Lifeboat Foundation

“I don’t want to interrupt Lucas’ neurodevelopment — he’s on the same path that a child his age would normally be,” Vogel said, adding that he’s started eating baby cereal and baby food. “We intervene with the best intentions and then possibly delay someone’s recovery — I don’t want to stunt his growth or neurodevelopment.”

In the future, Vogel said they will work with his family on cosmetic goals as well but that he has normal facial features, meaning the area the will need to address is the top of his skull. He added that the more bone he develops the more of his own tissue they can use, which will “lead to a better outcome.”

Vogel said the waiting has also paid off, as at a recent visit with Lucas he was lifting his head and trying to crawl, which is something a babies typically master between six and 10 months of age.

At SynBioBeta, entrepreneurs making plant-based foods and genetically engineered bacteria rallied to promote the idea that it’s biology’s century.

Please no, we don’t need a machine-learning troll farm.

Scientists at the University of California, Berkeley have used the CRISPR gene-editing tool to give fruit flies an evolutionary advantage they’ve never had before. By making just three small changes to a single gene, the team gave the flies the ability to effectively eat poison and store it in their bodies, protecting themselves from predators in the process.

Milkweed is a common plant that’s toxic to most animals and insects – but the monarch butterfly flies in the face of that plant’s defenses. The bug has evolved the ability to not only thrive on the poisonous plant, but turn it to its own advantage. It stores the toxins in its body, making it poisonous to any predators that might try to eat it.

And now, the UC Berkeley researchers have given fruit flies that ability for the first time. CRISPR has been used to edit the genes of insects, mammals and even humans, but the team says this is the first time a multicellular organism has been edited to endow it with new behaviors and adaptations to the environment. In this case, that means a new diet and a new defense mechanism against predators.

Drew Endy almost can’t talk fast enough to convey everything he has to say. It’s a wonderfully complex message filled with nuance, a kind of intricate puzzle box being built by a pioneer of synthetic biology who wants to fundamentally rejigger the living world.

Endy heads a research team at Stanford that is, as he puts it, building genetically encoded computers and redesigning genomes. What that means: he’s trying to engineer life forms to do useful things. Just about anything could come out of this toolkit: new foods, new materials, new medicines. So you are unlikely to find anyone who is more optimistic than he is about the potential for synthetic biology to solve big problems.

That’s what makes Endy so compelling when he worries about how the technology is being developed. Perhaps more than anyone else working in synthetic biology, Endy has tried to hold the community to account.

The fruit flies in Noah Whiteman’s lab may be hazardous to your health.

Whiteman and his University of California, Berkeley, colleagues have turned perfectly palatable fruit flies—palatable, at least, to frogs and birds—into potentially poisonous prey that may cause anything that eats them to puke. In large enough quantities, the flies likely would make a human puke, too, much like the emetic effect of ipecac syrup.

That’s because the team genetically engineered the flies, using CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing, to be able to eat milkweed without dying and to sequester its toxins, just as America’s most beloved butterfly, the monarch, does to deter predators.

From raindrops rolling off the waxy surface of a waterlily leaf to the efficiency of desalination membranes, interactions between water molecules and water-repellent “hydrophobic” surfaces are all around us. The interplay becomes even more intriguing when a thin water layer becomes sandwiched between two hydrophobic surfaces, KAUST researchers have shown.

In the early 1980s, researchers first noted an unexpected effect when two hydrophobic surfaces were slowly brought together in water. “At some point, the two surfaces would suddenly jump into contact—like two magnets being brought together,” says Himanshu Mishra from KAUST’s Water Desalination and Reuse Center. Mishra’s lab investigates water at all length scales, from reducing water consumption in agriculture, to the properties of individual water molecules.

Researchers were unable to explain the phenomenon at the molecular level, so in 2016, Mishra organized a KAUST conference on the subject. “We brought together leaders in the field—experimentalists and theorists—leading to intense debates on the understanding of hydrophobic surface forces,” he says.

A team of chemists at California Institute of Technology has totally synthesized perseanol using a 16-step process for the first time. In their paper published in the journal Nature, the group describes their process and how well it worked.

In nature, perseanol is a molecule produced by the persea tree. Shortly after its discovery in the late 1990s, researchers found that the molecule was similar to ryanodine, a once-popular pesticide. They have similar architecture, though perseanol lacks a pyrrole-2-carboxylate ester. Because of the similarities, interest in using perseanol on commercial crops grew. Not much later, a cheaper alternative was found, and the molecule never made it to the farm. But interest in it persists because of its ecofriendly reputation. For that reason, chemists have been working to produce it in the lab—if successful, the results would be both cheaper and more environmentally friendly than products now in use.

The researchers note that ryanodine works as a pesticide by binding to calcium channels in insects’ muscles, paralyzing them. It can paralyze animals, too, but perseanol is believed to be more specific to insects, making it a potentially safer pesticide. The researchers also note that little research has been performed to determine the means by which perseanol kills bugs. That could change however, if interest in using perseanol as a pesticide is rekindled.

A team including evolutionary biologists from the University of Toronto (U of T) have identified the ways in which herbicide-resistant strains of an invasive weed named common waterhemp have emerged in fields of soy and corn in southwestern Ontario.

They found that the resistance—which was first detected in Ontario in 2010—has spread thanks to two mechanisms: first, pollen and seeds of resistant plants are physically dispersed by wind, water and other means; second, resistance has appeared through the spontaneous emergence of resistance mutations that then spread.

The researchers found evidence of both mechanisms by comparing the genomes of herbicide-resistant waterhemp plants from Midwestern U.S. farms with the genomes of plants from Southern Ontario.