Lifeboat Foundation

Our body’s ability to detect disease, foreign material, and the location of food sources and toxins is all determined by a cocktail of chemicals that surround our cells, as well as our cells’ ability to ‘read’ these chemicals. Cells are highly sensitive. In fact, our immune system can be triggered by the presence of just one foreign molecule or ion. Yet researchers don’t know how cells achieve this level of sensitivity.

Now, scientists at the Biological Physics Theory Unit at Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University (OIST) and collaborators at City University of New York have created a simple model that is providing some answers. They have used this model to determine which techniques a cell might employ to increase its sensitivity in different circumstances, shedding light on how the biochemical networks in our bodies operate.

“This model takes a complex biological system and abstracts it into a simple, understandable mathematical framework,” said Dr. Vudtiwat Ngampruetikorn, former postdoctoral researcher at OIST and the first author of the research paper, which was published in Nature Communications. “We can use it to tease apart how cells might choose to spend their energy budget, depending on the world around them and other cells they might be talking to.”

Continue reading “Making sense of cells” »

Though advancements still need to be made, robots and A.I. could help us fight the coronavirus outbreak and save lives.

:33333 could lead to future cures of muscular dystrophy.

Facioscapulohumeral muscular dystrophy (FSHD) is caused by altered expression of DUX4, a gene important during development that is not usually present in adult cells. In FSHD skeletal muscle, activation of DUX4 leads to apoptosis. To identify potential targets that mediate DUX4-induced cell death, Lek et al. performed an unbiased screen using CRISPR-Cas9. Hypoxia signaling emerged as a target, and treating patient cells and zebrafish models of FSHD with inhibitors of hypoxia signaling reduced cell death and expression of DUX4 target genes and improved structural defects and muscle function. Results demonstrate the utility of this CRISPR-Cas9 screen for identifying putative therapeutic targets for FSHD.

The emergence of CRISPR-Cas9 gene-editing technologies and genome-wide CRISPR-Cas9 libraries enables efficient unbiased genetic screening that can accelerate the process of therapeutic discovery for genetic disorders. Here, we demonstrate the utility of a genome-wide CRISPR-Cas9 loss-of-function library to identify therapeutic targets for facioscapulohumeral muscular dystrophy (FSHD), a genetically complex type of muscular dystrophy for which there is currently no treatment. In FSHD, both genetic and epigenetic changes lead to misexpression of DUX4, the FSHD causal gene that encodes the highly cytotoxic DUX4 protein. We performed a genome-wide CRISPR-Cas9 screen to identify genes whose loss-of-function conferred survival when DUX4 was expressed in muscle cells. Genes emerging from our screen illuminated a pathogenic link to the cellular hypoxia response, which was revealed to be the main driver of DUX4-induced cell death.

Tech giants including Google and Microsoft want to work with hospitals and health-care systems to improve lives. But should people trust them with their medical data?

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Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and the World Health Organization’s director-general are trading ideas on how to get the COVID-19 pandemic under control, using tools ranging from Amazon Web Services’ firepower in cloud computing and artificial intelligence to distribution channels for coronavirus test kits.

Bezos recapped today’s talk with Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus in an Instagram post, featuring a screengrab of Bezos’ videoconference view with the billionaire’s own visage in the upper right corner of the frame:

By Kurt M. Campbell and Rush Doshi

KURT M. CAMPBELL is Chair and CEO of the Asia Group and was U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs from 2009 to 2013.

Xi Jinping has urged the nations to lift trade barriers.

Scientists took conspiracy theories seriously and analyzed the coronavirus to reveal its natural origins.

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NEWSBRIEF.