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Category: biotech/medical – Page 2,589

Is the World Ready for Synthetic People?

Drew Endy almost can’t talk fast enough to convey everything he has to say. It’s a wonderfully complex message filled with nuance, a kind of intricate puzzle box being built by a pioneer of synthetic biology who wants to fundamentally rejigger the living world.

Endy heads a research team at Stanford that is, as he puts it, building genetically encoded computers and redesigning genomes. What that means: he’s trying to engineer life forms to do useful things. Just about anything could come out of this toolkit: new foods, new materials, new medicines. So you are unlikely to find anyone who is more optimistic than he is about the potential for synthetic biology to solve big problems.

That’s what makes Endy so compelling when he worries about how the technology is being developed. Perhaps more than anyone else working in synthetic biology, Endy has tried to hold the community to account.

Room for improvement in drug dosage timing in hospitals

Too many hospitals provide medications according to the practicalities of their staffing schedules rather than the ideal dosing times for their patients, according to a new study led by experts at Cincinnati Children’s.

The study, published Oct. 1, 2019, in PNAS, was led by David Smith, MD, Ph.D., Divisions of Pediatric Otolaryngology and Pulmonary Medicine; Marc Ruben, Ph.D.; and John Hogenesch, Ph.D., Co-Director, Center for Circadian Medicine at Cincinnati Children’s.

The study examined the daily distribution of approximately 500,000 doses of 12 drugs in 1,486 inpatients at a major U.S. children’s hospital.

Machine learning predicts behavior of biological circuits

Biomedical engineers at Duke University have devised a machine learning approach to modeling the interactions between complex variables in engineered bacteria that would otherwise be too cumbersome to predict. Their algorithms are generalizable to many kinds of biological systems.

In the new study, the researchers trained a neural network to predict the circular patterns that would be created by a biological circuit embedded into a bacterial culture. The system worked 30,000 times faster than the existing computational .

To further improve accuracy, the team devised a method for retraining the machine learning model multiple times to compare their answers. Then they used it to solve a second biological system that is computationally demanding in a different way, showing the algorithm can work for disparate challenges.

The Bio-Belt: Growing The Future In Rural America

Despite this economic pressure, rural America remains one of our nation’s most fertile regions, and recent advances in biotechnology are making it easier than ever to sustainably grow new kinds of valuable goods, from biopharmaceuticals to biomaterials. With the right strategic investments, rural America could see a biotech “bloom.”

I propose a Bio-Belt stretching through middle America to bring new skills and high-paying jobs to communities that desperately need them. This initiative would bolster investment in biotechnology training, education, infrastructure and entrepreneurship in rural areas in order to develop new, sustainable sources of income.

The Bio-Belt is about much more than biofuel. Fermentation is an increasingly powerful force for converting sugar and other forms of biomass into value-added goods—all through the rational design of cells that can be sustainably grown wherever land is abundant.

Scientists recreate in flies the mutations that let monarch butterfly eat toxic milkweed with impunity

The fruit flies in Noah Whiteman’s lab may be hazardous to your health.

Whiteman and his University of California, Berkeley, colleagues have turned perfectly palatable —palatable, at least, to frogs and birds—into potentially poisonous prey that may cause anything that eats them to puke. In large enough quantities, the flies likely would make a human puke, too, much like the emetic effect of ipecac syrup.

That’s because the team genetically engineered the flies, using CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing, to be able to eat milkweed without dying and to sequester its toxins, just as America’s most beloved butterfly, the , does to deter predators.

Scientists unravel mystery of the jellyfish’s “superpower” ability to regenerate body parts

Scientists have unraveled the biological mechanisms behind what they describe as the extraordinary “superpower” ability of jellyfish to regenerate body parts.

Jellyfish are primitive animals which evolved in the oceans around 600 million years ago. Part of the reason for their evolutionary success is that some species are able to grow back tissue that has been lost—a trait that is rare in the animal kingdom.

To learn more about this poorly understood ability, a team of researchers from Tohoku University in Japan investigated the biology of a jellyfish species known as Cladonema pacificum—which has tentacles that spread out like tree branches—for a study published in the journal PeerJ.

MitoMouse – Curing Mitochondrial Dysfunction in Mammals

Today, we have launched the MitoMouse project on our fundraising platform Lifespan.io. This project aims to reverse the damage that aging does to the mitochondrial DNA and to restore energy production in our cells with the goal of preventing age-related ill health.

The power stations of the cell

The mitochondria are the power stations of every single cell in our bodies, and they are responsible for converting the nutrients we absorb into energy. The mitochondria are so efficient at doing this that they are responsible for around 90% of the energy that our cells need to function and survive.

The Gut Microbiome Affects Muscle Strength in Older Adults

A role for the gut microbiome on the health and functioning of many tissues, including the brain, liver, kidney, and adiposity, has been widely reported in the literature. Interestingly, 2019 might be the year that the role of the gut microbiome on skeletal muscle (i.e. the gut-muscle axis) comes into greater focus.

The influence of the gut microbiome on muscle strength

In April, Nay et al. reported that endurance exercise capacity was reduced in mice that do not contain a microbiome (germ-free mice, GFM) when compared with conventionally raised, microbiome-containing mice. This finding suggests that there are microbes in the gut that positively influence aerobic exercise performance.

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