Lifeboat Foundation

Genetic Engineering extends far beyond the controversial news headlines that obsess over ‘designer babies’. In the science community, gene-editing tools like CRISPR and PRIME editing will do nothing less than save the planet.

The Rise Of Genetic Engineering (2022)
Writers: Kyle McCabe, Christopher Webb Young.
Stars: Rodolphe Barrangou, George Church, Mary Beth Dallas.
Genre: Documentary.
Country: United States.
Language: English.
Release Date: August 24, 2022 (United States)

Continue reading “The Rise Of Genetic Engineering | Gene-Editing | Documentary” »

Nucleic acid sensing involving CRISPR technologies is powerful but has certain limitations, such as PAM sequence requirements and limited multiplexing. Here, authors report a CRISPR-based barcoding technology which enables multiple outputs from any target sequence, based on cis-and trans-cleavage.

Scientists had a hard time reconstructing how complex molecular parts are being held together. However, that was before SISSA’s Cristian Micheletti and his team studied how the DNA double helix unzips when translocated at high velocity through a nanopore.

DNA Double Helix’s Unzipping

Continue reading “DNA Double Helix Splits Due to Invasive Nature of Unzipping Process” »

Our brains aren’t limited to producing just one type of brain wave at a time, but usually, one type is dominant, and the type it is can often be linked to your level of alertness: delta waves may dominate when you sleep, while gamma waves might dominate when you concentrate intensely.

The idea: Researchers have previously observed that people with Alzheimer’s — a devastating neurological disease affecting more than 6 million people in the US alone — may have weaker and less in-sync gamma waves than people who don’t have the disease.

Continue reading “MIT is testing light and sound to combat Alzheimer’s” »

Organoids are an incredible tool for research into the brain. Cerebral organoids are created by growing human stem cells in a bioreactor. They might be the key to unlocking the answers to many of our questions about the brain. We explain how they’re made and some of the discoveries they’ve helped with so far!
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✍ Script by Duranka Perera (https://www.durankaperera.com/)
✍ Thumb by “Broken” Bran — https://twitter.com/BranGSmith.
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It’s a long-debated flaw in CRISPR: When you try to give Cas9 to a patient to snip its DNA, that person’s immune system may recognize that the protein comes not from us but from our ancient microbial foes. And it might then attack.

Scientists transplanted human cerebral organoids (“minibrains”) into rats, to better study brain disorders. The neurons grown in vivo looked more like mature human brain cells than those grown in vitro, and they made better models of Timothy syndrome. The human minibrains formed deep connections with the rat brains, received sensory information, and drove the rat’s behavior.

More on how minibrains are grown and used, and the issue of organoid consciousness: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6FGq7_t3Eo.

Continue reading “What if You Give a Rat Human Brain Cells? You Can Control Its Behavior… — YouTube” »

Chapters:
0:00 Intro.
0:43 Growing Organoids.
2:57 Minibrains in Science & Medicine.
4:46 Giving Minibrains Psychedelics.
5:26 Minibrains With Eyes.
6:30 Can Minibrains Feel?
7:22 Looking For Consciousness.
9:03 The Future of Minibrain Research.
10:47 Human Minibrains Grafted Onto Mice.
12:10 What’s Next?

Videography by Island Fox Media.

Continue reading “Growing Mini-Brains in a Lab: Cerebral Organoids Could Save Your Life, But Has Science Gone Too Far?” »

If a free-floating brain could feel pain or ‘wake up,’ how would we know? That’s an important ethical question — and it’s one we need to ask more often as labs around the world create new organoids, or miniature human organs. To answer it we talked to Jay Gopalakrishnan at his ‘mini brain’ lab for centrosome and cytoskeleton biology in Düsseldorf, Germany.

STUDY: https://www.cell.com/cell-stem-cell/fulltext/S1934-5909(21)00295-2

Continue reading “Inside a mini-brain (with eyes?) lab” »