Lifeboat Foundation

ACE, a groundbreaking DNA-powered signal amplification technology, significantly enhances the sensitivity of mass cytometry, providing new insights into various biological and pathological processes.

Since the 1950s, researchers have employed “flow cytometry,” a renowned technique devised by Wallace Coulter, to characterize various types of immune cells in research studies and human blood samples. This method has significantly enhanced our understanding of immune cell development and provided innovative approaches for evaluating human health and diagnosing various blood cancers. Eventually, flow cytometry was extended to analyze other cell types as well.

In traditional flow cytometry, cell surface and intracellular proteins are detected with antibody molecules that are linked to fluorescent probes. However, while providing single-cell sensitivity, this method is limited in detecting multiple proteins by the number of fluorophores that can be clearly distinguished within the entire spectrum of fluorescent light.

The ability to accurately quantify biological age could help monitor and control healthy aging. Epigenetic clocks have emerged as promising tools for estimating biological age, yet so far, most of these clocks have been developed from heterogeneous bulk tissues, and are thus composites of two aging processes, one reflecting the change of cell-type composition with age and another reflecting the aging of individual cell-types. There is thus a need to dissect and quantify these two components of epigenetic clocks, and to develop epigenetic clocks that can yield biological age estimates at cell-type resolution. Here we demonstrate that in blood and brain, approximately 35% of an epigenetic clock’s accuracy is driven by underlying shifts in lymphocyte and neuronal subsets, respectively. Using brain and liver tissue as prototypes, we build and validate neuron and hepatocyte specific DNA methylation clocks, and demonstrate that these cell-type specific clocks yield improved estimates of chronological age in the corresponding cell and tissue-types. We find that neuron and glia specific clocks display biological age acceleration in Alzheimer’s Disease with the effect being strongest for glia in the temporal lobe. The hepatocyte clock is found accelerated in liver under various pathological conditions. In contrast, non-cell-type specific clocks do not display biological age-acceleration, or only do so more marginally. In summary, this work highlights the importance of dissecting epigenetic clocks and quantifying biological age at cell-type resolution.

The authors have declared no competing interest.

The Illumina DNA methylation datasets analyzed here are all freely available from GEO (www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/geo).

Telomerase gene therapy shows promising potential for treating pulmonary fibrosis and other diseases associated with short telomeres.

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There’s only one alliterative phrase i like more than ‘the sheekey science show’, and that’s ‘anti-aging antibodies’. now, as it happens, one thing i spent a lot of time working on this year is antibodies. Antibody, make me feel this way. now while i cannot tell you yet what i was/am doing, i can tell you about two recent science stories that exploit antibodies to extend mouse lifespan. Firstly, i will bring your attention to this paper — immunotherapy targeting isoDGR-protein damage extends lifespan and then we’ll look at this paper that came out last month — Inhibition of IL-11 signalling extends mammalian healthspan.

Find me on Twitter — / eleanorsheekey.

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Join us on Patreon! https://www.patreon.com/MichaelLustgartenPhDDiscount Links/Affiliates: Blood testing (where I get my labs): https://www.ultalabtests.com/.…

Equitable and accessible education in life sciences, bioengineering, and synthetic biology is crucial for training the next generation of scientists. Here the authors present the CRISPRkit, a cost-effective educational tool that enables high school students to perform CRISPR experiments affordably and safely without prior experience, using smartphone-based quantification and an automated algorithm for data analysis.

It seems that Silicon Valley giants, AAA game developers, and other companies desperately clinging to the AI trend and trying to integrate the technology into any product they own will soon have to rethink their marketing strategies, as a new study conducted by researchers from Washington State University indicates that using terms like “AI” or “artificial intelligence” in product descriptions can negatively impact sales.

To explore the impact of including “AI” in goods and service descriptions on consumers’ purchase intentions, the team conducted six experiments and surveyed over a thousand people, discovering that the use of these terms decreases purchase intention and lowers emotional trust, leading to what any company fears the most – diminishing sales numbers.

Furthermore, the researchers found that putting artificial intelligence in the spotlight can be even more detrimental when it comes to high-risk products – those consumers typically think twice about buying, such as expensive gadgets and medical services – compared to low-risk items, primarily because of the greater likelihood of incurring monetary losses or facing health risks.

Injuries, infection and inflammatory diseases that damage the spinal cord can lead to intractable pain and disability. Some degree of recovery may be possible. The question is, how best to stimulate the regrowth and healing of damaged nerves.

At the Vanderbilt University Institute of Imaging Science (VUIIS), scientists are focusing on a previously understudied part of the brain and spinal cord —white matter. Their discoveries could lead to treatments that restore nerve activity through the targeted delivery of electromagnetic stimuli or drugs.

As in the brain, the spinal cord is made up nerve cell bodies (gray matter), which process sensation and control voluntary movement, and axons (white matter), fibers that connect nerve cells and which project to the rest of the body.

Artistic representation of hyper-Raman optical activity: twisted light (red helices) incident on molecules arranged on a helical scaffold (white dots) produce hyper-Raman scattering spectra (multicoloured light patches) that express ‘chirality’ (patches in spiral patterns and broken mirror). Credit: Ventsislav Valev and Kylian ValevAn international team of scientists, led by physicists from the University of Bath, has demonstrated a new optical phenomenon that could significantly impact various fields, including pharmaceutical science, security, forensics, environmental science, art conservation, and medicine.

Molecules rotate and vibrate in very specific ways. When light shines on them it bounces and scatters. For every million light particles (photons), a single one changes colour. This change is the Raman effect. Collecting many of these color-changing photons paints a picture of the energy states of molecules and identifies them.

Yet some molecular features (energy states) are invisible to the Raman effect. To reveal them and paint a more complete picture, ‘hyper-Raman’ is needed.