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CRISPR screen maps 250 genes essential for human muscle fiber formation

Muscles make up nearly 40% of the human body and power every move we make, from a child’s first steps to recovery after injury. For some, however, muscle development goes awry, leading to weakness, delayed motor milestones or lifelong disabilities. New research from the University of Georgia is shedding light on why.

UGA researchers have created a first-of-its-kind CRISPR screening platform for human muscle cells, identifying hundreds of genes critical to skeletal muscle formation and uncovering the potential cause of a rare genetic disorder. The findings come from two companion papers published in Nature Communications, one describing the large-scale screen and a second digging into a particular gene’s role in muscle development.

Together, the studies provide a comprehensive genetic map of how human muscle fibers are built and lend insights into the effects of genetic mutations on developmental muscle defects. By linking specific genes to the muscle-building process, this genetic roadmap gives clinicians a practical shortlist to more quickly pinpoint the likely genetic causes of a patient’s muscle-development disorder. It also provides researchers with clear targets to prioritize future drug or gene therapy approaches.

The Scientist Behind Moderna on How Engineering Revolutionizes Medicine

What does it take to turn bold ideas into life-saving medicine?

In this episode of The Big Question, we sit down with @MIT’s Dr. Robert Langer, one of the founding figures of bioengineering and among the most cited scientists in the world, to explore how engineering has reshaped modern healthcare. From early failures and rejected grants to breakthroughs that changed medicine, Langer reflects on a career built around persistence and problem-solving. His work helped lay the foundation for technologies that deliver large biological molecules, like proteins and RNA, into the body, a challenge once thought impossible. Those advances now underpin everything from targeted cancer therapies to the mRNA vaccines that transformed the COVID-19 response.

The conversation looks forward as well as back, diving into the future of medicine through engineered solutions such as artificial skin for burn victims, FDA-approved synthetic blood vessels, and organs-on-chips that mimic human biology to speed up drug testing while reducing reliance on animal models. Langer explains how nanoparticles safely carry genetic instructions into cells, how mRNA vaccines train the immune system without altering DNA, and why engineering delivery, getting the right treatment to the right place in the body, remains one of medicine’s biggest challenges. From personalized cancer vaccines to tissue engineering and rapid drug development, this episode reveals how science, persistence, and engineering come together to push the boundaries of what medicine can do next.

#Science #Medicine #Biotech #Health #LifeSciences.

Chapters:
00:00 Engineering the Future of Medicine.
01:55 Failure, Persistence, and Scientific Breakthroughs.
05:30 From Chemical Engineering to Patient Care.
08:40 Solving the Drug Delivery Problem.
11:20 Delivering Proteins, RNA, and DNA
14:10 The Origins of mRNA Technology.
17:30 How mRNA Vaccines Work.
20:40 Speed and Scale in Vaccine Development.
23:30 What mRNA Makes Possible Next.
26:10 Trust, Misinformation, and Vaccine Science.
28:50 Engineering Tissues and Organs.
31:20 Artificial Skin and Synthetic Blood Vessels.
33:40 Organs on Chips and Drug Testing.
36:10 Why Science Always Moves Forward.

The Big Question with the Museum of Science:

How DNA and life experiences leave distinct marks on the human immune system

Using single-cell epigenomic profiling of immune cells from 110 individuals, researchers show that genetic variation and environmental exposures shape the human immune system through distinct DNA methylation mechanisms. Genetic effects concentrate within gene bodies of memory cells, while environmental exposures primarily remodel regulatory regions in naive immune cells.

DNA From Ice Age Skeletons Solves a Medical Mystery That Puzzled Scientists for Decades

Scientists analyzing ancient DNA from a 12,000-year-old double burial in southern Italy uncovered genetic evidence of a rare inherited growth disorder in two closely related prehistoric individuals. A team led by researchers at the University of Vienna and Liège University Hospital Centre has tra

A mesoscale optogenetics system for precise and robust stimulation of the primate cortex

Li et al. present a microLED-based mesoscale optogenetic system for centimeter-scale, million-pixel primate cortical stimulation. Optogenetically evoked saccades with accurate retinotopic organization remain stable for over a year, demonstrating precise, robust, and durable neuromodulation and charting a path toward next-generation optical brain-computer interfaces and visual prostheses.

Exploring the role of apolipoprotein ε4 in progressive myoclonic epilepsy type 1

“Despite greater white matter degeneration and reduced cortical thickness, APOE ε4 carriers exhibited preserved deep brain volumes and better self-reported well-being. This study highlights the complex interplay between genetic factors and neurodegenerative processes. Our future research aims to provide more natural history data of EPM1 and correlate long-term phenotypic data with additional geno-phenotypic analyses.”

Read this original article from Epileptic Disorders at doi.org/10.1002/epd2.70112.


Objective Progressive myoclonic epilepsy type 1 (EPM1) is a neurodegenerative disease caused by biallelic variants in the cystatin B (CSTB) gene. Despite a progressive course, phenotype severity varies among patients, even within families. We studied the potential role of APOE ε4 in modifying phenotypic diversity in EPM1, given its established association with neurodegeneration, particularly in Alzheimer’s disease.

Distinct Mutations in the Same Gene Drive Cancer Differently

Scientists mapped every possible mutation in a key genetic hotspot, revealing how distinct mutations drive tumor growth differently, which could influence anticancer therapy success.

Read more.

Mapping diverse mutations within a cancer hotspot revealed that distinct variants drive tumor growth to different extents, which could guide anticancer therapies.

Few studies report on urinary microbiota, especially in pediatric conditions

Here, Miguel Verbitsky & team analyze urine from 325 participants in the Randomized Intervention for Children with Vesicoureteral Reflux study (RIVUR study), revealing genetic variations influence bacterial composition of urine in children with recurrent urinary infections and vesicoureteral reflux:

The image shows cytokeratin 5 and smooth muscle actin labeling after UTI in mouse bladder, which increases expression of Cxcl12 and Cxcr4.


3Department of Dermatology; and.

4Center for Precision Medicine and Genomics, Columbia University, New York, New York, USA.

5Department of Neurology, Heersink School of Medicine, University of Alabama at Birmingham, Birmingham, Alabama, USA.

From organoid culture to manufacturing: technologies for reproducible and scalable organoid production

Despite the absence of a fully established regulatory framework or unified technological standard for industrial-and clinical-grade organoid biomanufacturing yet, substantial progress has been made toward building the technical and institutional infrastructure required for scalability and reproducibility. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) introduced the Good In Vitro Method Practices (GIVIMP)19, an international quality-assurance framework that defines laboratory quality systems, method qualification, reference controls, equipment calibration, and data integrity—principles that now potentially serve as quantitative benchmarks for process validation in organoid production. Complementing this, the NIH Standardized Organoid Modeling (SOM) Center was recently established to promote the development of organoid platforms that are reproducible, robust, and broadly accessible for translational biomedical and pharmaceutical research.

Expanding these standardization efforts, a recent publication introduced the Essential Guidelines for Manufacturing and Application of Organoids, delineating a systematic workflow encompassing cell sourcing, culture optimization, quality control, and biobanking logistics20. Their framework identifies organ-specific critical quality attributes (CQAs)—including growth-factor composition, morphological fidelity, and quantitative analytical metrics—and recommends standardized cryopreservation conditions (~100–200 organoids per vial) to enhance batch comparability. Likewise, a recent study established quantitative criteria for human intestinal organoid standardization, specifying cell-line provenance, minimum lineage composition thresholds (e.g., ≥30% enterocytes), and molecular marker expression profiles consistent with physiological differentiation21. Taken together, these coordinated initiatives—from international organizations to national agencies and individual laboratories—represent an emerging global framework toward reproducible, quality-controlled, and scalable organoid biomanufacturing, laying the groundwork for eventual regulatory convergence and clinical translation.

In response to these prevailing limitations and in alignment with global standardization trends, a range of engineering strategies has been developed, shifting the paradigm from organoid culture to organoid manufacturing by enabling reproducible and scalable organoid production. These strategies broadly focus on two goals: improving reproducibility by minimizing uncontrolled variation in the culture environment as well as by regulating intrinsic morphogenetic processes, and enhancing scalability by increasing productivity and throughput. To this end, recent advances can be categorized into three major domains: cellular engineering approaches that regulate morphogenetic processes through programmed cell organization; material-based strategies that establish defined and controllable environmental cues; and platform-or system-level innovations that enable high-throughput and automated workflows. Together, these innovative engineering advances mark aion toward more standardized, efficient production workflows.

Massive Global Study Rewrites the Biology of Type 2 Diabetes

A large global genetics study shows that many key drivers of Type 2 diabetes operate outside the bloodstream. Scientists are getting a clearer picture of why Type 2 diabetes is so hard to pin down. In a major international project led in part by the University of Massachusetts Amherst and Helmholtz

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