A mouse study at WashU Medicine shows how Alzheimer’s disease reprograms genes in specialized cells involved in amyloid plaque removal.
Category: biotech/medical – Page 64
Engineers create bioelectronic hydrogels to monitor activity in the body
Wearable or implantable devices to monitor biological activities, such as heart rate, are useful, but they are typically made of metals, silicon, plastic and glass and must be surgically implanted. A research team in the McKelvey School of Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis is developing bioelectronic hydrogels that could one day replace existing devices and have much more flexibility.
Alexandra Rutz, an assistant professor of biomedical engineering, and Anna Goestenkors, a fifth-year doctoral student in Rutz’s lab, created novel granular hydrogels. They are made of microparticles that could be injected into the body, spread over tissues or used to encapsulate cells and tissue and also to monitor and stimulate biological activity. Results of their research were published Oct. 8 in the journal Small.
The microparticles are spherical hydrogels made from the conducting polymer known as PEDOT: PSS. When packed tightly, they are similar to wet sand or paste: They hold as a solid with micropores, but they can also be 3D printed or spread into different shapes while maintaining their structure or redistributed into individual microparticles when placed in liquid.
Mosquito saliva may hold clues to fighting chikungunya inflammation
Scientists from the A*STAR Infectious Diseases Labs (A*STAR IDL) have uncovered a surprising mechanism showing how mosquito saliva can alter the human body’s immune response during chikungunya virus (CHIKV) infection, contributing to Singapore’s broader efforts to strengthen infectious disease preparedness.
The research, published in Nature Communications, reveals that sialokinin, a bioactive peptide in Aedes mosquito saliva, binds to neurokinin receptors on immune cells and suppresses monocyte activation, thereby reducing inflammation and facilitating early viral dissemination. These findings offer new insight into how mosquito bites shape disease outcomes.
The Impact of Biomarkers on the Early Detection of Acute Mesenteric Ischemia
Background: acute mesenteric ischemia (AMI) is a life-threatening condition that is caused by inadequate blood flow through the mesenteric vessel and is related to high mortality rates due to systemic complications. This study aims to systematically review the available literature concerning the major findings of possible biomarkers for early detection of acute mesenteric ischemia in the human population. Methods: studies that measured the performance of biomarkers during acute mesenteric ischemia were identified with the search of PubMed, Embase, Medline, and Cochrane library. Results: from a total of 654 articles, 46 articles examining 14 different biomarkers were filtered, falling within our inclusion criteria. Intestinal fatty acid-binding protein (I-FABP) was the most commonly researched biomarker regarding AMI, with sensitivity ranging from 61.5% to 100% and specificity ranging from 40% to 100%. The second most commonly researched biomarker was D-dimer, with a sensitivity of 60–100% and a specificity of 18–85.71%. L-lactate had a sensitivity of 36.6–90.91% and a specificity of 64.29–96%. Several parameters within the blood count were examined as potential markers for AMI, including NLR, PLR, MPV, RDW, DNI, and IG. Citrulline, interleukin 6 (IL-6), and procalcitonin (PCT) were the least-researched biomarkers. Conclusion: different biomarkers showed different accuracies in detecting AMI. I-FABP and D-dimer have been the most researched and shown to be valuable in the diagnosis of AMI, whereas L-lactate could be used as an additional tool. Ischemia-modified albumin (IMA), alpha glutathione S-transferase (αGST), interleukin 6 (IL-6), and citrulline showed potential use in their respective studies. However, further research needs to be done on larger sample sizes and with controls to reduce bias. Several studies showed that neutrophil–lymphocyte ratio (NLR), platelet–lymphocyte ratio (PLR), mean platelet volume (MPV), red-cell distribution width (RDW), delta neutrophil index (DNI), and immature granulocytes (IGs) might be useful, as well at the same time be widely distributed and affordable in combination with other markers presenting higher specificity and sensitivity.
Reducing Cardiovascular Disease Risk: Going Beyond ApoB
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Jeremy Barton | A Path to Atomically Precise Manufacturing @ Paths to Progress
Jeremy Barton and Nanotechnology.
*This video was recorded at ‘Paths to Progress’ at LabWeek hosted by Protocol Labs & Foresight Institute.*
Protocol Labs and Foresight Institute are excited to invite you to apply to a 5-day mini workshop series to celebrate LabWeek, PL’s decentralized conference to further public goods. The theme of the series, Paths to Progress, is aimed at (re)-igniting long overdue progress in longevity bio, molecular nanotechnology, neurotechnology, crypto & AI, and space through emerging decentralized, open, and technology-enabled funding mechanisms.
*This mini-workshop is focused on Paths to Progress in Molecular Nanotechnology*
Molecular manufacturing, in its most ambitious incarnation, would use programmable tools to bring together molecules to make precisely bonded components in order to build larger structures from the ground up. This would enable general-purpose manufacturing of new materials and machines, at a fraction of current waste and price. We are currently nowhere near this ambitious goal. However, recent progress in sub-fields such as DNA nanotechnology, protein-engineering, STM, and AFM provide possible building blocks for the construction of a v1 of molecular manufacturing; the molecular 3D printer. Let’s explore the state of the art and what type of innovation mechanisms could bridge the valley of death: how might we update the original Nanotech roadmap; is a tech tree enough? how might we fund the highly interdisciplinary progress needed to succeed: FRO vs. DAO?
*About The Foresight Institute*
Microtubule-Stabilizer Epothilone B Delays Anesthetic-Induced Unconsciousness in Rats
Suggests microtubules play an important role in consciousness. Answer probably lies within them. I really hope for the possibility of what some call “mind uploading” or transfer of consciousness to a stronger medium like artificial neurons made out of better materials. But first, we must get a far better understanding of why consciousness exist. These kinds of experiments are a pre-requisite to that.
Study: Sana Khan, Yixiang Huang, Derin Timuçin, Shantelle Bailey, Sophia Lee, Jessica Lopes, Emeline Gaunce, Jasmine Mosberger, Michelle Zhan, Bothina Abdelrahman, Xiran Zeng and Michael C. Wiest.
Volatile anesthetics reversibly abolish consciousness or motility in animals, plants, and single-celled organisms (Kelz and Mashour, 2019; Yokawa et al., 2019). For humans, they are a medical miracle that we have been benefiting from for over 150 years, but the precise molecular mechanisms by which these molecules reversibly abolish consciousness remain elusive (Eger et al., 2008; Hemmings et al., 2019; Kelz and Mashour, 2019; Mashour, 2024). The functionally relevant molecular targets for causing unconsciousness are believed to be one or a combination of neural ion channels, receptors, mitochondria, synaptic proteins, and cytoskeletal proteins.
The Meyer–Overton correlation refers to the venerable finding that the anesthetic potency of chemically diverse anesthetic molecules is directly correlated with their solubility in lipids akin to olive oil (S. R. Hameroff, 2018; Kelz and Mashour, 2019). The possibility that general anesthesia might be explained by unitary action of all (or most) anesthetics on one target protein is supported by the Meyer–Overton correlation and the additivity of potencies of different anesthetics (Eger et al., 2008). Together these results suggest that anesthetics may act on a unitary site, via relatively nonspecific physical interactions (such as London/van der Waals forces between induced dipoles).
Cytoskeletal microtubules (MTs) have been considered as a candidate target of anesthetic action for over 50 years (Allison and Nunn, 1968; S. Hameroff, 1998). Other membrane receptor and ion channel proteins were ruled out as possible unitary targets by exhaustive studies culminating in Eger et al. (2008). However, MTs (composed of tubulin subunits) were not ruled out and remain a candidate for a unitary site of anesthetic action. MTs are the major components of the cytoskeleton in all cells, and they also play an essential role in cell reproduction—and aberrant cell reproduction in cancer—but in neurons, they have additional specialized roles in intracellular transport and neural plasticity (Kapitein and Hoogenraad, 2015). MTs have also been proposed to process information, encode memory, and mediate consciousness (S. R. Hameroff et al., 1982; S. Hameroff and Penrose, 1996; S. Hameroff, 2022). While classical models predict no direct role of MTs in neuronal membrane and synaptic signaling, Singh et al. (2021a) showed that MT activities do regulate axonal firing, for example, overriding membrane potentials. The orchestrated objective reduction (Orch OR) theory proposes that anesthesia directly blocks quantum effects in MTs necessary for consciousness (S. Hameroff and Penrose, 2014). Consistent with this hypothesis, volatile anesthetics do bind to cytoskeletal MTs (Pan et al., 2008) and dampen their quantum optical effects (Kalra et al., 2023), potentially contributing to causing unconsciousness.
