said senior author Christina Smolke, Phd, associate professor of bioengineering. Now, though the output is small it would take 4,
about one-third of the world supply has shifted to bioreactors. his is complicated the most chemical synthesis ever engineered in yeast,
said Stephanie Galanie, a Phd student in chemistry and a member of Smolke team. heye the action heroes of biology.
but even after the Stanford bioengineers added this enzyme into their microbial factory, the yeast didn create enough of the opioid compound.
with proper controls against abuse, allow bioreactors to be located where they are needed, she said. In addition to bioengineering yeast to convert sugar into hydrocodone,
The team's discovery, featured in the current issue of the Journal of Biological Chemistry, focuses on ERMANI, a protein that prevents the HIV virus from replicating."
MSU associate professor of microbiology and molecular genetics and co-author of the study.""We now know that ERMANI is an essential key,
Zheng's lab was the first to show that HIV-1 envelope glycoprotein biosynthesis can be inhibited specifically by ERMANI,
"said first author Mackenzie Lind, a doctoral candidate at the Virginia Institute for Psychiatric and Behavioral Genetics at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond."
explains Christian Kastrup, an assistant professor in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular biology and the Michael Smith Laboratories at the University of British columbia.
biochemical engineers and emergency physicians to develop simple, gas-generating calcium carbonate micro-particles that can be applied in powder form to stop critical bleeding.
and we turn off the genetic information and the demographic and clinical information, and we see that with combined information,
This included data on genetic markers known as single-nucleotide polymorphisms; demographic data, such as subject age, gender, marital status, and education level;
and say that the original motivation was curiosity about how much of anatomy we could predict from genetics
borrowing tools from the developing field of optogenetics, which so far has been used mainly in brain science.
'Optogenetics uses genetic modification to alter cells so that they can be activated by light. Until now, it has mainly been used to activate individual cells
'A protein called channelrhodopsin was delivered to heart cells using gene therapy techniques so that they could be controlled by light.
However, as gene therapy moves into the clinic and with miniaturization of optical devices, use of this all-optical technology may become possible.
and is likely to bring dramatic advances in several biological fields s
#Powerful Plastic Microscope Brings Better Diagnostic Care for World's Rural Poor, Rice university Reveals You can learn a lot about the state of someone's immune system just by examining their blood under the microscope.
or sample preparation,"said Tomasz Tkaczyk, associate professor, Department of Bioengineering, Rice university, Houston, Texas."Many systems which work for point-of-care applications have quite expensive cartridges.
"Tkaczyk co-authors on this research included Rebecca Richards-Kortum, Fellow of The Optical Society and a professor in Rice's Department of Bioengineering.
'mini tumors'in a culture dish,"explains the study's corresponding author Senthil Muthuswamy, Phd, Director of the Cell biology Program in the Cancer Research Institute at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical center
and biology of the cancer tissue in the patient, "says Muthuswamy, who conducted this research while at the University of Toronto.
which we can screen for drugs and mutations, we can begin to understand why some patients respond to a treatment
The worldwide scientific consensus on the safety of genetic engineering is as solid as that which underpins human-caused global warming.
the gene-editing tool known as Crispr is on the brink of revolutionizing the field of genetics internationally.
The historical irony is that Europe once led in biotech: In 1983, Marc Van Montagu and Jeff Schell at the University of Ghent in Belgium introduced the world to modern plant genetic engineering.
Today, however, no rational young scientist interested in molecular techniques of crop breeding would choose a base in Continental Europe.
because biotech traits make them cheaper. Yet these same traits such as herbicide tolerance and insect resistance are barred now widely from domestic use.
In essence, Europe has chosen chemistry over biology: It will not be able to reduce fungicide applications by adopting genetically modified blight-resistant potatoes;
where anti-Western conspiracy theories about biotech companies have become part of the ruling party ideology. According to Tobaiwa Mudede, a crony of President Robert Mugabe, exual dysfunction is a huge problem in the U s a,
I was interrupted by an organic farmer who said he was determined never to grow biotech crops. His grounds?
Yet from drought tolerant maize to virus-resistant cassava, many biotech traits are being developed that could quickly improve the livelihoods of poorer African farmers.
#Gluten free wheat quest undertaken by farmers Kansas farmers are paying for genetic research to figure out exactly why some people struggle to digest wheat.
Horse poop yields antibiotic-laced mushrooms European biologists have discovered a bacteria-killing compound in common mushrooms that grow in horse dung.
and that is why we are using bioreactors which then provides controlled and sterile environment for copsin production."
lead author of the study published Monday in the journal BMC Evolutionary biology.""This is the first real big predator,
"said paper co-author Alexis Vallée-Belisle, a University of Montreal chemistry professor and the Canada Research Chair in bioengineering and bionanotechnology."
"Biochemistry professor Kevin Plaxco of the University of California at Santa barbara, who supervised Vallée-Belisle's previous postdoctoral work and who is himself an expert in electrochemical methods to detect antibodies,
which plants use solar energy to reduce carbon dioxide to acetate, a ubiquitous biochemical uilding block. In the second step, acetate is converted to more complex chemical precursors.
but our excuse for not knowing anything about is that the genome for S. ovata was sequenced only a couple of years ago.
The 2013 genome announcement launched right into the good stuff by noting that. ovata uses N-methyl compounds
said that he biological experiments do seem intriguing, and I wouldn dismiss them. source) Today, numerous teleportation breakthroughs have been made.
and biochemical building blocks it needs to grow during the first 11 weeks of pregnancy. During this time the embryo is too small and delicate for the umbilical cord to be attached
and potholed roads are numbered after a microbiologist developed a self-healing concrete that mends cracks using bacteria.
and diversification of the species.'For each robot child, there is a unique'genome'made up of a combination of between one and five different genes,
As in nature, evolution in robots takes place through'mutation, 'where components of one gene are modified
and'crossover',where a new genome is formed by merging genes from two individuals. In order for the'mother'to determine which'children'were the fittest
while mutation and crossover were introduced in the less successful children. The researchers found that design variations emerged
'One of the big questions in biology is how intelligence came about-we're using robotics to explore this mystery,
These adaptations allow biological organisms to survive in a wide variety of different environments-allowing animals to make the move from living in the water to living on land, for instance.
'But what we do have are a lot of enabling technologies that will help us import some aspects of biology to the engineering world.'
It uses microarrays of electrodes that can be implanted into the brains of volunteers to pick up tiny electrical pulses from the neurons.
#British scientists set to genetically modify embryos for the first time Genetic modification of human IVF embryos could be carried out for the first time in British history,
The geneticists have applied for a unique licence from the Government fertility watchdog to carry out the procedure using a gene manipulation technique called Crispr/Cas9.
If granted, it will be only the second occasion where the chromosome of human embryos have been modified.
Editing genetic codes to remove inherited disease has already been shown to work on mice. However most geneticists believe the procedure is not ready to be carried out on human embryos-after the Chinese research led to unwanted mutations in DNA.
The application for a licence to perform enome editingon human embryos has been made by Dr Kathy Niakan, of the Francis Crick Institute, London.
She emphasised that there would be o GM babiesbecause the team simply wants to understand the genetics of early embryonic development.
In 2008 the UK laws on IVF was changed to allow genetic manipulation of embryos that are less than two weeks old for research purposes,
of chromosomes passed on to future generations. But it continues to attract controversy as critics fear DNA alterations could create unforeseen health problems that would be passed down from generation to generation of the population.
but even among those there were numerous mutations which were intended not by the scientists. Many experts said the ultimate failure of the procedure underlines the case for caution with the technique.
'Dr David King, director of Human genetics Alert, a campaign group which opposes genetically-modified babies,
'Genome editing of embryos for use in treatment is illegal.''It has been permissible in research since 2009,
But keeping calm yet alert behind the wheel could be about to get easier with the advent of a car seat that actively monitors a driver's physical and mental status. The'Active Wellness'seat has built-in biometric sensors to detect
From there, they came up with a shortlist of 18 immune system biomarkers. And from that list
The researchers found that in patients where high levels of these three biomarkers attached to'exhausted'T-cells prior to patients beginning anti-retroviral therapy,
Immune cells with the PD1 biomarker have already been identified as a target for drugs to treat stage-four melanoma
The study's authors are recommending that biomarkers now be considered in future research investigating how to control the HIV virus following ART.
The bank wants to replace PIN codes with biometric scanners that could identify customers using only their eyes.
The bank may have to overcome privacy concerns as some customers may be uncomfortable giving their biometric data to such an institution.
which produces biochemical signals suitable for transmission to neurons. In the tests pressure signals from the skin generated light pulses that activated a line of light-sensitive nerve cells.
#A new gene-editing breakthrough A FEW years ago, molecular biologists made a breakthrough. By borrowing an antiviral mechanism called CRISPR-Cas9 from bacteria,
they created an easy way to tweak the genetic information in a cell nucleus. This has implications for medicine and agriculture.
but by searching a published database of bacterial genetic sequences for promising-looking bits of DNA. This yielded two species that contain the new mechanism.
Despite the optimism of those who think the new techniques may calm qualms about genetic engineering,
Meredith Perry, who began tinkering with wireless charging as a paleobiology undergrad at the University of Pennsylvania,
borrowing tools from the developing field of optogenetics, which so far has been used mainly in brain science.
'Optogenetics uses genetic modification to alter cells so that they can be activated by light. Until now, it has mainly been used to activate individual cells
'A protein called channelrhodopsin was delivered to heart cells using gene therapy techniques so that they could be controlled by light.
However, as gene therapy moves into the clinic and with miniaturization of optical devices, use of this all-optical technology may become possible.
and then it must be degraded--the components are recycled then basically,"added Marth, also director of UCSB's Center for Nanomedicine and a professor in the campus's Department of Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental biology."
The new work has broad implications for basic research into biological function at the cellular level as well as providing an efficient platform for new drug design
compared with biological molecules, which are often thousands of Daltons. A Dalton is roughly equal to the mass of a single nucleon--either a proton or neutron.
while yielding new insights into foundational issues in cellular biology.""We're very excited by this technology
He added that because many ALPS cases result from underlying gene mutations, future studies could also test
whether sirolimus can treat other ALPS-like disorders with mutations in similar genes.""More research remains to be done,
Loss-of-function mutations in the gene that codes for the TREX1 protein are linked to AGS and SLE in humans.
who also is an investigator in the Center for the Genetics of Host Defense and holder of the George L. Macgregor Distinguished Chair in Biomedical science.
About 60 percent of children and adults with T-cell leukemia harbor a Notch mutation. But drugs designed to block Notch have caused serious side effects such as severe diarrhea or skin cancers.
#A better way to read the genome UCONN researchers have sequenced the RNA of the most complicated gene known in nature,
They published their findings on Sept. 30 in Genome Biology. If your genome was a library
and each gene was a book, some genes would be straightforward reads -but some would be more like a"Choose Your Own Adventure"novel.
so that faculty and students across our campuses will successfully compete for grant dollars and launch bioscience ventures."
"Graveley will speak about the research at the Oxford Nanopore Minion Community Meeting at the New york Genome Center on Dec 3.
"This technology has amazing potential to transform how we study RNA biology and the type of information we can obtain,
"Our study provides evidence-based methodology that will have applications in clinical practice, participation in clinical trials, prevention studies, community surveys, and biomarkers research."
and has been working to improve clinical detections by combining biomarkers including high density EEG, functional and structural MRI,
PET scans and CSF biomarkers to characterize and differentiate LBD from healthy aging and other neurodegenerative diseases.
He has done cross-cultural validation of dementia screening methods in comparison with Gold standard clinical evaluations and biomarker assays.
cognitive, functional, behavioral and biological markers of disease in healthy aging, mild cognitive impairment, Alzheimer disease,
that can be gleaned by combing the genome of a large collection of leukemia tissue samples. By analyzing genetic material in chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL) and normal tissue from more than 500 patients,
researchers identified dozens of genetic abnormalities that may drive the disease, including two that had never before been linked to human cancer.
as its ever-churning genome spawns new groups and subgroups of tumor cells in a single patient.
similarly-treated group of patients provides the statistical power necessary to study the disease in all its genetic diversity-to draw connections between certain mutations and the aggressiveness of the disease,
and to chart the emergence of new mutations and their role in helping the disease advance,
"The growing sample size allows us to start engaging deeply with the complex interplay between different mutations found in any individual tumor,
which these mutations are acquired to allow the malignancy to thrive and overcome therapy.""Wu and her team collected tumor and normal tissue samples from 538 patients with CLL, 278 of
reading the genetic code letter by letter in sections of DNA that hold the code for making proteins.
and demonstrate specific mutations affect patients'response to therapy. These discoveries will form the basis for precision medicine of CLL and other tumor types
The combination-pairing a drug targeted against mutations in the BRAF gene with a second drug that targets another important signaling pathway-was discovered through one of the largest screens of cancer drug combinations conducted to date.
Findings from the study conducted at the MGH Cutaneous Biology Research center and Center for Molecular Therapeutics have been published in the open-access journal PLOS ONE."
Since around half the cases of malignant melanoma are driven by mutation in the BRAF gene, the team focused on combinations that might address intrinsic resistance to the BRAF inhibitor vemurafenib.
and find biomarkers that predict which patients with BRAF-mutant melanoma should receive this combination,
-which means that mutations and expression changes in each line's genes have been documented-we should be able to identify in advance patients who will benefit from specific combinations.
whose mutation leads to the aggressive growth of a common and deadly type of lung cancer in humans.
"Sometimes there are hundreds of mutations in the genes of a patient's tumors, but you don't know
or byproducts,"says senior author Inder Verma, professor of genetics and holder of Salk's Irwin and Joan Jacobs Chair in Exemplary Life science."
"Two gene mutations in particular are known to spur the growth of human tumors: KRAS and p53. Though both genes have been studied heavily,
The researchers narrowed in on the 4, 700 genes in the human genome related to cellular signaling--specifically,
"With a mutation in KRAS, a tumor forms in 300 days. But without Epha2, the KRAS mutation leads to tumors in half the time, 120 to 150 days,"says Verma,
who is also an American Cancer Society Professor of Molecular biology.""This molecule Epha2 is having a huge effect on restraining cancer growth
A 10-year national project called the Cancer Genome Atlas mapped the genomes of hundreds of patients for over 20 different cancers
and uncovered a number of related genetic mutations, though the role of these mutations has not been understood well in lung cancer (especially adenocarcinoma,
which makes up almost a quarter of all lung cancers). From the Cancer Genome Atlas data, the Salk team found that genetic alterations of Epha2 were detected in 54 out of 230 patients with adenocarcinoma.
The team also found, surprisingly, that the loss of Epha2 activated a pathway commonly associated with cancer (dubbed Hedgehog) that promotes tumor growth."
"Oddly, among human lung cancer patients with Epha2 mutations, around 8 percent of patients actually have high Epha2 expression.
In research that appeared today in Nature Genetics, a Weizmann Institute of Science team has revealed now one of the drivers of a particularly deadly subset of melanomas-one that is still seeing a rise in new cases.
Yardena Samuels and her team in the Institute's Molecular Cell biology Department were specifically searching for tumor suppressor genes in their database,
which consists of more than 500 melanoma genomes and exomes-protein-building sequences-making it the largest melanoma dataset to date.
Thus studying these genes is crucial in cancer biology.""The identification of targetable alterations in melanoma is need an urgent.
An in depth understanding of the functional effects of mutations in these genes is the first step toward revealing the underlying mechanism of melanoma growth,
Indeed, the melanoma genome sequences contained mutations in known tumor suppressor genes, but there was also a new gene that stood out in the team's search, named RASA2.
When they restored the production of the protein in melanoma cells that harbored RASA2 mutations,
However, loss or mutations in tumor suppressor genes like RASA2 also contribute to melanoma development;
. professor of biomedical engineering and mechanical engineering and associate professor of surgery at U-M. The models were printed by Ann arbor-based Thingsmiths.
"In close collaboration with his TUM colleagues Johannes Buchner, professor of biotechnology and Sevil Weinkauf, professor of electron microscopy, Reif determined that the small heat shock protein uses a specific nonpolar beta-sheet structure pile in its center
MD, chairman of the Department of Stem Cell biology and Regenerative medicine at Cleveland Clinic Lerner Research Institute.
or sample preparation,"said Tomasz Tkaczyk, associate professor, Department of Bioengineering, Rice university, Houston, Texas."Many systems which work for point-of-care applications have quite expensive cartridges.
"Tkaczyk's co-authors on this research included Rebecca Richards-Kortum, Fellow of The Optical Society and a professor in Rice's Department of Bioengineering.
and turnover,"said senior author Jamey Marth, director of UCSB's Center for Nanomedicine and a professor in the campus's Department of Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental biology."
#Gene on-off switch works like backpack strap A research team based in Houston's Texas Medical center has found that the proteins that turn genes on by forming loops in human chromosomes work like the sliding plastic adjusters on a grade-schooler
and allow researchers to reprogram cells by directly modifying the loops in genomes. The study,
is by the same team that published the first high-resolution 3-D maps showing how the human genome folds inside the nucleus of a cell.
Every human cell contains a genome, a linear string of DNA. Sequences of DNA bases spell out genes,
and coming into contact during genome folding. Last year, the team showed that it was possible to map the positions of these loops,
and the researchers created the first atlas of loops in the human genome. But the group couldn't explain how the loops were forming."
"said senior author Erez Lieberman Aiden, a geneticist and computer scientist with joint appointments at Baylor and Rice."
"The human genome contains more than 20,000 genes. In any given cell, only a fraction of these are active,
Aiden, who is also a senior investigator at Rice's Center for Theoretical Biological Physics,
"Aiden, assistant professor of genetics at Baylor and of computer science and computational and applied mathematics at Rice, said Sanborn
and high-performance computation to predict how a genome will fold. The team confirmed their predictions by making tiny modifications in a cell's genome
and showing that the mutations changed the folding pattern exactly as expected. Rao likened the result to a new form of genome surgery:
a procedure that can modify how a genome is folded by design and with extraordinary precision.""We found that changing even one letter in the genetic code was enough to modify the folding of millions of other letters,
"said Rao, a graduate student in the Aiden lab and at Stanford university.""What was stunning was that once we understood how the loops were forming,
the results of these changes became extremely predictable.""Sanborn said the discovery also explains a puzzling pattern that the team noticed
when it published its original atlas of loops.""DNA encodes information, and you can think of each DNA base pair as a letter and of certain sequences of letters as words,
and the genome is flexible at that scale, "said Sanborn.""If I were a protein,
The basic idea is that the tri-glide protein complex lands on the genome and pulls the strand from each side so that a loop forms in the middle--just like the loop someone might make
"Aiden said that one of the most astonishing implications of the new model is that loops on different chromosomes tend not to become entangled."
when two bits of the genome wiggled around and then met inside the cell nucleus, "Aiden said."
"But this process would lead to interweaving loops and highly entangled chromosomes. This is a big problem
if you need those chromosomes to separate again when the cell divides.""The tri-glide takes care of that,
or biological implant, engineers strive to make the material strong and defect-free. However, methods conventionally used to control the amount of defects in a material,
the researchers used multidisciplinary experimental approaches, ranging from structural to cellular biology.""It all started with an intuition we published in the journal Biochemistry in 2012,
"explains Gabriele Giachin, first author of the study and former SISSA Phd student (today at the European Synchrotron radiation Facility, ESRF, in Grenoble, France)."
"On that occasion, we hypothesized that the pathological genetic mutations present in the prion protein could affect copper coordination".
Then, drawing on the consolidated expertise in molecular and cellular biology available at the SISSA Laboratory of Prion Biology coordinated by Legname,
biological fluids containing bacteria and blood. Not only did the material repel all the liquid and show anti-biofouling behavior but the tungsten oxide actually made the steel stronger than steel without the coating.
Medical steel devices are one of the material's most promising applications, said Philseok Kim,
Another avenue for application is functional 3d printing and microarray devices, especially in printing highly viscous and sticky biological and polymeric materials where friction and contamination are major obstacles.
U s. Navy spends tens of millions of dollars each year dealing with the ramifications of biofouling on hulls.
Organisms such as barnacles and algae create drag and increased energy expenditure, not to mention the costs of cleaning
The Córdoba-based company Canvax Biotech has participated also in the development of the patent. A nontoxic drug One of the major advantages of the drug is that it is nontoxic.
which maintains the biological activity of its predecessor as an effective anti-tumor drug, but which can also be synthesized
In the last two months, the research project has received funding of over#124,930 from the public sector from the Ministry of Economy and Finance and the firm Canvax Biotech SL and#20
and is likely to bring dramatic advances in several biological fields s
#Umbrella-shaped diamond nanostructures make efficient photon collectors Standard umbrellas come out when the sky turns dark,
or work involving biological observations. Individual nitrogen vacancy centers could essentially function as the basic units of quantum computers.
In terms of applications, the team's nanostructures may find use in highly sensitive magnetic sensors for making biological observations or within the computational science realm for quantum computing and cryptographic communications.
"explained corresponding author James Hamilton, Phd, professor of physiology and biophysics and research professor of medicine at BUSM."
genetics and disease diagnosis. But carrying out such analyses requires expensive lab equipment, making its application out of reach for many people who live in resource-limited places.
however, could make analysis of genetic material possible at a much lower cost. David Sinton and colleagues wanted to see
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