according to Restorative Neurology and Neuroscience reporthuman stem cells can be differentiated to produce other cell types, such as organ cells, skin cells, or brain cells.
In a new study published in Restorative Neurology and Neuroscience, researchers report successfully growing multiple brain structures
Mesencephalic dopaminergic (mda) neurons and their connections to other neurons in the brain are believed to be related to disorders including drug abuse, schizophrenia, Parkinson disease,
and perhaps eating disorders, attention deficit-hyperactivity disorder, Tourette syndrome, and Lesch-Nyhan syndrome. However, studying mda neurons and neocortical neurons in isolation does not reveal much data about how these cells actually interact in these conditions.
This new capability to grow and interconnect two types of neurons in vitro now provides researchers with an excellent model for further study. his method,
therefore, has the potential to expand the potential of hpsc-derived neurons to allow for studies of human neural systems
#Tumour in a petri dish a way to a personalized cancer treatment Cancer is still one of those diagnoses that make people weak in their knees
That is why innovative cancer treatments are always in the spotlight of attention and that is why scientists have been puzzling how to treat cancer for a long time.
They understand that not every case is the same, individuals need individual treatment. And now scientists from the University of Wisconsin-Madison completed highly successful,
first-of-its-kind endeavour to create tumour in a petri dish. This is an important achievement as it will allow for personalized treatments in the future.
said that this research is one of the first steps of mimicking the body of the cancer patient in a dish.
The methods of creating such environment in laboratory are complicated rather. The researchers produced testing process,
which involves co-culturing multiple myeloma tumour cells with their surrounding cells that do not have cancer, all from the same patient, in a micro scale petri dish.
Then scientists treated this cancer in a dish with common drug called bortezomib, which is used often to treat myeloma,
and it only took them three days to see if treatment is effective or not.
The idea behind the research was to include environment of the tumour too, not just the tumour itself,
so in is a universally fatal cancer. It is treatable but incurable. It rises in the blood marrow due to an accumulation of abnormal,
or cancerous, plasma cells and current median survival rate only reaches about five to seven years.
or testing process, may not help to reach the breakthrough in searching for cure for cancer.
Multiple myeloma is most likely to remain a universally fatal cancer until some major scientific discoveries are made.
However, it can save many multiple myeloma cancer patients the psychological stress of having to try multiple drugs until they find the most effective one.
Cancer is still able to interact with its surroundings as well as treatment, but outside of the body.
Scientists are already thinking how to expand this assay to test responsiveness to different drugs of other cancers as well.
This may not be a tool to cure cancer, but it will surely help cancer patients to receive personalized treatments.
It will reduce stress they get through usual trial and error method and will make treatment that a little bit less tormenting.
Which is very good news to many patients and to their families i
#Scientists announce first room-temperature magnetic skyrmion bubbles Researchers at UCLA and the U s. Department of energy Argonne National Laboratory announced a new method for creating magnetic skyrmion bubbles at room temperature.
and compact electronics, can be created with simple equipment and common materials. ur new method is the simplest way to generate skyrmion bubbles thus far,
If you wrapped one up into a sphere, its magnetic fields would point away in all different directionso they stay in neat little packages
Scientists found they could prod these skyrmions to move using electric currents, and an idea was born:
could we use them to represent 1s and 0s in computer memory? Transistors, which form the basis of today computing,
are tiny devices that stop the flow of electric current (off and on, 1 and 0). But there a limit to how small we can make them,
and wee running up against it. Scientists want to find a way to create 1 and 0 by using physics phenomena that don actually change the atomic structure of the materialor example,
very low temperatures (below-450 degrees Fahrenheit) with expensive equipment like spin-polarized scanning tunneling microscopesot practical for making consumer devices like laptops,
Using the Center for Nanoscale Materials a DOE Office of Science user facility at Argonne, they built a constricted wire out of a three-layered structure in
which a tiny layer of magnetic material is sandwiched between tantalum and tantalum-oxide layers. Long stripes of magnetic domains appear in the magnetic material on one side of a tiny channel.
When the scientists applied an electric current to the metal layers, the stripes stretched through the channel
and broke into tiny spherical skyrmion bubbles on the other sideuch like how children blow soap bubbles.
By running a smaller electric current through the system they could make the skyrmions move: hese aren exotic materialsheye widely used already in the magnetics industry,
said Argonne materials scientist Axel Hoffmann, the corresponding author on the paper. The electric current needed to move the skyrmions is much lower than
what used in other experimental memory alternatives, like racetrack memory, he said. ith this system we can explore many of the theoretical ideas on skyrmion physics that have been proposed over the past few years,
#Scientists construct first whole genome sequence of bighorn sheep Geneticists at the University of Alberta have constructed the first whole genome sequence of a bighorn sheep in a new study that could have a significant impact on conservation efforts of the species,
which is native to Alberta. ighorn sheep are an important symbol of Alberta and Canada wild spaces.
as a result of human exploitation and disease-related die offs, says Joshua Miller, Phd student in the Department of Biological sciences and lead author on the study. hus,
there is active interest in how best to manage the species to ensure their long-term survival.
To construct a whole genome sequence, the DNA is first run through a sequencer to identify small strings of building blocks, called nucleotides.
The strings of nucleotides are joined then together to produce a complete picture. he process of ordering the nucleotides into a genome is much like assembling a jigsaw puzzle,
explains Miller. here are then two ways to try and connect the pieces: de novo assembly or alignment to a reference.
which uses an existing genome sequence as a reference point to streamline the process. ere, one starts with the same jigsaw pieces,
and for genome sequencing this usually results in a much more complete picture being put together in less time than de novo assembly.
In this case, the reference used for alignment was the already complete whole genome sequence of a domestic sheep.
Full genome sequences are still relatively rare; for context, only 108 mammals are listed in the National Center for Biotechnology Information database. ntil recently,
generating a genome sequence of any organism was nearly impossible, notes Miller. The majority of organisms sequenced so far have been domestic laboratory species such as fruit flies or lab mice.
But as Miller notes, this also tends to create an incomplete picture. here is an implicit problem
With advances in DNA sequencing technology and computer processing the process is now efficient and cost-effective enough to be useful in obtaining whole genome sequences of wildlife species, like bighorn sheep.
This opens new avenues of research such as using genomics to plan conservation and management actions for at-risk species. Constructing a whole genome sequence of the bighorn sheep will also help by providing a reference for new studies,
which may make it possible to connect specific pieces of DNA with traits of interestor example,
As a game species, the trophy status of a bighorn sheep ram is based largely on horn size.
Because the rams with the largest horns are often the ones targeted by hunters their removal from a population could then eliminate the genetic ability of animals in that population to grow large horns.
using genomic methods learned over the course of his Phd to identify individuals that can be part of a captive breeding program u
and toxic agents are studied. y developing this omo minutus, we are stepping beyond the need for animal or Petri dish testing:
and toxicity analysis systems that can mimic the response of actual human organs, said Rashi Iyer, a senior scientist at Los alamos National Laboratory.
lung and kidney each organ component is about the size of a smartphone screen, and the whole ATHENA odyof interconnected organs will fit neatly on a desk.
A new video available from the Los alamos National Laboratory Youtube channel updates the ATHENA project as it begins to integrate the various organ systems into a single system.
Providing a realistic, cost-effective and rapid screening system such as ATHENA with high-throughput capabilities could provide major benefits to the medical field,
and is a collaboration of Los alamos National Laboratory, Harvard university, Vanderbilt University, Charité Universitätsmedizin, Berlin, Germany, CFD Research Coporation,
and the University of California San francisco o
#Revolutionary New High-speed Infrared detector Sees First Light The first prototype of a new generation of fast and very sensitive detectors has been installed successfully on the PIONIER instrument at ESO Paranal Observatory.
This achievement is the result of five years of sustained collaboration and effort from academic institutes (LETI, ONERA, IPAG, LAM) and industrial partners (SOFRADIR.
ranging from fundamental science to medicine. In astronomy, it will boost the performance of adaptive optics, a technology at the heart of the European Extremely Large telescope (E-ELT.
Unlike most of the commercially available detectors, RAPID can spot photons (light particles) of both visible and infrared light (wavelengths from 0. 4. 6 micrometres.
PIONIER was chosen as its interferometric combination of light requires a very fast detector to fight against atmospheric turbulence,
and the detector was exploited then immediately for purely scientific pursuits. t is an historic moment
he former detector on PIONIER is more than 20 years old and was considered still among the best of its type.
This illustrates how hard we had to work to get this new generation in hand. The exquisite sensitivity of RAPID is based on the avalanche effect.
Every photon arriving into the detector is converted into many more than one electron, therefore easing its detection.
This multiplication is almost perfect, with only a very small amount of excess noise being introduced.
The avalanche effect is obtained without having to cool the detector to extremely low temperatures avoiding the use of a complex cooling system,
which considerably simplifies the detector packaging and operations. As an example, it took only two days for the team to install this brand new revolutionary camera inside PIONIER i
#An origami battery that generates power from bacteria An engineer at Binghamton University has created a flexible, origami-style battery.
A battery that can create energy from a drop of bacteria-containing liquid is already a fantastic achievement,
But now Seokheun eanchoi, engineer from Binghamton University, has developed an inexpensive, bacteria-powered battery made from paper.
Just like origami sculptures. This device is not a conventional battery we all know and use.
It generates power from microbial respiration. To explain simply, it extracts power from bacteria the process delivers enough energy to run a paper-based biosensor with nothing more than a drop of bacteria-containing liquid.
The inventor himself said that ny type of organic material can be the source of bacteria for the bacterial metabolism This is great news,
Scientists hope that these new batteries would eliminate such need. Seokheun Choi has envisioned a self-powered system in
which a paper-based battery would create enough energy to run the biosensor. Such sensors do not require a lot of power few microwatts would be enough.
This device would be a great leap forward in cheap medical devices for underdeveloped countries, where simple medical care,
which is taken for granted in Western world, could save many lives. Obviously, when such vision is created,
This paper battery costs around 5 U s. dollar cents. Only 5 cents costing device that is so innovative that can produce power from dirty water would seem as science fiction some time ago,
It is made of simple ordinary office paper on one side there is inexpensive air-breathing cathode created with nickel sprayed on
on another side the anode is screen printed with carbon paints, creating a hydrophilic zone with wax boundaries.
and managed to light up a small LED. This just once again proves that science creates very small yet very important devices.
Such simple and cost effective device could change how we look at batteries for variety of different sensors.
However, more research will have to be done until the origami battery will find its practical application. Source:
#Leaving on a Biofueled Jet plane The problem is simple to understand. Molecules of carbon and other greenhouse gases absorb heat.
the warmer the atmosphere becomes, exacerbating global climate change. Solving the problem is not so simple, especially with regards to aviation the source of two-percent of the annual greenhouse gas emissions from human activity.
While biofuels have proven to be an effective, renewable, low-carbon alternative to gasoline and diesel, jet fuels pose unique challenges.
These challenges have now been met with a new technique developed by researchers at the Energy Biosciences Institute (EBI
a partnership led by the University of California (UC) Berkeley that includes Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign,
and the BP energy company. ee combined chemical catalysis with life-cycle greenhouse gas modeling to create a new process for producing bio-based aviation fuel as well as automotive lubricant base oils,
a chemical engineer with joint appointments at Berkeley Lab and UC Berkeley. he recyclable catalysts we developed are capable of converting sugarcane biomass into a new class of aviation fuel and lubricants with superior cold
density and viscosity that could achieve net life-cycle greenhouse gas savings of up to 80-percent. Bell is one of three corresponding authors of a paper describing this research in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS.
and lubricants from biomass optimized using life-cycle greenhouse gas assessment. Corinne Scown, a research scientist with Berkeley Lab Energy Analysis and Environmental impacts Division,
and Dean Toste, a chemist with joint appointments at Berkeley Lab and UC Berkeley, are the other two corresponding authors.
Additional authors are are Madhesan Balakrishnan, Eric Sacia, Sanil Sreekumar, Gorkem Gunbas and Amit Gokhale.
Biofuels synthesized from the sugars in plant biomass help mitigate climate change. However jet fuels have stringent requirements that must be met. et fuels must be oxygen-free,
have the right boiling point distribution and lubricity, and a very low pour point, meaning the fuel can become gelatinous in the cold temperatures of the stratosphere,
but offer only modest greenhouse gas reduction benefits. Ours is the first process to generate true drop in aviation biofuels.
Scown cites the Intergovernmental panel on climate change (IPCC) on the importance of drop in aviation biofuels. n a 2014 report
because batteries and fuel cells simply aren practical. The process developed at EBI can be used to selectively upgrade alkyl methyl ketones derived from sugarcane biomass into trimer condensates with better than 95-percent yields.
These condensates are deoxygenated then hydro into a new class of cycloalkane compounds that contain a cyclohexane ring and a quaternary carbon atom.
Lubricant base oils can produce even more greenhouse gas emissions on a per-mass basis than petroleum-derived fuels
sugar and electricity, says PNAS paper co-author Gokhale, a chemical engineer, who is managing the research project from BP side. xpanding the product slate to include aviation fuels
and lubricant base oils could allow for operators to manage their market risks better, which is exactly how petrochemical refinery complexes operate today.
Rather than optimize for one product, they try to optimize the overall product slate. Adds Scown,
nother important advantage offered by our process is that it enables refineries to convert a portion of the bagasse,
the fibrous residue that remains after juice is extracted from sugarcane stalk, into fuels and other products.
The rest of the waste biomass can be combusted to produce process heat and electricity to operate the refinery.
This new EBI process for making jet fuel and lubricants could also be used to make diesel
and additives for gasoline as Gokhale explains. ith some minimal modifications to both the catalysts
and the reaction schemes we can produce drop in diesel as well, he says. ee planning further studies on this.
Although the goal of this study was to develop a strategy for the flexible production of jet fuels and lubricant base oils in a Brazilian sugarcane refinery,
the strategy behind the process could also be applied to biomass from other non-food plants
and agricultural waste that are fermented by genetically engineered microbes. lthough there are some additional technical challenges associated with using sugars derived entirely from biomass feedstocks like Miscanthus
In their PNAS paper the authors acknowledge that the commercial implementation of their proposed process would include financial implications that extend beyond greenhouse gas emission reductions
but hold that there still important incentives to encourage investments. ee shown in this study that biorefineries can use inexpensive catalysts to produce a suite of hydrocarbon fuels and lubricants,
Scown says. y strategically piecing together biological and thermochemical processes, biorefineries can also operate without any fossil-derived inputs. o
#Research Simplifies Recycling of Rare-earth Magnets Despite their ubiquity in consumer electronics, rare-earth metals are,
as their name suggests, hard to come by. Mining and purifying them is an expensive, labor-intensive and ecologically devastating process.
Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania have pioneered now a process that could enable the efficient recycling two of these metals, neodymium and dysprosium.
In contrast to the massive and energy-intensive industrial process currently used to separate rare earths, the Penn team method works nearly instantaneously at room temperature and uses standard laboratory equipment.
Sourcing neodymium and dysprosium from used electronics rather than the ground would increase their supply at a fraction of the financial, human and environment cost.
The research was lead by Eric Schelter, assistant professor in the Department of chemistry in Penn School of arts & Sciences,
and graduate student Justin Bogart. Connor A. Lippincott, an undergraduate student in the Vagelos Integrated Program in Energy Research,
and Patrick J. Carroll, director of the University of Pennsylvania X-ray Crystallography Facility, also contributed to the study.
It was published in Angewandte Chemie, International Edition. eodymium magnets can be beat in terms of their properties,
the two metals need to be separated and remixed before they can be reused. t, in principle, easier to get the neodymium
and mine more of the minerals they are originally found in, Schelter said. hose minerals have five elements to separate,
whereas the neodymium magnet in a wind turbine generator only has two. Currently, whether purifying the neodymium and dysprosium out of minerals or out of an old power tool motor
the same costly and energy-intensive process is used. The technique, known as liquid-liquid extraction, involves dissolving the composite material
and chemically filtering the elements apart. The process is repeated thousands of times to get useful purities of the rare-earth metals,
and so it must be conducted on an industrial scale. Rather than this liquid-liquid method, Schelter team has devised a way to separate the two metals by having neodymium stay dissolved in a solution
and dysprosium drop out as a solid. Their method can, in a matter of minutes, separate an equal mixture of the two elements into samples that are 95 percent pure.
Starting with the two elements as a mixed powder a metal-binding molecule known as a ligand is applied.
The type of ligand the research team designed has three branches, which converge on the metal atoms and hold them in the aperture between their tips.
enabling the two metals to be separated easily. Once apart, an acid bath can strip the ligand off both metals,
enabling it to be recycled as well. f you have the right ligand, you can do this separation in five minutes,
Future work will involve improving the stability of the ligand so it is less likely to fall off before the metals are separated.
Further modification of the ligand could enable other rare earths in technology products, such as compact fluorescent light bulbs, to be recycled this way n
#New imaging technique could make brain tumor removal safer, more effective Brain surgery is famously difficult for good reason:
When removing a tumor, for example, neurosurgeons walk a tightrope as they try to take out as much of the cancer as possible
while keeping crucial brain tissue intact and visually distinguishing the two is often impossible. Now Johns Hopkins researchers report they have developed an imaging technology that could provide surgeons with a color-coded map of a patient brain showing
which areas are and are not cancer. A summary of the research appears June 17 in Science Translational Medicine. s a neurosurgeon,
I in agony when I taking out a tumor. If I take out too little the cancer could come back;
too much, and the patient can be disabled permanently, says Alfredo Quinones-Hinojosa, M d.,a professor of neurosurgery,
neuroscience and oncology at the Johns hopkins university School of medicine and the clinical leader of the research team. e think optical coherence tomography has strong potential for helping surgeons know exactly where to cut.
First developed in the early 1990s for imaging the retina, optical coherence tomography (OCT) operates on the same echolocation principle used by bats and ultrasound scanners,
but it uses light rather than sound waves, yielding a higher-resolution image than does ultrasound.
One unique feature of OCT is that unlike X-ray, CT SCANS or PET scans, it delivers no ionizing radiation to patients.
For the past decade, research groups around the globe, including a group at Johns Hopkins led by Xingde Li, Ph d,
. a professor of biomedical engineering, has been working to further develop and apply the technology to other organs beyond the relatively transparent eye.
Carmen Kut, an M d./Ph d. student working in Li lab, thought OCT might provide a solution to the problem of separating brain cancers from other tissue during surgery.
Working with Li, Quinones-Hinojosa and other collaborators Kut first built on the idea that cancers tend to be relatively dense,
which affects how they scatter and reflect lightwaves. The team tried for three years to build their technique on this principle.
Eventually, the researchers figured out that a second special property of brain cancer cells that they lack the so-called myelin sheaths that coat healthy brain cells had a greater effect on the OCT readings than did density.
Once they had found the characteristic OCT ignatureof brain cancer, the team devised a computer algorithm to process OCT data and,
nearly instantaneously, generate a color-coded map with cancer in red and healthy tissue in green. e envision that the OCT would be aimed at the area being operated on,
and the surgeon could look at a screen to get a continuously updated picture of where the cancer is
and isn, Li says. So far, says Kut, the team has tested the system on fresh human brain tissue removed during surgeries
and in surgeries to remove brain tumors from mice. The researchers hope to begin clinical trials in patients this summer.
If those trials are successful and the system goes to market, it will be a big step up from imaging technologies now available during surgeries,
says Quinones-Hinojosa. ltrasound has a much lower resolution than OCT, and MRI SCANNERS designed to be wheeled over a patient on the operating table cost several millions of dollars each
and require an extra hour of operating room time to obtain a single image, he says.
By comparison, the team anticipates that the cost of an OCT-based system would run in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.
The system can potentially be adapted to detect cancers in other parts of the body, Kut says.
She is working on combining OCT with a different imaging technique that would detect blood vessels to help surgeons avoid cutting them s
#Tissue caffoldtechnology could help rebuild large organs An artist impression of myoglobin-based artificial membrane binding proteins supplying oxygen to the stem cells during tissue engineering.
Research led by the Universities of Bristol and Liverpool has shown that it is possible to combine cells with a special scaffold to produce living tissue in the laboratory.
It is hoped this can then be implanted into patients as a way of replacing diseased parts of the body.
led by Dr Adam Perriman from the University of Bristol and Professor Anthony Hollander from the University of Liverpool,
Dr Perriman from Bristol School of Cellular and Molecular Medicine said: rom our preliminary experiments, we found that we could produce these artificial membrane binding proteins
and paint the cells without affecting their biological function. owever, we were surprised and delighted to discover that we could deliver the necessary quantity to the cells to supplement their oxygen requirements.
It like supplying each cell with its own scuba tank, which it can use to breathe from
when there is not enough oxygen in the local environment. he team findings, published today 17 june in Nature Communications,
Professor Hollander said: e have shown already that stem cells can help create parts of the body that can be transplanted successfully into patients,
or knee osteoarthritis or the severe injuries caused by major trauma, for example in road traffic accidents or war injuries. heir new methodology,
is likely to pave the way for the development of a wide range of new biotechnologies.
Professor Hollander pioneering work includes the development of a method of creating cartilage cells from stem cells,
which helped to make possible the first successful transplant of a tissue-engineered trachea, utilising the patient own stem cells.
Universities of Bristo i
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