Synthetic biologists are racing to come up with artificial versions of the building blocks of life.""We have been basically reinventing the genetic alphabet from the bottom up,
Hopes for such fake DNA range from developing new drugs to creating artificial life. In 2006, Benner and his colleagues built two bases,
AAAA or TTTT,"says Millie Georgiadis of Indiana University in Indianapolis. Because of the way they are joined together Romesberg's bases can't form such long runs.
Using X-ray crystallography they found that the bases could incorporate themselves into strands of both natural and unnatural bases that included runs of Z and P up to six bases long.
"The work is impressive, says Romesberg. The ZP pair"can really function like a GC or an AT,
#Gadgets powered wirelessly at home with a simple Wi-fi router Our homes are tangled a mess of wires and chargers.
Work is under way to use the Wi-fi signals that surround us to power our gadgets.
which modified electrical devices were put in their homes along with a Wi-fi router. Over 24 hours, the devices were powered solely by the router's signal,
which also continued to provide wireless internet access to the home. How was this possible? The energy of the radio waves the router sent out was converted into direct current voltage with a component called a rectifier,
much as solar panels convert light energy into electrical energy. That voltage was boosted then to a useful level by a DC-DC converter (arxiv. org/abs/1505.06815.
The system powered temperature sensors and battery-less low-resolution cameras, and charged standard batteries. The hard part is getting the router to constantly push out enough energy,
says team member Vamsi Talla from the University of Washington in Seattle. When someone is browsing the web,
the Wi-fi signal is active and can be used to power devices. However, when not browsing the signal goes quiet."
"With Wi-fi for communications, you only want to transmit when you have data to send, "Talla says."
"But for power delivery, you want to transmit something all the time. There's a clear mismatch.""To get around this, the team designed software that broadcasts meaningless data across several Wi-fi channels
when no one is using the internet. Small devices could use this as part of an internet of things,
says Ben Potter at the University of Reading, UK.""Where we're heading is to have more sensors in everything around us,
"he says.""Innovations with microchips mean they can run with less power. For that type of application, this is interesting technology."
"The problem is that Wi-fi is never going to provide a very powerful signal. Wi-fi is regulated tightly in many countries the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC), for example, limits the power of a Wi-fi broadcast to 1 watt.
An iphone charger delivers at least 5 watts and has no other demands on its output. One company with a solution is Ossia in Bellevue, Washington.
It has called a system Cota that gets around the FCC regulations by designing a wireless hub that transmits waves at a Wi-fi frequency
but doesn't send a communications signal. The Cota setup can produce up to 20 watts
but would only deliver 1 watt to a single phone. CEO Hatem Zeine says that's enough to charge an iphone 5 several times over in a single day
if it has constant access to the signal.""Unlike Wi-fi, our power signal is unmodulated,
"says Zeine.""It's a continuous wave, there's no message in it.""A receiver chip on the device being charged tells the hub which of Cota's thousands of antennas it is receiving signals from.
Those antennas alone are kept active and the system is able to ignore other objects in the room,
such as a human body. Eric Woods, an IT infrastructure researcher at consultancy firm Navigant in London, thinks there will be demand for this type of technology for the many sensors that will fill the smart homes and cities of the future.
Sensors powered by Wi-fi could be used to monitor air quality or the status of systems across a city
says Woods.""Removing the need to think about batteries takes away one of the barriers to the exploitation of those technologies,
"he says
#World's first biolimb: Rat forelimb grown in the lab IT MIGHT look like an amputated rat forelimb,
but the photo above is of something much more exciting: the limb has been grown in the lab from living cells.
It may go down in history as the first step to creating real, biologically functional limbs for amputees."
"We're focusing on the forearm and hand to use it as a model system
and proof of principle,"says Harald Ott of Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, who grew the limb."
"But the techniques would apply equally to legs, arms and other extremities.""""This is science fiction coming to life,
"says Daniel Weiss at the University of Vermont College of Medicine in Burlington, who works on lung regeneration."
"It's a very exciting development, but the challenge will be to create a functioning limb."
"Many amputees receive artificial replacements that look fine cosmetically, but don't function as well as real limbs.
And while bionic replacement limbs that work wellmovie Camera are now being mademovie Camera, they look unnatural.
Hand transplants have also been successful, but the recipient needs lifelong immunosuppressive drugs to prevent their body rejecting the hand.
A biolimb would get round many of these obstacles as it only contains cells from the recipient so would avoid the need for immunosuppression.
It should also look and behave naturally.""This is the first attempt to make a biolimb,
The scaffold is nourished then in a bioreactor enabling new tissue to grow and colonise the scaffold.
Ott began by suspending the decellularised forelimb in a bioreactor, plumbing the collagen artery into an artificial circulatory system to provide nutrients, oxygen and electrical stimulation to the limb.
Ott finished off the limb by coating the forelimbs with skin grafts (Biomaterials, doi. org/4w7.
But would the limb's muscles work? To find out, the team used electrical pulses to activate the muscles
Results of hand transplants show that this happens through the recipient's nerve tissue penetrating into the hand
Whether this also works in regenerated limbs remains to be seen. Ott and his colleagues have shown also that a primate forearm can be successfully decellularised (see photo, below.
"says Steve Badylak of the University of Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania, who has used grafts built on scaffolds made from pig muscle to rebuild damaged leg muscles in 13 people."
"Of these, the circulation is probably the biggest challenge, and making sure even the tiniest capillaries are lined successfully with endothelial cells
taking known fundamental principles of biology and applying them as an engineer would.""Others are more critical."
"says Oskar Aszmann of the Medical University of Vienna in Austria, inventor of a bionic hand that people can control through their own thoughtsmovie Camera."
it must at this stage remain in the academic arena, not as a clinical scenario."
while muscle cells could come from biopsies from large muscles, such as in the thigh.""If you took about 5 grams, the size of a finger,
"At present, if you lose an arm, a leg or soft tissue as part of cancer treatment or burns,
but what about that time you had measles or was it chicken pox? Your blood knows:
It could also be used to identify links between viral infections and mysterious diseases like chronic fatigue syndrome.
our immune cells respond by producing antibodies that neutralise it when they bind to specific proteins on its surface.
These antibodies continue to be made long after the virus has been cleared from our body ready to mount a quicker response should it return.
If antibodies target it then the virus has infected the person in the past. var ord=window. ord Math. floor (Math. random()*10e12;
and could help doctors identify hidden infections.""A lot of people have hepatitis C, for example, without realising,"says Elledge.
You could imagine routinely screening people in this way, he says. To develop Virscan, Elledge and his colleagues used an international database to look up all viruses known to infect humans around 1000 strains from 206 viral species. Using this information,
they recreated the DNA in each virus that's responsible for making its proteins, and put the DNA segments into individual bacteriophages viruses that infect bacteria.
When someone's blood is mixed with the bacteriophage brew any circulating antibodies latch on to the associated proteins on the bacteriophages.
Sequencing these bacteriophages then reveals the person's viral history. David Matthews at Bristol University in the UK thinks the best use of Virscan might lie outside of diagnostics,
considering we already have quick and easy tests for individual viruses."Usually when you've got a set of symptoms,
doctors have a pretty good idea of what you've got, "he says. Moreover, the immune system takes a
while to make antibodies, so you might not find a strong antibody response in the early stages of an infection.
The test would also not be able to distinguish between antibodies made as a result of an infection and those triggered by a vaccine.
Instead the technique might be useful in outbreaks of new viruses. Understanding how our immune system responds to other viral fragments might reveal clues as to
which family the new virus belongs to, says Pamela Vallely at the University of Manchester, UK."
"If we'd have had this test during the HIV outbreak in the 1980s, it would have given us a clue for where to be looking to find out more about the virus,
For example, Elledge's team will be collaborating with another group to test people with chronic fatigue syndrome,
to see if they might have been infected with any of the same viruses."Multiple sclerosis is wheeled usually out as being linked to a virus,
"The team used the test to screen blood samples from 569 people from four countries the US, South africa, Thailand and Peru.
Matthews thinks it would be worth extending the screen to animal populations. He envisages screening wild populations of animals thought to be linked to emerging diseases."
"You could test the wild bat population to get a good idea of what viruses are out there,
At the same time, farm animals could be screened comprehensively. Farmers that are able to identify viruses affecting the health
or yields of their herds might be able to halt the spread of those viruses,
Wiring friendly bacteria to take out disease Matthew Wook Chang has opened an academy for assassins. His trainees are deadly.
It can wreak havoc in hospital wards, in the lungs of those with cystic fibrosis, and in the guts of premature babies.
In 2013, Chang put his assassins through their paces in a lab flask. They have since been hanging out in the guts of mice
Trine Olsen and Frederik Ekholm Gaardsted Christensen, students from the University of South Denmark in Odense, made the discovery
while injecting magnetic microchips into starfish to track their movements for a project. To their frustration, the animals would somehow rid themselves of the tags within a few days.
watching a starfish pop the chip out through the end of one of its arms (see video, above.
they were able to track the movement of one of the chips through its body until it was released."
"This is roughly equivalent to getting rid of a bullet lodged between your lungs by squeezing it out through your forehead,
"says Daniel Levitis, the project supervisor. The team is interested in how this unique ability evolved and
and shell enter a wound. They can also self-amputate if they get too hot,
#Laser'tricorder'can diagnose malaria through the skin It's a weapon that fights malaria a laser scan can give an accurate diagnosis in seconds,
without breaking the skin, just like the fictional tricorder in Star trek. It works by pulsing energy into a vein in a person's wrist or earlobe.
but is absorbed by hemozoin waste crystals that are produced by the malaria parasite Plasmodium falciparum when it feeds on blood.
When the crystals absorb this energy, they warm the surrounding blood plasma, making it bubble. An oscilloscope placed on the skin alongside the laser senses these nanoscale bubbles
when they start popping, detecting malaria infections in only 20 seconds.""It's the first true noninvasive diagnostic,
"says Dmitri Lapotko of Rice university in Houston, Texas, whose team used the probe to correctly identify which person had malaria in a test of six individuals.
They even managed to use the device to show whether dead mosquitoes were carrying the parasite.
Malaria threatens half the world's population, killing 584,000 people in 2013. Existing tests for malaria are already quick,
taking only 15 to 20 minutes to give a diagnosis, but they could be simpler.
Blood has to be taken, the test has to be conducted by trained personnel to get reliable results,
battery-powered device the size of a shoebox would house everything associated with the small probe, with no other reagents, facilities or specialist personnel required.
"The possibility of diagnosing a malaria infection with the device, without any blood-taking and with results available in seconds will provide a fantastic new tool for the control
and eventual elimination of malaria,"says Umberto D'Alessandro of the UK Medical Research Council Unit in Gambia."
and its capability of identifying infections with low densities of parasites in the blood,"says D'Alessandro,
if a patient has a dark skin a potentially huge pitfall given that children living in Africa account for the majority of malaria deaths.
#Finally, a way to catch symptomless pancreatic cancer in time It's the sneakiest of cancers and as many as 80 per cent of cases are identified too late.
The disease has one of the worst cancer survival rates, with less than 4 per cent of people living for five years or more after diagnosis. A major cause of this is that
by the time symptoms start appearing, pancreatic cancer is advanced often too to treat successfully. The disease is identified only in time for curative surgery in about 15 per cent of people
so early diagnosis is crucial for improving survival rates. Now, researchers have identified a protein that is present in the blood at much higher levels
when a person has the disease, giving us a way to test for it. The protein, glypican-1, sticks out from the surface of exosomes little globules that are thought to bud off from pancreatic cancer cells.
Other cells in the body also produce these exosomes, but they seem to carry much less of this protein.
Raghu Kalluri of the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston found that there is so much more glypican-1 in people with pancreatic cancer that a blood test can be used to accurately distinguish them from both healthy controls and people with the disease pancreatitis."
"The margin is always large enough to detect cancer exosomes, "says Kalluri. When to test?"
"says Nell Barrie of the charity Cancer Research UK.""This could, in turn, one day offer a way to spot diseases like pancreatic cancer at a much earlier stage,
although there is much more work to be done to develop this into an actual test, "she says.
But Kalluri hopes a test for pancreatic cancer based on his team's findings can be made available soon.
and have a family history of the disease. The test could also be used for tracking the progress of therapies
and recovery, says Kalluri. His team found that the concentration of glypican-1 increases with the disease's severity,
potentially providing doctors with a measure for how advanced the cancer is and a way to monitor the effectiveness of treatments.
Former Apple CEO Steve jobs and actor Patrick Swayze both had pancreatic cancer, which is so deadly partly because of its limited treatment options, with few new and effective drugs and therapies available l
#What is artificial blood and why is the UK going to trial it? Artificial blood will soon be tested in the UK for the first time.
In other words, the goal is to find an alternative to oxygen-carrying red blood cells that could be used for transfusions.
Today, the UK National Health service announced it plans to start transfusing people with artificial blood by 2017 the first clinical trials of this kind anywhere in the world.
One such product Hemopure is based on bovine haemoglobin, and was approved for human use in South africa back in 2001.
Will it work? It should do. Robert Lanza, chief scientific officer at Ocata Therapeutics formerly Advanced Cell Technology-in Marlborough, Massachusetts,
and his colleagues first grew red blood cells on a large scale in the lab in 2008. In 2011, Luc Douay at Pierre and Marie Curie University in Paris, France,
and his colleagues performed the first small transfusion of such lab-grown red blood cells into human volunteers.
These cells behaved just like normal red blood cells, with about 50 per cent still circulating in the blood 26 days after the transfusion.
So there are no more hurdles to overcome? Perhaps there is still one volume. Douay said in 2011 that it will be a big challenge to scale up the technology to generate enough artificial cells for regular transfusion.
In his team's experiment, they injected 10 billion artificial cells into volunteers, but that's equivalent to only 2 millilitres of blood.
Even then, they produced about a twentieth of the number of cells that would be needed for a single transfusion.
may be useful for testing new drugs or monitoring diseases. We've levitated living things using magnets before,
but we didn't have the delicate touch required to control magnetic fields precisely enough to levitate smaller objects."
Understanding the varied responses of cells could be a great boon to testing out new drugs and diagnosing diseases,
"This whole levitation thing exploits unusual magnetic properties of very weird elements,"says William Grover of the University of California Riverside.
useful for picking out rare cells needed in a diagnosis. Grover's reservations are echoed by George Whitesides of Harvard university,
"Now what has to be done is the hard work that comes with any new analytical method a
#Infrared light speeds up healing by turbocharging our cells A near infrared laser beam makes it easier for a nanoscale probe to pass through water (Image:
Shining red light on skin or cells in a dish gives an instant energy boost that could help heal wounds,
relieve pain and perhaps help male infertility and other medical conditions. The curious healing effect has been known for decades researchers have been investigating its use in eye injuries
since 2002 but why it works has been a mystery. It turns out the explanation could be simple and yet strange:
the red light seems to alter the physical properties of water, which turbocharges the chemical reactions that provide a cell's energy.
The revelation has come from work led by Andrei Sommer of the University of Ulm in Germany. var ord=window. ord Math. floor (Math. random()*10e12;
document. write(''''The effect on cells of near-infrared light, which has a wavelength of 670 nanometres,
was reported first 40 years ago. The light causes mitochondria, the cell's powerhouses, to produce more ATP, a compound that provides the cell's energy.
Until now, the best explanation was that an important respiration enzyme called cytochrome C is affected by the near-infrared energy,
but we now know that it doesn't absorb light at quite the right frequency.
The work from Sommer's team now points at the water within the cell. Normally the layer of water next to any solid object has high surface tension
making it viscous.""It's like molasses, "says Sommer. His team found that when surface layers of water are illuminated with the red light,
It spins like a molecular turbine, and being surrounded by runnier water should make it turn more easily,
the team measured the effect of near-infrared light on thin layers of water by examining the friction on a diamond probe as it pushed through water
"says Horst-Dieter Försterling of the Philipp University of Marburg in Germany.""This is the first explanation of how the light might work."
"Other research groups are investigating this phenomenon as a way to speed up the healing of skin wounds
and to repair burns to the eye. It may also be able to reduce pain and inflammation in tissues underneath the skin.
whether red light shone into mice's heads using fibre optics can help with Parkinson's disease. A better understanding of how red light affects cells should make it easier to expand its medical uses,
says Sommer.""If we start from an incorrect model then everything is trial and error.""One of the next applications could be in helping couples undergoing IVF because of problems with male fertility.
Some men's sperm do not have enough energy to fertilise an egg in a lab,
says IVF doctor Friedrich Gagsteiger of the Fertility Centre in Ulm. Gagsteiger has investigated previously other ways of giving sperm more oomph,
but also seems to be toxic. Gagsteiger is now starting tests of irradiating sperm with the near-infrared light before fertilisation."
#Smart mirror monitors your face for telltale signs of disease Mirror mirror on the wall, am I at risk of heart disease?
multispectral cameras and gas sensors to assess the health of someone looking into it. It does this by examining the person face,
Facial recognition software looks for telltale markers of stress or anxiety, while the gas sensors take samples of the user breath looking for compounds that give an indication of how much they drink or smoke.
The 3d scanners analyse face shape to spot weight gain or loss while the multispectral cameras can estimate heart rate or haemoglobin levels.
After the software has analysed the face which only takes about a minute the mirror produces a score that tells the user how healthy they seem.
It also displays personalised advice on how to improve their health. Wize Mirror is being developed by a consortium of researchers
and industry partners from seven European union countries, with EU funding. Sara Colantonio and colleagues from the National Research Council of Italy,
which coordinates the project, want to use Wize Mirror to address common long-term health issues that are difficult to treat once something has gone already wrong,
like heart disease or diabetes. Need for prevention revention is the most viable approach to reduce the socioeconomic burden of chronic and widespread diseases,
such as cardiovascular and metabolic diseases, they write. Clinical trials of the device will begin next year at three sites in France
and Italy, aiming to compare its readings with those from traditional medical devices. Consumer technology that can read signals from the body to interpret underlying physical
and mental health is on the cusp of becoming part of everyday life. For example, Cardiio, originally developed at the Massachusetts institute of technology
is an app that uses a smartphone camera to monitor blood levels in the face
and tell you your heart rate. At MIT Media Lab, Javier Hernandez has looked at using mirrors for health monitoring.
He also developed a program called Senseglass, which uses Google glass and other wearables to measure someone mood
says Matja Humar of Harvard Medical school. The feat allows cells to be labelled and monitored more accurately,
which could boost our ability to track the spread of diseases such as cancer. Humar and his colleagues developed three ways to get cells to emit visible light.
They also scattered polystyrene beads 10 micrometres wide into a Petri dish filled with macrophages a type of white blood cell that ingests foreign material.
The first two approaches were tested on human cells, the last on pig cells. A shining achievement (Image:
Humar results echo research published last week by Malte Gather and his group at the University of St andrews
Gather work, which focuses exclusively on the macrophage route to converting cells into lasers, goes further in laying out its potential applications.
and migrate to the affected sites. We could also use this technique to study the early development of complex organisms,
it can officially take Nigeria off the list of countries where the disease is endemic.
The vaccination drive has been dogged by political corruption rumours the vaccine was contaminated with HIV and violence nine health workers were killed by terrorist group Boko Haram in 2013.
Nigeria has come close to eradicating the disease several times before, only for it to re-emerge. But this is the longest the country has gone without reporting a case,
says Rosenbaum. The road to zero cases The only places where the disease still circulates regularly are Afghanistan and Pakistan,
which have reported 5 and 28 cases of polio respectively this year. For each of these, there will be around 199 other people who are infected but symptomless
spreading the virus. A handful of other countries such as Somalia, Iraq and EG occasionally report the odd case,
but not enough so that the disease would be considered endemic there. Both Afghanistan and Pakistan are making progress with their vaccination campaigns,
but too many children are missed, partly due to the difficulties in reaching people in rural areas with poor infrastructure,
A lack of international funding for the vaccination campaigns is also a problem, says Rosenbaum.
and unless we get to zero cases wee not going to finish this disease, says Rosenbaum. igeria will need to keep immunising and protecting the population. i
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