuring of prokaryotic pangenomes.

A multi-disciplinary team of researchers has developed a way to monitor the progression of movement disorders using motion capture technology and AI.

In two ground-breaking studies, published in Nature Medicine, a cross-disciplinary team of AI and clinical researchers have shown that by combining human movement data gathered from wearable tech with a powerful new medical AI technology they are able to identify clear movement patterns, predict future disease progression and significantly increase the efficiency of clinical trials in two very different rare disorders, Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD) and Friedreich’s ataxia (FA).

DMD and FA are rare, degenerative, genetic diseases that affect movement and eventually lead to paralysis. There are currently no cures for either disease, but researchers hope that these results will significantly speed up the search for new treatments.

Scientists have worked out why common anti-depressants cause around half of users to feel emotionally “blunted.” In a study published today in Neuropsychopharmacology, they show that the drugs affect reinforcement learning, an important behavioral process that allows people to learn from their environment.

According to the NHS, more than 8.3 million patients in England received an antidepressant drug in 2021/22. A widely used class of antidepressants, particularly for persistent or severe cases, is selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs). These drugs target serotonin, a chemical that carries messages between nerve cells in the brain and has been dubbed the “pleasure chemical.”

One of the widely reported side effects of SSRIs is “blunting,” where patients report feeling emotionally dull and no longer finding things as pleasurable as they used to. Between 40% and 60% of patients taking SSRIs are believed to experience this side effect.

Last week, Rice University in Houston announced that one of its assistant professors of bioengineering, Jerzy Szablowski, received a Young Faculty Award from DARPA to research non-genetic drugs that can “temporarily enhance the human body’s resilience to extreme cold exposure.”

Thermogenesis is the use of energy to create heat, and our bodies have two different ways of doing this. One is shivering, which we’re all familiar with. The other, which Szablowski simply calls non-shivering thermogenesis, involves burning off brown adipose tissue (BAT), or brow n fat.

This type of fat exists specifically to warm us up when we get cold; it stores energy and only activates in cold temperatures. Most of our body fat is white fat. It builds up when we ingest more calories than we burn and stores those calories for when we don’t get enough energy from food. An unfortunate majority of American adults have the opposite problem: too much white fat, which increases the risk of conditions like heart disease and Type 2 diabetes.

Cellular reprogramming builds on the Nobel Prize-winning work of Shinya Yamanaka, who showed that adult cells could be transformed back into stem cells by exposing them to a specific set of genome-regulating proteins known as transcription factors. The Salk team’s innovation was to reduce the exposure times to the so-called Yamanaka factors, which they found could reverse epigenetic changes to the cells without reverting them to stem cells.

While the approach led to clear increases in lifespan in prematurely aging mice, the fact that no one had been able to replicate the result in healthy mice since then raised doubts about the approach. “Different groups have tried this experiment, and the data have not been positive so far,” Alejandro Ocampo, from the University of Lausanne in Switzerland, who carried out the original Salk experiments, told MIT Technology Review.

But now, Rejuvenate Bio claims that when they exposed healthy mice near the end of their lives to a subset of the Yamanaka factors, they lived for another 18 weeks on average, compared to just 9 weeks for those that didn’t undergo cellular reprogramming.