Lifeboat Foundation

A UCSF-led team has developed a technique to build tiny models of human tissues, called organoids, more precisely than ever before using a process that turns human cells into a biological equivalent of LEGO bricks. These mini-tissues in a dish can be used to study how particular structural features of tissue affect normal growth or go awry in cancer. They could be used for therapeutic drug screening and to help teach researchers how to grow whole human organs.

The new technique — called DNA Programmed Assembly of Cells (DPAC) and reported in the journal Nature Methods on August 31, 2015 — allows researchers to create arrays of thousands of custom-designed organoids, such as models of human mammary glands containing several hundred cells each, which can be built in a matter of hours.

There are few limits to the tissues this technology can mimic, said Zev Gartner, PhD, the paper’s senior author and an associate professor of pharmaceutical chemistry at UCSF. “We can take any cell type we want and program just where it goes. We can precisely control who’s talking to whom and who’s touching whom at the earliest stages. The cells then follow these initially programmed spatial cues to interact, move around, and develop into tissues over time.”

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Growing brain tissue in a dish has been done before, but bold new research announced this week shows that scientists’ ability to create human brains in laboratory settings has come a long way quickly.

Researchers at the Ohio State University in the US claim to have developed the most complete laboratory-grown human brain ever, creating a model with the brain maturity of a 5-week-old foetus. The brain, which is approximately the size of a pencil eraser, contains 99 percent of the genes that would be present in a natural human foetal brain.

“It not only looks like the developing brain, its diverse cell types express nearly all genes like a brain,” Rene Anand, professor of biological chemistry and pharmacology at Ohio State and lead researcher on the brain model, said in a statement.

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Need an obscure medicinal compound found only in a jungle plant? Just print it.

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Synthetic biology programming microorganisms to perform some new functions. Genes are made out of DNA; synthetic biology involves inserting synthetic genes that might not have existed before into yeast and reprogramming them to make a new chemistry or things not made naturally by biology. Each gene codes for an enzyme. One can program a new set of enzymes and convert them to intermediate products. If you go through five or even 15 steps, you can get a final product – a polymer, a new drug – creating a chemical factory inside a cell. This is much better than nanotechnology, because in synthetic biology, we get down to molecular size…

Prof. Joseph Jacobson, a leading physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is not only the inventor of e-ink but also a mover in creating artificial DNA to eventually cure diseases.

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Professor Hyun-Gyu Park of the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) has developed a technique to analyze various target DNAs using an aptamer, a DNA fragment that can recognize and bind to a specific protein or enzyme. This technique will allow the development of affordable genetic diagnosis for new bacteria or virus, such as Middle Ease Respiratory Syndrome (MERS). The research findings were published in the June issue of Chemical Communications, issued by the Royal Society of Chemistry in the United Kingdom. The paper was selected as a lead article of the journal.

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It’s official: Star Trek-style replicators are on the way. Well, sort of. Assembly lines for specific molecules could be a thing of the future, thanks to a recent breakthrough in atomic bonding published in the journal Physical Review Letters. A team of scientists has found a way of using laser beams to control the path of chemical processes, possibly ushering in a new age of photochemistry.

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“OS FERMENTATION events have included installations, workshops, prints, and tastings. The installation includes digital prints created by custom electronics and software that allow microbes to take their own “selfies” and add image manipulation effects to their images based on the shifting pH levels, oxygen, and color values of the fermentation process.”

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Consider how many natural laws and constants—both physical and chemical—have been discovered since the time of the early Greeks. Hundreds of thousands of natural laws have been unveiled in man’s never ending quest to understand Earth and the universe.

I couldn’t name 1% of the laws of nature and physics. Here are just a few that come to mind from my high school science classes. I shall not offer a bulleted list, because that would suggest that these random references to laws and constants are organized or complete. It doesn’t even scratch the surface…

Newton’s Law of force (F=MA), Newton’s law of gravity, The electromagnetic force, strong force, weak force, Avogadro’s Constant, Boyle’s Law, the Lorentz Transformation, Maxwell’s equations, laws of thermodynamics, E=MC², particles behave as waves, superpositioning of waves, universe inflation rate, for every action… etc, etc.

For some time, physicists, astronomers, chemists, and even theologians have pondered an interesting puzzle: Why is our universe so carefully tuned for our existence? And not just our existence—After all, it makes sense that our stature, our senses and things like muscle mass and speed have evolved to match our environment. But here’s the odd thing—If even one of a great many laws, properties or constants were off by even a smidgen, the whole universe could not exist—at least not in a form that could support life as we imagine it! Even the laws and numbers listed above. All of creation would not be here, if any of these were just a bit off…

Continue reading “Our Universe is Fine Tuned for Life—Why?” »