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Category: biotech/medical – Page 1,796

Six new coronavirus symptoms just officially added to CDC list. What are they?

New symptoms for the disease now include “chills, repeated shaking with chills, muscle pain, headache, sore throat and new loss of taste or smell,” the CDC said.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has tripled the number of coronavirus symptoms it lists on its website.

The federal organization previously listed fever, cough and shortness of breath as symptoms of COVID-19. The CDC has added six additional symptoms as people “have had a wide range of symptoms reported,” it says on its website.

How Tesla pivoted to avoid the global chip shortage that could last years

Tesla explained how it pivoted to avoid the global microchip shortage that Intel now says could last for several more years.

The pandemic has resulted in an increase in demand for many electronics and computers that the supply chain couldn’t handle, especially the semiconductor industry.

This microchip shortage, in turn, affected the automotive industry, which has increasingly become a big consumer of microchips.

‘Universal’ coronavirus vaccine may protect against variants, common cold

An experimental COVID-19 vaccine could potentially provide universal protection against future COVID-19 variants as well as other coronaviruses — maybe even the ones responsible for the common cold.

And it’s dirt cheap — less than $1 a dose, researchers say.

The vaccine targets a part of the COVID-19 virus’ spike protein that appears to be highly resistant to mutation and is common across nearly all coronaviruses, said senior researcher Dr. Steven Zeichner. He is a professor of pediatric infectious disease with the University of Virginia, in Charlottesville.

A milestone in muscular dystrophy therapy

Muscle stem cells enable our muscle to build up and regenerate over a lifetime through exercise. But if certain muscle genes are mutated, the opposite occurs. In patients suffering from muscular dystrophy, the skeletal muscle already starts to weaken in childhood. Suddenly, these children are no longer able to run, play the piano or climb the stairs, and often they are dependent on a wheelchair by the age of 15. Currently, no therapy for this condition exists.

“Now, we are able to access these patients’ gene mutations using CRISPR-Cas9 technology,” explains Professor Simone Spuler, head of the Myology Lab at the Experimental and Clinical Research Center (ECRC), a joint institution of the Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine in the Helmholtz Association and Charité — Universitätsmedizin Berlin. “We care for more than 2000 patients at the Charité outpatient clinic for muscle disorders, and quickly recognized the potential of the new technology.” The researchers immediately started working with some of the affected families, and have now presented their results in the journal JCI Insight. In the families studied, the parents were healthy and had no idea they possessed a mutated gene. The children all inherited a copy of the disease mutation from both parents.

Nuclear DNA From Cave Sediments Helps Unlock Ancient Human History

For the first time, scientists have succeeded in extracting and analyzing Neandertal chromosomal DNA preserved in cave sediments.

The field of ancient DNA has revealed important aspects of our evolutionary past, including our relationships with our distant cousins, Denisovans, and Neandertals. These studies have relied on DNA from bones and teeth, which store DNA and protect it from the environment. But such skeletal remains are exceedingly rare, leaving large parts of human history inaccessible to genetic analysis.

To fill these gaps, researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology developed new methods for enriching and analyzing human nuclear DNA from sediments, which are abundant at almost every archaeological site. Until now, only mitochondrial DNA has been recovered from archaeological sediments, but this is of limited value for studying population relationships. The advent of nuclear DNA analyses of sediments provides new opportunities to investigate the deep human past.

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