Lifeboat Foundation

The gene-editing system CRISPR-Cas9 which has revolutionized genetic engineering over the past decade involves cutting DNA strands which is a process that can be quite hard to control and can result in unwanted genetic changes. Now, thanks to researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), a new gene-editing technology called CRISPRoff can change that, according to a press release.

“Fast forward four years [from the initial grant], and CRISPRoff finally works as envisioned in a science fiction way,” says co-senior author Luke Gilbert. “It’s exciting to see it work so well in practice.”

In this, we present QuASeR, a reference-free DNA sequence reconstruction implementation via de novo assembly on both gate-based and quantum annealing platforms. This is the first time this important application in bioinformatics is modeled using quantum computation. Each one of the four steps of the implementation (TSP, QUBO, Hamiltonians and QAOA) is explained with a proof-of-concept example to target both the genomics research community and quantum application developers in a self-contained manner. The implementation and results on executing the algorithm from a set of DNA reads to a reconstructed sequence, on a gate-based quantum simulator, the D-Wave quantum annealing simulator and hardware are detailed. We also highlight the limitations of current classical simulation and available quantum hardware systems. The implementation is open-source and can be found on https://github.com/QE-Lab/QuASeR.

Citation: Sarkar A, Al-Ars Z, Bertels K (2021) QuASeR: Quantum Accelerated de novo DNA sequence reconstruction. PLoS ONE 16: e0249850. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.

Editor: Archana Kamal, University of Massachusetts Lowell, UNITED STATES.

Before undergoing surgeries and other invasive medical procedures, patients typically undergo anesthesia. Anesthesia consists in giving patients a class of drugs (i.e., anesthetics) that cause them to lose feeling in specific areas of the body (i.e., local anesthesia) or fully lose awareness during a procedure (i.e., general anesthesia). These anesthetics can be administered to patients via injection, inhalation, skin-numbing lotions, and other means.

In the past, doctors and medical researchers viewed general anesthesia as a passive process that could not be influenced or interrupted once anesthetic drugs were administered. More recently, however, studies showed that it is in fact an active brain process that can be experimentally controlled and acted on.

A research team at the Southern University of Science and Technology in China recently carried out a study investigating the processes underpinning brain states while under general anesthesia and those associated with the subsequent re-emergence of awareness. Their findings, published in Nature Neuroscience, highlight possible strategies that could help anesthesiologists to extend and deepen or shorten periods of anesthesia.

Online romance fraud is an increasingly common phenomenon, which can affect people of all ages worldwide. This type of fraud occurs when a malicious individual or members of a criminal organization engage with users online pretending to be romantically interested in them, while trying to trick them into sending money or sharing confidential information with them.

Online romance scams can have a detrimental effect on a victim’s life, causing them to spend all their savings, become indebted, and even be subjected to blackmail or identity theft. A team of researchers at Abertay University in the U.K. recently reviewed existing literature focusing on romance fraud and then summarized some of the most recurring findings in a paper pre-published on arXiv.

“Romance fraud has been growing over the last decade or so and was exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic which saw a surge in cybercrime and cyberattacks,” Dr. Lynsay Shepherd, one of the researchers who carried out the study, told Tech Xplore. “Our paper provides a comprehensive overview of romance fraud research, which could serve as a starting point for future research in the field.”

Researchers at the University of California at Los Angeles have analyzed RNA editing in postmortem brains of four schizophrenia cohorts and uncovered a significant and reproducible trend of hypo-editing in patients of European descent.

The paper “Widespread RNA hypo-editing in schizophrenia and its relevance to mitochondrial function,” published in Science Advances, details the research team’s efforts to isolate functionally impacting RNA editing sites to understand how dysregulated editing contributes to various disorders.

In the data analysis, researchers identified 26,841 unique differential editing sites. They observed a significant trend of lower than expected amounts of RNA editing in the schizophrenia groups, which was reproduced in three of the four cohorts of European individuals.

Promising results in clinical studies have been demonstrated by the utilization of electrothermal agents (ETAs) in cancer therapy. However, a difficulty arises from the balance between facilitating the degradation of ETAs, and at the same time, increasing the electrothermal performance/stability required for highly efficient treatment. In this study, we controlled the thermal signature of the MoS2 by harnessing MoS2 nanostructures with M13 phage (MNM) via the structural assembling (hydrophobic interaction) phenomena and developed a combined PANC-1 cancer cell–MNM alternating current (AC)-stimulus framework for cancer cell ablation and electrothermal therapy. A percentage decrease in the cell viability of ~23% was achieved, as well as a degradation time of 2 weeks; a stimulus length of 100 μs was also achieved.

Scientists have created thin, elastic bottlebrush polymer films that can function as artificial muscles at significantly lower voltages than currently available materials, potentially enabling their use in safer medical devices and artificial organs.

Whether wriggling your toes or lifting groceries, muscles in your body smoothly expand and contract. Some polymers can do the same thing — acting like artificial muscles — but only when stimulated by dangerously high voltages. Now, researchers in ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces report a series of thin, elastic films that respond to substantially lower electrical charges. The materials represent a step toward artificial muscles that could someday operate safely in medical devices.

Artificial muscles could become key components of movable soft robotic implants and functional artificial organs. Electroactive elastomers, such as bottlebrush polymers, are attractive materials for this purpose because they start soft but stiffen when stretched. And they can change shape when electrically charged. However, currently available bottlebrush polymer films only move at voltages over 4,000 V, which exceeds the 50 V maximum that the U.S. Occupational Safety & Health Administration states is safe. Reducing the thickness of these films to less than 100 µm could lower the required voltages, but this hasn’t been done successfully yet for bottlebrush polymers. So, Dorina Opris and colleagues wanted to find a simple way to produce thinner films.

Taken in pill form, the drug would eliminate cells in the human body that are responsible for advancing the ageing process – potentially doubling our lifespan. But is this desirable?

As data scientist Izzy Miller puts it, the group chat is “a hallowed thing” in today’s society. Whether located on iMessage, WhatsApp, or Discord, it’s the place where you and your best friends hang out, shoot the shit, and share updates about life, both trivial and momentous. In a world where we are increasingly bowling alone, we can, at least, complain to the group chat about how much bowling these days sucks ass.

“My group chat is a lifeline and a comfort and a point of connection,” Miller tells The Verge. “And I just thought it would be hilarious and sort of sinister to replace it.”

So he did.