Escherichia coli (E. coli) is a common bacterium that lives in the intestines of animals and humans, and it is often used to identify fecal contamination within the environment. E. coli can also easily develop resistance to antibiotics, making it an ideal organism for testing antimicrobial resistance—especially in certain agricultural environments where fecal material is used as manure or wastewater is reused.
Among the tens of thousands of ant species, incredible “intelligent” behaviors like crop culture, animal husbandry, surgery, “piracy,” social distancing, and complex architecture have evolved.
Yet at first sight, the brain of an ant seems hardly capable of such feats: it is about the size of a poppy seed, with only 0.25m to 1m neurons, compared to 86bn for humans.
Now, researchers from Israel and Switzerland have shown how “swarm intelligence” resembling advance planning can nevertheless emerge from the concerted operation of many of these tiny brains. The results are published in Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience.
Learn about dragon fruit and its nutritional value. Discover how to eat it and ideas for incorporating it into to your diet…
Posted in biotech/medical, food | Leave a Comment on Biased agonism of GLP-1R and GIPR enhances glucose lowering and weight loss, with dual GLP-1R/GIPR biased agonism yielding greater efficacy
Biased agonism to treat diabetes and obesity.
Agonists of glucagon-like peptide-1 receptor (GLP-1R) and glucose-dependent insulinotropic polypeptide receptor (GIPR) have been used for diabetes and obesity treatment. Mechanism of action and signaling of these receptors are of paramount importance.
The researchers investigate the impact of biased cyclic AMP (cAMP) signaling with a dual GLP-1R/ GIPR agonist.
Biased GLP-1R and GIPR agonism with GLP-1R/GIPR agonist, CT-859 leads to better and prolonged glucose lowering, greater food intake reduction, and weight loss than unbiased agonism.
Biased GIPR agonism synergizes with GLP-1R on food intake suppression and weight loss. https://www.cell.com/cell-reports-medicine/fulltext/S2666…0229-0 https://sciencemission.com/Biased-agonism-of-GLP-1R-and-GIPR
Rodriguez et al. investigate the impact of biased signaling with a dual GLP-1R/GIPR agonist. Biased GLP-1R and GIPR agonism leads to better and prolonged glucose lowering, greater food intake reduction, and weight loss than unbiased agonism. Biased GIPR agonism synergizes with GLP-1R on food intake suppression and weight loss.
Oregon State University researchers are gaining a more detailed understanding of emissions from wood-burning stoves and developing technologies that allow stoves to operate much more cleanly and safely, potentially limiting particulate matter pollution by 95%.
The work has key implications for human health as wood-burning stoves are a leading source of PM2.5 emissions in the United States. PM2.5 refers to fine particulate matter with a diameter of 2.5 micrometers or smaller that can be inhaled deeply into the lungs and even enter the bloodstream. Exposure to PM2.5 is a known cause of cardiovascular disease and is linked to the onset and worsening of respiratory illness.
Even though a relatively small number of households use wood stoves, they are the U.S.’s third-largest source of particulate matter pollution, after wildfire smoke and agricultural dust, said Nordica MacCarty of the OSU College of Engineering.
Plant DNA has become a frontier for artificial intelligence, with large language models turning genetic sequences into interpretable content for researchers. These tools treat bases like words, revealing hidden patterns that once eluded traditional methods.
A study published by Dr. Meiling Zou from Hainan University describes how language-based models interpret extensive plant genomes with remarkable precision.
Trees get most of the love, but diatoms, a group of photosynthetic microalgae, produce 20% of Earth’s oxygen and are the foundation of aquatic food webs. The prevalence and diversity of diatoms have made them highly successful, suggesting the evolutionary history of diatoms is worth understanding as an important piece of the larger puzzle of life on Earth.
A new study led by researchers from the U of A found that diatoms evolved slowly for the first 100 million years of their existence. Then, 170 million years ago, they reached an inflection point characterized by a burst of rapid speciation orders of magnitude faster than anything that had preceded it. This included changes to their shape, size and mode of reproduction, as well as repeated movements from oceans into freshwater systems, a typically difficult barrier for aquatic species to cross.
With an estimated 100,000 species, diatoms are now one of the most diverse groups of microalgae. They are small enough that dozens could fit on the head of a pin and are found almost anywhere there is water and sunlight.
The researchers are especially interested in how our bodies maintain balance. Metabolic homeostasis, the fancy term for it, may have shaped more traits than we realize.
And as diets continue to change today, our ancient genetic choices could still be nudging us in new directions.
The study is published in the journal Cell Genomics.
Researchers led by Hiroshi Ohno at the RIKEN Center for Integrative Medical Sciences (IMS) in Japan have discovered a new way to reduce obesity. Their study shows that supplying the gut with extra acetate reduces fat and liver mass in both normal and obese mice, as long as bacteria of the Bacteroides species are also present in the gut.
When both these conditions are met, gut bacteria can eliminate more sugars from the gut and promote the burning of fats for energy in the host. The findings were published in Cell Metabolism.
Affecting hundreds of millions of people around the world, obesity constitutes a global epidemic. It is linked to eating too much sugar and starchy foods and is known to increase the risk of heart disease, type-2 diabetes, and cancer. At the same time, studies show that eating fiber reduces the risk of these very same diseases—even though it cannot be digested directly by mammals.
Beta-glucan fibre molecules are found in oats Alamy/PA A new study suggests that eating a fibre supplement found naturally in oats, barley and rye before