Lifeboat Foundation

A technological advancement that may prove crucial in the long-term success of dental implants has been developed by University of Queensland researchers.

Dr. Karan Gulati, NHMRC Early Career Fellow from the UQ School of Dentistry, said modifying dental implants with ‘nanopores’ will help protect against one of the leading causes of implant failure.

“Poor integration between the implant and the surrounding tissue is one of the leading causes of dental implant failure,” Dr. Gulati said. “If the sealing between the implant and the surrounding gum tissue fails it can result in bacteria entering the implant and causing infection.”

The aim of this study is to evaluate if the sweat produced by COVID-19 persons (SARS-CoV-2 PCR positive) has a different odour for trained detection dogs than the sweat produced by non COVID-19 persons. The study was conducted on 3 sites, following the same protocol procedures, and involved a total of 18 dogs. A total of 198 armpits sweat samples were obtained from different hospitals. For each involved dog, the acquisition of the specific odour of COVID-19 sweat samples required from one to four hours, with an amount of positive samples sniffing ranging from four to ten. For this proof of concept, we kept 8 dogs of the initial group (explosive detection dogs and colon cancer detection dogs), who performed a total of 368 trials, and will include the other dogs in our future studies as their adaptation to samples scenting takes more time.

The percentages of success of the dogs to find the positive sample in a line containing several other negative samples or mocks (2 to 6) were 100p100 for 4 dogs, and respectively 83p100, 84p100, 90p100 and 94p100 for the others, all significantly different from the percentage of success that would be obtained by chance alone.

We conclude that there is a very high evidence that the armpits sweat odour of COVID-19+ persons is different, and that dogs can detect a person infected by the SARS-CoV-2 virus.

One day, cell and gene therapies will be as common as small molecules and antibody-based therapies are today, according to panelists at BIO’s June 8 virtual session, “The Next Generation of Medicine: Cell Therapies, Gene Therapies and Beyond.”

Because cell and gene therapies have the potential to address complex biological issues such as dysregulation, translocation and mutations, they can use that power to change what the body is doing.

“So, while small molecules and antibody therapies will still be around 30 years from now, they will be less important. Cell and gene therapies will dominate,” James Sabry, global head of pharma partnering at Roche, said.

Can lost species ever become un-extinct? Many scientists believe it’s only a matter of time before many extinct animals again walk the Earth through cloning.

A simple chemical reaction gives platelets the ability to swim around.

Numerous efforts have been made to improve the temporal resolution of CRISPR-Cas9–mediated DNA cleavage to the hour time scale. Liu et al. developed a Cas9 system that achieved genome-editing manipulation at the second time scale (see the Perspective by Medhi and Jasin). Part of the guide RNA is chemically caged, allowing the Cas9-guide RNA complex to bind at a specific genomic locus without cleavage until activation by light. This fast CRISPR system achieves genome editing at high temporal resolution, enabling the study of early molecular events of DNA repair processes. This system also has high spatial resolution at short time scales, allowing editing of one genomic allele while leaving the other unperturbed.

Science, this issue p. 1265; see also p. 1180

CRISPR-Cas systems provide versatile tools for programmable genome editing. Here, we developed a caged RNA strategy that allows Cas9 to bind DNA but not cleave until light-induced activation. This approach, referred to as very fast CRISPR (vfCRISPR), creates double-strand breaks (DSBs) at the submicrometer and second scales. Synchronized cleavage improved kinetic analysis of DNA repair, revealing that cells respond to Cas9-induced DSBs within minutes and can retain MRE11 after DNA ligation. Phosphorylation of H2AX after DNA damage propagated more than 100 kilobases per minute, reaching up to 30 megabases. Using single-cell fluorescence imaging, we characterized multiple cycles of 53BP1 repair foci formation and dissolution, with the first cycle taking longer than subsequent cycles and its duration modulated by inhibition of repair. Imaging-guided subcellular Cas9 activation further facilitated genomic manipulation with single-allele resolution.

Miniaturization has enabled technology like smartphones, health watches, medical probes and nano-satellites, all unthinkable a couple decades ago. Just imagine that in the course of 60 years, the transistor has shrunk from the size of your palm to 14 nanometers in dimension, 1000 times smaller than the diameter of a hair.

Miniaturization has pushed technology to a new era of optical circuitry. But in parallel, it has also triggered new challenges and obstacles, for example, controlling and guiding light at the nanometer scale. Researchers are looking for techniques to confine light into extremely tiny spaces, millions of times smaller than current ones. Studies had earlier found that metals can compress light below the wavelength-scale (diffraction limit).

In that aspect, graphene, a material composed from a single layer of carbon atoms, which exhibits exceptional optical and electrical properties, is capable of guiding light in the form of plasmons, which are oscillations of electrons that strongly interact with light. These graphene plasmons have a natural ability to confine light to very small spaces. However, until now, it was only possible to confine these plasmons in one direction, while the actual ability of light to interact with small particles like atoms and molecules resides in the volume into which it can be compressed. This type of confinement in all three dimensions is commonly regarded as an optical cavity.

Engineers at Duke University have demonstrated a versatile microfluidic lab-on-a-chip that uses sound waves to create tunnels in oil to touchlessly manipulate and transport droplets. The technology could form the basis of a small-scale, programmable, rewritable biomedical chip that is completely reusable to enable on-site diagnostics or laboratory research.

The results appear online on June 10 in the journal Science Advances.

“Our new system achieves rewritable routing, sorting and gating of droplets with minimal external control, which are essential functions for the digital logic control of droplets,” said Tony Jun Huang, the William Bevan Distinguished Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science at Duke. “And we achieve it with less energy and a simpler setup that can control more droplets simultaneously than previous systems.”

Circa 2017

Unlike other animals, cephalopods – the family that includes octopuses, squid and cuttlefish – do not obey the commands of their DNA to the letter.

Instead, they sometimes interfere with the code as it is being carried by a molecular “messenger”. This has the effect of diversifying the proteins their cells can produce, leading to some interesting variations.

Continue reading “Squid and octopus can edit and direct their own brain genes” »