#Researchers find new gene involved in blood-forming stem cells The findings, scheduled for online publication in the Journal of Clinical Investigation April 13,
both in normal conditions and in situations of stress--like the body experiences following a bone marrow transplant.
the discovery opens new lines of inquiry about the Ash1l gene's potential role in cancers known to involve other members of the same gene family,
like leukemia, or those where Ash1l might be expressed highly or mutated.""It's vital to understand how the basic,
"said study senior author Ivan Maillard, an associate research professor at the Life sciences Institute, where his lab is located,
and an associate professor in the Division of Hematology-Oncology at the U-M Medical school.""Leukemia is a cancer of the body's blood-forming tissues,
so it's an obvious place that we plan to look at next. If we find that Ash1l plays a role,
Graduate students Morgan Jones and Jennifer Chase were the study's first authors. Dysfunction of blood-forming stem cells is well known in illnesses like leukemia and bone marrow failure disorders.
Blood-forming stem cells can also be destroyed by high doses of chemotherapy and radiation used to treat cancer.
The replacement of these cells through bone marrow transplantation is the only widely established therapy involving stem cells in human patients.
But even in the absence of disease, blood cells require constant replacement--most blood cells last anywhere from a few days to a few months,
depending on their type. Over more than five years, Maillard and his collaborators identified a previously unknown
The Ash1l (Absent, small or homeotic 1-like) gene is part of a family of genes that includes MLL1 (Mixed Lineage Leukemia 1),
a gene that is frequently mutated in patients who develop leukemia. The research found that both genes contribute to blood renewal;
but lacking both led to catastrophic deficiencies.""We now have clear evidence that these genes cooperate to develop a healthy blood system,
His lab's investigation of the gene began at the prompting of co-author Sally Camper, the James V. Neel Professor and Chair of the Department of Human genetics in the U-M Medical school.
Ash1l-deficient stem cells were unable to establish normal blood renewal after a bone marrow transplant.
After the U s. dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, doctors noticed that radiation patients weren't able to generate new white blood cells to fend off infections.
Subsequent experiments on mice showed that bone marrow transplants from healthy animals into irradiated ones could renew their ability to make new blood cells.
including those whose blood stem cells are killed off by cancer treatments. But work continues in the laboratory setting."
"By continuing to investigate the basic, underlying mechanisms--which builds on a history of research in fruit flies
#New biomarker for uterine cancer discovered Researchers at Uppsala University have, together with researchers from Turku and Bergen, discovered a new biomarker
which makes it possible to identify women with uterine cancer who have a high risk of recurrence.
The findings were published recently in the journal Gynecologic Oncology. Endometrial cancer of the uterus is the most common form of gynecologic cancer in Europe and North america.
The treatment primarily consists of removing the uterus and in some cases offering chemotherapy if the risk of recurrence is deemed high.
The current study looks at the amount of protein ASRGL1 present in the tumour cells in uterine cancer.
Based on the amount of ASRGL1 the researchers were able to separate women with a negative prognosis
The study was conducted in cooperation between researchers at the universities in Uppsala, Turku and Bergen and is collected based on samples from 500 women who were diagnosed with uterine cancer between the years 1981 and 2007.
The protein ASRGL1 is an enzyme that normally exists in healthy cells of the uterus.
or partially lost ASRGL1 in the tumour cells had a much higher risk of the cancer recurring
and dying from the disease, while patients with sustained high levels of ASRGL1 had a much lower risk of recurrence.
'I view the results as a first step towards personal treatment of uterine cancer. Today, 10-15 per cent of the patients suffer recurrences,
and offer them more aggressive treatment after their operation increases',says Per-Henrik Edqvist, researcher at Uppsala University's Department of Immunology, Genetics and Pathology,
whether ASRGL1 also can be used for diagnosing tissue biopsies taken before the operation, to identify patients in need of more extensive surgery.'
'Our results are promising, but more research is needed before ASRGL1 can be accepted as a new diagnostic tool in healthcare.
since Swedish biotech company Atlas Antibodies has shown interest in commercialising our findings, 'says Per-Henrik Edqvist.
It was within The Human Protein Atlas project that the expression of the ASRGL1 protein was mapped first in the human body's normal tissues and in different forms of cancer.
By searches in the public protein atlas database the researchers were able to identify ASRGL1 as a potential new biomarker.'
and our study is an excellent example of how The Human Protein Atlas database can be used by researchers across the world to find interesting leads to follow up on,
#Taking aircraft manufacturing out of the oven Aerospace engineers at MIT have developed now a carbon nanotube (CNT) film that can heat
and solidify a composite without the need for massive ovens. When connected to an electrical power source,
and wrapped over a multilayer polymer composite, the heated film stimulates the polymer to solidify.
The group tested the film on a common carbon-fiber material used in aircraft components,
and found that the film created a composite as strong as that manufactured in conventional ovens
--while using only 1 percent of the energy. The new"out-of-oven"approach may offer a more direct
energy saving method for manufacturing virtually any industrial composite, says Brian L. Wardle, an associate professor of aeronautics and astronautics at MIT."
"Typically, if you're going to cook a fuselage for an Airbus a350 or Boeing 787, you've got about a four-story oven that's tens of millions of dollars in infrastructure that you don't need,
"Wardle says.""Our technique puts the heat where it is needed, in direct contact with the part being assembled.
Think of it as a self-heating pizza. Instead of an oven, you just plug the pizza into the wall
and it cooks itself.""Wardle says the carbon nanotube film is also incredibly lightweight: After it has fused the underlying polymer layers,
the film itself--a fraction of a human hair's diameter--meshes with the composite, adding negligible weight.
The team, including MIT graduate students Jeonyoon Lee and Itai Stein and Seth Kessler of the Metis Design Corporation, has published its results in the journal ACS Applied materials and Interfaces.
Carbon nanotube deicerswardle and his colleagues have experimented with CNT films in recent years, mainly for deicing airplane wings.
The team recognized that in addition to their negligible weight, carbon nanotubes heat efficiently when exposed to an electric current.
The group first developed a technique to create a film of aligned carbon nanotubes composed of tiny tubes of crystalline carbon
standing upright like trees in a forest. The researchers used a rod to roll the"forest"flat,
creating a dense film of aligned carbon nanotubes. In experiments, Wardle and his team integrated the film into airplane wings via conventional,
oven-based curing methods, showing that when voltage was applied, the film generated heat, preventing ice from forming.
The deicing tests inspired a question: If the CNT film could generate heat, why not use it to make the composite itself?
How hot can you go? In initial experiments, the researchers investigated the film's potential to fuse two types of aerospace-grade composite typically used in aircraft wings and fuselages.
Normally the material, composed of about 16 layers, is solidified, or cross-linked, in a high-temperature industrial oven.
The researchers manufactured a CNT film about the size of a Post-it note, and placed the film over a square of Cycom 5320-1. They connected electrodes to the film,
then applied a current to heat both the film and the underlying polymer in the Cycom composite layers.
The team measured the energy required to solidify or cross-link, the polymer and carbon fiber layers, finding that the CNT film used one-hundredth the electricity required for traditional oven-based methods to cure the composite.
Both methods generated composites with similar properties, such as cross-linking density. Wardle says the results pushed the group to test the CNT film further:
As different composites require different temperatures in order to fuse, the researchers looked to see whether the CNT film could,
quite literally, take the heat.""At some point, heaters fry out, "Wardle says.""They oxidize,
or have different ways in which they fail. What we wanted to see was how hot could this material go."
"To do this, the group tested the film's ability to generate higher and higher temperatures,
and found it topped out at over 1, 000 F. In comparison, some of the highest-temperature aerospace polymers require temperatures up to 750 F in order to solidify."
"We can process at those temperatures, which means there's no composite we can't process,
"Wardle says.""This really opens up all polymeric materials to this technology.""The team is working with industrial partners to find ways to scale up the technology to manufacture composites large enough to make airplane fuselages and wings."
"There needs to be thought some given to electroding, and how you're going to actually make the electrical contact efficiently over very large areas,
"Wardle says.""You'd need much less power than you are currently putting into your oven.
I don't think it's a challenge, but it has to be done.""Gregory Odegard, a professor of computational mechanics at Michigan Technological University, says the group's carbon nanotube film may go toward improving the quality and efficiency of fabrication processes for large composites, such as wings on commercial aircraft.
The new technique may also open the door to smaller firms that lack access to large industrial ovens."
so without investing in large ovens or outsourcing,"says Odegard, who was involved not in the research."
"This could lead to more innovation in the composites sector, and perhaps improvements in the performance and usage of composite materials."
"This research was funded in part by Airbus Group, Boeing, Embraer, Lockheed martin, Saab AB, Tohotenax, ANSYS Inc.,the Air force Research Laboratory at Wright-Patterson Air force base,
and the U s army Research Office e
#Graphene pushes the speed limit of light-to-electricity conversion ICFO researchers Klaas-Jan Tielrooij, Lukasz Piatkowski,
Mathieu Massicotte and Achim Woessner led by ICFO Prof. Frank Koppens and ICREA Prof. at ICFO Niek van Hulst, in collaboration with scientists from the research group led by Pablo Jarillo-Herrero at MIT
and the research group led by Jeanie Lau at UC Riverside, have demonstrated now that a graphene-based photodetector converts absorbed light into an electrical voltage at an extremely high speed.
"has recently been published in Nature Nanotechnology. The new device that the researchers developed is capable of converting light into electricity in less than 50 femtoseconds (a twentieth of a millionth of a millionth of a second.
To do this, the researchers used a combination of ultrafast pulse-shaped laser excitation and highly sensitive electrical readout.
Thus, the energy absorbed from light is efficiently and rapidly converted into electron heat. Next, the electron heat is converted into a voltage at the interface of two graphene regions with different doping.
This photo-thermoelectric effect turns out to occur almost instantaneously, thus enabling the ultrafast conversion of absorbed light into electrical signals.
As Prof. van Hulst states""it is amazing how graphene allows direct nonlinear detecting of ultrafast femtosecond (fs) pulses."
"The results obtained from the findings of this work, which has been funded partially by the EC Graphene Flagship,
open a new pathway towards ultra-fast optoelectronic conversion. As Prof. Koppens comments,"Graphene photodetectors keep showing fascinating performances addressing a wide range of applications
The discovery point towards the possibility of identifying aggressive melanomas at an earlier stage than is currently possible,
Pigment Cell & Melanoma Research. May be possible to predict disease progression It is the first time that the protein megalin,
which is known otherwise primarily for its function in the kidneys, has been connected with malignant melanomas. The novel knowledge is the result of longstanding research in the field of cell surface receptor proteins at the Department of Biomedicine at Aarhus University."
"Our studies have shown that the protein megalin is almost always detectable in malignant melanomas, while it is rarely found in the benign counterparts.
"says Associate professor Mette Madsen from the Department of Biomedicine at Aarhus University. With the new knowledge, the hope is that pathologists
and oncologists at an early stage will be able--unlike today--to predict whether a patient should expect spreading
and relapse or not from a malignant melanoma.""It is a new and interesting marker that no one has thought of before.
Even though we currently see considerable progress and success from novel treatment strategies for patients with metastatic melanoma,
it remains a very serious illness when it reaches later stages with spreading. In a best case scenario, this discovery can pinpoint those patients who will experience a relapse,
which patients the most,"says Henrik Schmidt, consultant at the Department of Oncology at Aarhus University Hospital,
either medicine affecting the protein and its function thereby inhibiting the proliferation of the cancer cells and their survival,
and could easily be introduced at the hospitals s
#Shape-shifting molecule tricks viruses into mutating themselves to death A newly developed spectroscopy method is helping to clarify the poorly understood molecular process by
which an anti-HIV drug induces lethal mutations in the virus's genetic material. The findings from the University of Chicago and the Massachusetts institute of technology could bolster efforts to develop the next generation of antiviral treatments.
Viruses can mutate rapidly in order to adapt to environmental pressure. This feature also helps them become resistant to antiviral drugs.
But scientists have developed therapeutic antiviral agents for HIV Hepatitis C, and influenza using a strategy called lethal mutagenesis.
This strategy seeks to extinguish viruses by forcing their already high mutation rates above an intolerable threshold.
If viruses experience too many mutations, they can't properly manage their genetic material.""They can't replicate
and so are eliminated quickly,"said Andrei Tokmakoff, the Henry G. Gale Distinguished Service Professor in Chemistry at UCHICAGO."
"In order to make this work, you need a stealth mutagen. You need something sneaky, something that the virus isn't going to recognize as a problem."
"Tokmakoff and his associates at UCHICAGO and MIT reported new details of the stealthy workings of the anti-HIV agent KP1212 last month in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Supporting data were collected with two-dimensional infrared spectroscopy, an advanced laser technique that combines ultrafast time resolution with high sensitivity to chemical structure.
Critical tool"Two-dimensional infrared spectroscopy will be critical on the path ahead. It lets us look at the structures that exist in aqueous solution,
which is the natural milieu of cells, "said study co-author John Essigmann, MIT's William and Betsy Leitch Professor of Chemistry,
Toxicology, and Biological engineering. Essigmann is cofounder of a pharmaceutical company that is developing mutagenic inhibitors of HIV."
"We also have done nuclear magnetic resonance, which is very informative, but those studies were done in organic solvents that probably do not as accurately provide a view of what happens in cells as did infrared the studies done by the Tokmakoff group,
"These analogs can bind to the wrong base partners and therefore lead to genetic mutations,"said the study's lead author, Sam Peng,
who completed his doctorate at MIT in 2014. KP1212 is a cytosine variation, which normally would pair with guanine during replication.
But biochemical experiments and clinical trials have shown that KP1212 induces mutations by pairing with adenine.
and non-protonated forms facilitated the viral mutation rate. Even in the absence of the protonated form, the virus still mutated, just at a lower rate."
and this protonated form induces even higher mutation rates, reaching approximately 50 percent, "Peng said.
The work taught his team how to create even more potent shape shifters--by decorating the KP1212 scaffold with groups of atoms and molecules that further raises their ability to capture protons."
"KP1212 is about 20 percent of the way toward being an ideal therapeutic mutagen. The hints given us by the spectroscopy guide us toward even better mutagenic molecules,
Tokmakoff's biological research involves proteins, not DNA. But together their research teams were able to fruitfully undertake one of the first 2d infrared spectroscopic studies of the therapeutic mechanism of an antiviral drug."
"This is how basic research works, "Tokmakoff said.""This is how so often you get transitions from basic research to real applications.
They can't be predicted
#Major advance in artificial photosynthesis poses win/win for the environment A potentially game-changing breakthrough in artificial photosynthesis has been achieved with the development of a system that can capture carbon dioxide emissions before they are vented into the atmosphere
and then, powered by solar energy, convert that carbon dioxide into valuable chemical products, including biodegradable plastics, pharmaceutical drugs and even liquid fuels.
Scientists with the U s. Department of energy (DOE)' s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and the University of California (UC) Berkeley have created a hybrid system of semiconducting nanowires and bacteria
that mimics the natural photosynthetic process by which plants use the energy in sunlight to synthesize carbohydrates from carbon dioxide and water.
However this new artificial photosynthetic system synthesizes the combination of carbon dioxide and water into acetate,
the most common building block today for biosynthesis."We believe our system is a revolutionary leap forward in the field of artificial photosynthesis,
"says Peidong Yang, a chemist with Berkeley Lab's Materials sciences Division and one of the leaders of this study."
and the Kavli Energy Nanosciences Institute (Kavli-ENSI) at Berkeley, is one of three corresponding authors of a paper describing this research in the journal Nano Letters.
The paper is titled"Nanowire-bacteria hybrids for unassisted solar carbon dioxide fixation to value-added chemicals.""The other corresponding authors and leaders of this research are chemists Christopher Chang and Michelle Chang.
In addition, Chris Chang is a Howard hughes medical institute (HHMI) investigator. The more carbon dioxide that is released into the atmosphere the warmer the atmosphere becomes.
Yet fossil fuels, especially coal, will remain a significant source of energy to meet human needs for the foreseeable future.
"In natural photosynthesis, leaves harvest solar energy and carbon dioxide is reduced and combined with water for the synthesis of molecular products that form biomass,
"says Chris Chang, an expert in catalysts for carbon-neutral energy conversions.""In our system, nanowires harvest solar energy and deliver electrons to bacteria,
where carbon dioxide is reduced and combined with water for the synthesis of a variety of targeted, value-added chemical products."
"By combining biocompatible light-capturing nanowire arrays with select bacterial populations, the new artificial photosynthesis system offers a win/win situation for the environment:
solar-powered green chemistry using sequestered carbon dioxide.""Our system represents an emerging alliance between the fields of materials sciences and biology,
where opportunities to make new functional devices can mix and match components of each discipline,
"says Michelle Chang, an expert in biosynthesis."For example, the morphology of the nanowire array protects the bacteria like Easter eggs buried in tall grass
so that these usually-oxygen sensitive organisms can survive in environmental carbon-dioxide sources such as flue gases."
"The system starts with an"artificial forest"of nanowire heterostructures, consisting of silicon and titanium oxide nanowires, developed earlier by Yang and his research group."
"Our artificial forest is similar to the chloroplasts in green plants, "Yang says.""When sunlight is absorbed, photo-excited electron?
hole pairs are generated in the silicon and titanium oxide nanowires, which absorb different regions of the solar spectrum.
The photo-generated electrons in the silicon will be passed onto bacteria for the CO2 reduction while the photo-generated holes in the titanium oxide split water molecules to make oxygen."
"Once the forest of nanowire arrays is established, it is populated with microbial populations that produce enzymes known to selectively catalyze the reduction of carbon dioxide.
For this study, the Berkeley team used Sporomusa ovata, an anaerobic bacterium that readily accepts electrons directly from the surrounding environment
and uses them to reduce carbon dioxide.""S. ovata is a great carbon dioxide catalyst as it makes acetate,
"We were able to uniformly populate our nanowire array with S. ovata using buffered brackish water with trace vitamins as the only organic component."
and catalytic activity that is made possible by the nanowire/bacteria hybrid technology. With this approach the Berkeley team achieved a solar energy conversion efficiency of up to 0. 38-percent for about 200 hours under simulated sunlight,
and 52-percent for the renewable and biodegradable plastic PHB. Improved performances are anticipated with further refinements of the technology."
#Electronic micropump to deliver treatments deep within the brain Drugs constitute the most widely used approach for treating brain disorders.
Epilepsy is a typical example of a condition for which many drugs could not be commercialised because of their harmful effects,
During an epileptic seizure, the nerve cells in a specific area of the brain are activated suddenly in an excessive manner.
and Swedish scientists led by Magnus Berggren from Linkping University, have developed a biocompatible micropump that makes it possible to deliver therapeutic substances directly to the relevant areas of the brain.
The micropump (20 times thinner than a hair) is composed of a membrane known as"cation exchange,"i e.,
the researchers reproduced the hyperexcitability of epileptic neurons in mouse brains in vitro. They then injected GABA,
by allowing very localised action, directly in the brain and without peripheral toxicity.""By combining electrodes,
such as those used to treat Parkinson's disease, with this micropump, it may be possible to use this technology to treat patients with epilepsy who are resistant to conventional treatments,
and those for whom the side-effects are too great, "explains Christophe Bernard, Inserm Research director. Based on these initial results, the researchers are now working to move on to an in vivo animal model
and the possibility of combining this high-technology system with the microchip they previously developed in 2013.
The device could be embedded and autonomous. The chip would be used to detect the imminent occurrence of a seizure
in order to activate the pump to inject the drug at just the right moment. It may therefore be possible to control brain activity where
In addition to epilepsy, this state-of-the-art technology, combined with existing drugs, offers new opportunities for many brain diseases that remain difficult to treat at this time e
#Genetics overlap found between Alzheimer's disease, cardiovascular risk factors The findings are published in current online issue of Circulation."
"For many years we have known that high levels of cholesterol and high levels of inflammation are associated with increased risks for Alzheimer's disease,
"said study co-author Paul M Ridker, MD, MPH, the Eugene Braunwald Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical school and director of the Center for Cardiovascular disease Prevention at Brigham and Women's Hospital."
"The current work finds that specific genetic signals explain a part of these relationships. We now need to characterize the function of these genetic signals
and see whether they can help us to design better trials evaluating inflammation inhibition as a possible method for Alzheimer's treatment."
"The researchers used summary statistics from genome-wide association studies of more than 200,000 individuals, looking for overlap in single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPS) associated with clinically diagnosed AD and CRP and the three components of total cholesterol:
DNA sequence or chromosome--linked to increased AD risk. The researchers next conducted a meta-analysis of these 55 variants across four independent AD study cohorts,
encompassing almost 145,000 persons with AD and healthy controls, revealing two genome-wide significant variants on chromosomes 4 and 10.
"Our findings indicate that a subset of genes involved with elevated plasma lipid levels and inflammation may also increase the risk for developing AD.
Elevated levels of plasma lipids and inflammation can be modified with treatment, which means it could be possible to identify
and therapeutically target individuals at increased risk for developing cardiovascular disease who are also at risk for developing Alzheimer's disease,
Phd, research fellow and radiology resident at the UC San diego School of medicine and the study's first author.
Late-onset AD is the most common form of dementia affecting an estimated 30 million persons worldwide--a number that is expected to quadruple over the next 40 years.
"Currently, there are no disease modifying therapies and much attention has been focused upon prevention and early diagnosis,"said Ole A. Andreassen, MD, Phd,
a senior co-author and professor of biological psychiatry at the University of Oslo in Norway."
"Delaying dementia onset by even just two years could potentially lower the worldwide prevalence of AD by more than 22 million cases over the next four decades,
resulting in significant societal savings
#New transitional stem cells discovered Preeclampsia is a disease that affects 5 to 8 percent of pregnancies in America.
Complications from this disease can lead to emergency cesarean sections early in pregnancies to save the lives of the infants and mothers.
Scientists believe preeclampsia is caused by a number of factors, including shallow placentas that are associated insufficiently with maternal blood vessels.
Now, researchers from the University of Missouri, in an effort to grow placenta cells to better study the causes of preeclampsia,
serendipitously discovered a previously unknown form of human embryonic stem cell. R. Michael Roberts a Curators Professor of Animal Science and a professor of biochemistry,
and his colleagues, says these new stem cells can help advance research on preeclampsia and a number of other areas of the human reproductive process."
"These new cells, which we are calling bone morphogenetic protein (BMP)- primed stem cells, are much more robust
what causes diseases like preeclampsia and other prenatal problems.""Embryonic stem cells are pluripotent, meaning they can develop into a number of different types of cells such as muscle cells, bone cells, skin cells, etc.
They also added two other drugs that temporarily inhibited key biochemical pathways associated with the pluripotent state of the stem cells.
meaning that all the cells in the culture are quite similar to each other in the way they express their genetic information."
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