Structural and dynamic DNA nanosciences offer unique tools for engineering bottom–up synthetic cells. This Review provides a holistic overview for using DNA as a structural material, for designing functional entities, and for information-processing circuits for adaptive and interactive behaviour.
This simplicity was what attracted many scientists to viruses in the first place, said Marco Vignuzzi, a virologist at the Singapore Agency for Science, Research and Technology Infectious Diseases Labs. “We were trying to be reductionist.”
That reductionism paid off. Studies on viruses were crucial to the birth of modern biology. Lacking the complexity of cells, they revealed fundamental rules about how genes work. But viral reductionism came at a cost, Vignuzzi said: By assuming viruses are simple, you blind yourself to the possibility that they might be complicated in ways you don’t know about yet.
For example, if you think of viruses as isolated packages of genes, it would be absurd to imagine them having a social life. But Vignuzzi and a new school of like-minded virologists don’t think it’s absurd at all. In recent decades, they have discovered some strange features of viruses that don’t make sense if viruses are lonely particles. They instead are uncovering a marvelously complex social world of viruses. These sociovirologists, as the researchers sometimes call themselves, believe that viruses make sense only as members of a community.
Tuberous sclerosis is a rare genetic disease that causes benign tumors to grow in the brain and other organs. The disease can be mild, or it can cause severe disabilities. Tuberous sclerosis has no cure, but treatments can help symptoms. More info here.
Tuberous sclerosis (TSC) is a rare genetic disease. It causes benign tumors in the brain and other organs. Learn about symptoms and what can help.
A trailblazer in the field of therapeutic genome editing, Fyodor D. Urnov’s research focuses on developing medicines for devastating genetic diseases.
Denis Noble discusses common misconceptions in genetics. Are our genes really as deterministic as we think they are?Watch the full talk] at https://iai.tv/vid…
In good news for future animation figureheads, there might be a new way to revive frozen brains without damaging them. Scientists in China have developed a new chemical concoction that lets brain tissue function again after being frozen.
Freezing is effective at keeping organic material from decomposing, but it still causes damage. As the water inside turns to ice, the crystals tear apart the cells. That’s why frozen meat or fruit goes a bit mushy after it’s defrosted – but a bigger problem is that it also happens with organs or tissues chilled for transplant or research.
For the new study, scientists at Fudan University in China experimented with various chemical compounds to see which ones might work to preserve living brain tissue during freezing. They started by testing out promising chemicals on brain organoids – small, lab-grown lumps of brain tissue that develop into different types of related cells.
In 1998, a paper linking childhood vaccines with autism was published in the journal, The Lancet, only to be retracted in 2010 when the science was debunked.
In a May 15 paper released in the journal Physical Review Letters, Virginia Tech physicists revealed a microscopic phenomenon that could greatly improve the performance of soft devices, such as agile flexible robots or microscopic capsules for drug delivery.
The paper, written by doctoral candidate Chinmay Katke, assistant professor C. Nadir Kaplan, and co-author Peter A. Korevaar from Radboud University in the Netherlands, proposes a new physical mechanism that could speed up the expansion and contraction of hydrogels. For one thing, this opens up the possibility for hydrogels to replace rubber-based materials used to make flexible robots—enabling these fabricated materials to perhaps move with a speed and dexterity close to that of human hands.
Soft robots are already being used in manufacturing, where a hand-like device is programmed to grab an item from a conveyer belt—picture a hot dog or piece of soap—and place it in a container to be packaged. But the ones in use now lean on hydraulics or pneumatics to change the shape of the “hand” to pick up the item.
AlphaFold 3 models all life’s molecules—proteins, DNA, RNA, and small molecules—and their interactions. The work could speed up science and drug discovery.
Genomics is revolutionizing medicine and science, but current approaches still struggle to capture the breadth of human genetic diversity. Pangenomes that incorporate many people’s DNA could be the answer, and a new project thinks quantum computers will be a key enabler.
When the Human Genome Project published its first reference genome in 2001, it was based on DNA from just a handful of humans. While less than one percent of our DNA varies from person to person, this can still leave important gaps and limit what we can learn from genomic analyses.
That’s why the concept of a pangenome has become increasingly popular. This refers to a collection of genomic sequences from many different people that have been merged to cover a much greater range of human genetic possibilities.
