Lifeboat Foundation

A bold project to read the complete genetic sequences of every known vertebrate species reaches its first milestone by publishing new methods and the first 25 high-quality genomes.

It’s one of the most audacious projects in biology today – reading the entire genome of every bird, mammal, lizard, fish, and all other creatures with backbones.

And now comes the first major payoff from the Vertebrate Genomes Project (VGP): near complete, high-quality genomes of 25 species, Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) Investigator Erich Jarvis with scores of coauthors report April 28, 2021, in the journal Nature. These species include the greater horseshoe bat, the Canada lynx, the platypus, and the kākāpō parrot – one of the first high-quality genomes of an endangered vertebrate species.

An acquired mutation in the cancer-causing gene PIK3CA can make blood vessel malformations in the brain worse, possibly explaining why these abnormal clusters sometimes rapidly increase in size and cause stroke or seizures, shows new research.

Research from the University of Pennsylvania and Duke University shows an acquired mutation in the cancer-causing gene PIK3CA can trigger uncontrolled growth in cerebral cavernous malformations often leading to strokes or seizures in those affected.

BRUSSELS/BERLIN (Reuters)-Intel wants 8 billion euros ($9.7 billion) in public subsidies towards building a semiconductor factory in Europe, its CEO was cited as saying on Friday, as the region seeks to reduce its reliance on imports amid a shortage of supplies. The pitch is the first time Pat Gelsinger has publicly put a figure on how much state aid he would want, as Intel pursues a multibillion-dollar drive to take on Asian rivals in contract manufacturing. “What we’re asking from both the U.S. and the European governments is to make it competitive for us to do it here compared to in Asia,” Gelsinger told Politico Europe in an interview.

A Dutch couple have become the proud new tenants of the country’s first ever 3D-printed house.

Elize Lutz and Harrie Dekkers have been given the digital key to the gray, boulder-shaped building in the Bosrijk neighborhood of Eindhoven, in the southern Netherlands.

The single-story home has more than 1000 square feet of floor area, with a spacious living room and two bedrooms.

Independent Genesis on Mars or Transfer of Life between Earth and Mars?

Considering the likelihood of an exchange of microbes between Earth and Mars.

After a mechanic from the United Kingdom lost his penis, medical innovators fashioned him a replacement out of his existing tissue — and it now rests on his left forearm.

45-year-old Malcolm MacDonald suffered from a perineum infection which led to a severe case of sepsis in 2014, which spread to his extremities, turning his fingers and toes black. Then it began to also affect his genitalia. “When I saw my penis go black I was beside myself,” MacDonald told The Sun. “It was like a horror film…I knew deep down it was gone and I was going to lose it. Then one day it just dropped off on to the floor.”

For two years afterwards, MacDonald says his life “fell apart”, until he was referred to Professor David Ralph, a urologist at University College London Hospital who specializes in penile reconstruction surgery.

While the CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing system has become the poster child for innovation in synthetic biology, it has some major limitations. CRISPR-Cas9 can be programmed to find and cut specific pieces of DNA, but editing the DNA to create desired mutations requires tricking the cell into using a new piece of DNA to repair the break. This bait-and-switch can be complicated to orchestrate, and can even be toxic to cells because Cas9 often cuts unintended, off-target sites as well.

Alternative gene editing techniques called recombineering instead perform this bait-and-switch by introducing an alternate piece of DNA while a cell is replicating its genome, efficiently creating genetic mutations without breaking DNA. These methods are simple enough that they can be used in many cells at once to create complex pools of mutations for researchers to study. Figuring out what the effects of those mutations are, however, requires that each mutant be isolated, sequenced, and characterized: a time-consuming and impractical task.

Researchers at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University and Harvard Medical School (HMS) have created a new gene editing tool called Retron Library Recombineering (RLR) that makes this task easier. RLR generates up to millions of mutations simultaneously, and “barcodes” mutant cells so that the entire pool can be screened at once, enabling massive amounts of data to be easily generated and analyzed. The achievement, which has been accomplished in bacterial cells, is described in a recent paper in PNAS.

At TAE Technologies lab in California, scientists are building a nuclear fusion machine to recreate the energy of the sun, stars and lightening here on Earth.

Artificial womb technology for extremely preterm infants — jasmijn kok, juno perinatal healthcare.

Every year, 800000 babies are born extremely preterm (defined as less than 28 weeks of age) worldwide. These infants are usually transferred to an air-based neonatal intensive care unit to support their heart and lung development. Exposure to air, however, leads to many complications, because the lungs are not fully developed yet.

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