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Continue reading “82 Year Old Longevity Biohacker’s Experience With Follistatin Gene Therapy” »
Summary: Researchers have developed an AI model that accurately predicts gene activity in any human cell, providing insights into cellular functions and disease mechanisms.
Trained on data from over 1.3 million cells, the model can predict gene expression in unseen cell types with high accuracy. It has already uncovered mechanisms driving a pediatric leukemia and may help explore the genome’s “dark matter,” where most cancer mutations occur.
Influential inventions often combine existing tools in new ways. The iPhone, for instance, amalgamated the telephone, web browser and camera, among many other devices.
The same is now possible in gene editing. Rather than employ separate tools for editing genes and regulating their expression, these distinct goals can now be combined into a single tool that can simultaneously and independently address different genetic diseases in the same cell.
In a new paper in Nature Communications, researchers in the Center for Precision Engineering for Health (CPE4H) at the University of Pennsylvania School of Engineering and Applied Science (Penn Engineering) describe minimal versatile genetic perturbation technology (mvGPT).
Summary: While humans share over 95% of their genome with chimpanzees, our brains are far more complex due to differences in gene expression. Research shows that human brain cells, particularly glial cells, exhibit higher levels of upregulated genes, enhancing neural plasticity and development.
Oligodendrocytes, a glial cell type, play a key role by insulating neurons for faster and more efficient signaling. This study underscores that the evolution of human intelligence likely involved coordinated changes across all brain cell types, not just neurons.
Outdated BIOS firmware in Illumina iSeq 100 allows attackers to disable devices or install malware, threatening critical genetic research and vaccine.
Summary: Researchers have developed a Genetic Progression Score (GPS) using artificial intelligence to predict the progression of autoimmune diseases from preclinical symptoms to full disease. The GPS model integrates genetic data and electronic health records to provide personalized risk scores, improving prediction accuracy by 25% to 1,000% over existing models.
This method identifies individuals at higher risk earlier, enabling timely interventions and better disease management. The framework could also be adapted to study other underrepresented diseases, offering a breakthrough in personalized medicine and health equity.
A study from the University of Minnesota Medical School links social stress to accelerated aging, finding that stress damages DNA
DNA, or deoxyribonucleic acid, is a molecule composed of two long strands of nucleotides that coil around each other to form a double helix. It is the hereditary material in humans and almost all other organisms that carries genetic instructions for development, functioning, growth, and reproduction. Nearly every cell in a person’s body has the same DNA. Most DNA is located in the cell nucleus (where it is called nuclear DNA), but a small amount of DNA can also be found in the mitochondria (where it is called mitochondrial DNA or mtDNA).
Studying a diverse and peculiar genus of mice offers researchers a window into the genetic and neural underpinnings of behavior.
Recent research led by UTHealth Houston scientists has uncovered two genes associated with variants linked to epilepsy, which showed specific traits that make them promising diagnostic biomarkers.
The study is published in Nature Communications.
Led by Dennis Lal, Ph.D., director of the Center for Neurogenetics and associate professor of neurology at McGovern Medical School at UTHealth Houston, the research team analyzed data from 1,386 human brain tissues for somatic variants in the genes of individuals undergoing epilepsy surgery. Somatic variants are DNA changes that occur after conception and can only be identified in the brain tissue.
Why it matters
The new study explains a longstanding puzzle in medicine: why do some people who’ve inherited a disease-causing mutation experience fewer symptoms than others with the same mutation? “In many diseases, we’ll see that 90% of people who carry a mutation are sick, but 10% who carry the mutation don’t get sick at all,” says Bogunovic, a scientist who studies children with rare immunological disorders at Columbia University Irving Medical Center.
Enlisting an international team of collaborators, the researchers looked at several families with different genetic disorders affecting their immune systems. In each case, the disease-causing copy was more likely to be active in sick patients and suppressed in healthy relatives who had inherited the same genes.
