Salk Institute Scientists Research How Animals Regrow Body Parts

Salk Institute Scientists Research How Animals Regrow Body Parts – NYTimes.com

The best possible kind of regenerative medicine would surely be to entice the body to use nature’s own methods to regrow a damaged limb or organ. The genes that made the structure in the first place are still present in every cell of the body but somehow repressed. Could they not be reactivated to make the patient as good as new?

Mecanismele evoluţiei vieţii pe Terra

Mecanismele evoluţiei vieţii pe Terra

În cadrul seriei dedicate evoluţiei vieţii pe Terra am prezentat dovezi în favoarea teoriei evoluţionismului. În continuare vom explora mecanismele care fac posibilă evoluţia formelor de viaţă. Pentru a realiza acest lucru, este nevoie să găsim răspunsurile la doar două întrebări:

1. Cum apare diversitatea în cazul genomului indivizilor care fac parte din acelaşi grup (aceeaşi specie)?

2. Care este modul prin care această diversitate conduce la apariţia unor noi specii?

No men OR women needed: artificial sperm and eggs created for first time

No men OR women needed: artificial sperm and eggs created for first time | Mail Online

Human eggs and sperm have been grown in the laboratory in research which could change the face of parenthood.

It paves the way for a cure for infertility and could help those left sterile by cancer treatment to have children who are biologically their own.

But it raises a number of moral and ethical concerns. These include the possibility of children being born through entirely artificial means, and men and women being sidelined from the process of making babies.

Reduced human genome works fine with 2000 chunks missing

Reduced genome works fine with 2000 chunks missing – 22 October 2009 – New Scientist

Previous studies suggested it is possible to lead a full and healthy life without every single bit of the genome. “You don’t need a complete genome to be a complete person,” says Terry Vrijenhoek of the Radboud University Nijmegen Medical Centre in the Netherlands.

To put a figure on how much of our DNA is non-essential, Vrijenhoek and his colleagues screened the genomes of 600 healthy students, searching for chunks of DNA at least 10,000 base pairs in length that were missing in some individuals. Across all the genomes, about 2000 such chunks were missing – amounting to about 0.12 per cent of the total genome.

Scientists watch evolution unfold

Time in a bottle: Scientists watch evolution unfold

Lenski, Hannah Professor of Microbial Ecology at MSU, started growing cultures of fast-reproducing, single-celled E. coli bacteria in 1988. If a genetic mutation gives a cell an advantage in competition for food, he reasoned, it should dominate the entire culture. While Darwin’s theory of natural selection is supported by other studies, it has never before been studied for so many cycles and in such detail.

“It’s extra nice now to be able to show precisely how selection has changed the genomes of these bacteria, step by step over tens of thousands of generations,” Lenski said.

Lenski’s team periodically froze bacteria for later study, and technology has since developed to allow complete genetic sequencing. By the 20,000-generation midpoint, researchers discovered 45 mutations among surviving cells. Those mutations, according to Darwin’s theory, should have conferred some advantage, and that’s exactly what the researchers found.

Gene Therapy Success for Parkinson’s

Technology Review: Blogs: TR Editors’ blog: Gene Therapy Success for Parkinson’s

This success in monkeys paves the way for future studies in humans, says Palfi, who reported his animal results today in the journal Science Translational Medicine1. “This is the exact situation that we will face in the clinic,” he says. Palfi’s team has already tested two different doses of the three-gene-containing virus in six human patients, and is now investigating an intermediate dose that matches that used in the monkeys, with corrections for brain size. Once the researchers find the optimal dose, they plan to move the experimental treatment into Phase II trials, Palfi says.

Ribosome Unraveled: A Q&A with Nobelist Thomas Steit

Ribosome Unraveled: A Q&A with Nobelist Thomas Steitz: Scientific American

What we found was this catalysis is done entirely by RNA, which is consistent with the hypothesis that the original ribosome was all RNA, which makes sense if you realize the-chicken-and-the-egg nature of the problem. You can’t make proteins starting with a protein if the first protein is the enzyme that does it, so instead you use RNA.

The Human Genome in 3 Dimensions

The Human Genome in 3 Dimensions | Wired Science | Wired.com

By breaking the human genome into millions of pieces and reverse-engineering their arrangement, researchers have produced the highest-resolution picture ever of the genome’s three-dimensional structure.

The picture is one of mind-blowing fractal glory, and the technique could help scientists investigate how the very shape of the genome, and not just its DNA content, affects human development and disease.

“It’s become clear that the spatial organization of chromosomes is critical for regulating the genome,” said study co-author Job Dekker, a molecular biologist at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. “This opens up new aspects of gene regulation that weren’t open to investigation before. It’s going to lead to a lot of new questions.”

Comprehensive understanding of bacteria could lead to new insights into many organisms

Comprehensive understanding of bacteria could lead to new insights into many organisms

PhysOrg.com) — Investigators at Burnham Institute for Medical Research, University of California, San Diego, The Scripps Research Institute, Genomics Institute of the Novartis Research Foundation and other institutions have constructed a complete model, including three dimensional protein structures, of the central metabolic network of the bacterium Thermotoga maritima (T. maritima).
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Researchers were surprised by the degree of structural conservation within the network. Of the 478 proteins, with 714 domains, there were only 182 distinct folds. This supports the hypothesis that nature uses existing shapes, slightly modified, to perform new tasks.

Nanodiamonds Advance Anticancer Gene Therapy

Nanodiamonds Advance Anticancer Gene Therapy

Dr. Ho and his research team engineered surface-modified nanodiamond particles that successfully and efficiently delivered DNA into mammalian cells. The delivery efficiency was 70 times greater than that of a conventional standard for gene delivery.