A tiny but prolific world of microbes encompasses everything around us, both inside and out. Microbiomes, which are comprised of diverse communities of microbes, play a pivotal role in shaping human health, yet the intricacies of how different microbial compositions influence our well-being remain largely unknown.
In a recent study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign describe a new framework they have created to predict how species within microbiomes interact with each other to create unique compositions.
“Microbes can be used in medicine, aka ‘bugs as drugs,’ and these microbial therapeutics hold the possibility of being the answer to many of the diseases we face today,” said Shreya Arya, a graduate student in the O’Dwyer lab.
Large language models such as that used by ChatGPT could soon become essential tools for diagnosing and treating patients. To protect people’s privacy and safety, medical professionals, not commercial interests, must drive their development and deployment.
CHARLESTON, W.Va. (AP) — An entire county school system in coal-producing West Virginia is going solar, representing what a developer and U.S. Sen. Joe Manchin’s office touted on Wednesday as the biggest-ever single demonstration of sun-powered renewable electricity in Appalachian public schools.
The agreement between Wayne County Schools and West Virginian solar installer and developer Solar Holler builds on historic investments in coal communities made possible by the Inflation Reduction Act, which Democratic Sen. Manchin had a major role in shaping as chairman of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee.
Manchin, who announced this month that he wouldn’t run for reelection in the deep-red state, citing an increasingly polarized political system, was quick Wednesday to tout U.S. President Joe Biden’s 2022 landmark climate, health and tax law, which placed special emphasis on creating new clean energy jobs.
The Lung Cancer Webinar Series Presentation held on August 31, 2022 on “Treatment of Unresectable Stage 3 Non-Small Cell Lung Cancer” moderated by: Hatim Husain, M.D., Medical Oncologist, Associate Professor of Medicine, UC San Diego Health and discussants: Edward B. Garon, M.D., MS, Professor of Medicine at David Geffen School of Medicine, UCLA Department of Medicine, Division of Hematology/Oncology and Aaron E. Lisberg, M.D., Assistant Clinical Professor at David Geffen School of Medicine, UCLA Department of Medicine, Division of Hematology/Oncology.
The new study estimates $25.7 billion lost annually in waste management and damage to marine ecosystems.
Olga355/iStock.
Cigarette filters were marketed under the guise of addressing health concerns by providing a false impression of safety. These filters, made of a material called cellulose acetate, don’t actually reduce health risks and can even harm the lungs. The cellulose acetate fibers have been shown to deposit into the lungs of smokers.
NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) — A ransomware attack has prompted a healthcare chain that operates 30 hospitals in six states to divert patients from at least some of its emergency rooms to other hospitals, while putting certain elective procedures on pause, the company announced.
In a statement Monday, Ardent Health Services said the attack occurred Nov. 23 and the company took its network offline, suspending user access to its information technology applications, including the software used to document patient care.
The Nashville, Tennessee-based company said it cannot yet confirm the extent of any patient health or financial information that has been compromised. Ardent says it reported the issue to law enforcement and retained third-party forensic and threat intelligence advisors, while working with cybersecurity specialists to restore IT functions as quickly as possible. There’s no timeline yet on when the problems will be resolved.
Nervous systems are complex networks, comprised of billions of neurons connected by trillions of synapses. These connections are subject to specific wiring rules that are thought to result from competitive selection pressures to minimise wiring costs and promote complex, adaptive function. While most connections in the brain are short-range, a smaller subset of metabolically costly projections extend over long distances to connect disparate anatomical areas. These long-range connections support integrated brain function and are concentrated between the most highly connected network elements; the hubs of the brain. Hub connectivity thus plays a vital role in determining how a given nervous system negotiates the trade-off between cost and value, and natural. selection may favour connections that provide high functional benefit for low cost.
Consistent with this view, Professor Alex Fornito will present evidence. that hub connectivity is under strong genetic control. He will show that the strength of connectivity between hubs in the human brain is more heritable than connectivity between other nodes, and that the genetic variants influencing hub connectivity overlaps with those implicated in mental illness and intelligence. He will also discuss the progress and challenges of developing generative models that evaluate the role of different cost-value trade-offs in driving complex brain topology.
Professor Fornito completed his Clinical Masters (Neuropsychology) and PhD in 2007 at The University of Melbourne before undertaking postdoctoral training at the University of Cambridge, UK. In 2013, he assumed his current position at the Turner Institute of Brain and Mental Health, where he is Head of the Brain Mapping and Modelling Theme, Co-Director of the Brain, Mind, and Society Research Hub, and a Sylvia and Charles Viertel Senior Medical Research Fellow.
Alex’s research concentrates on developing new imaging techniques for mapping human brain connectivity and applying these methods to shed light on brain function in health and disease.
MEXICO CITY (AP) — Ecologists from Mexico’s National Autonomous university on Friday relaunched a fundraising campaign to bolster conservation efforts for axolotls, an iconic, endangered fish-like type of salamander.
The campaign, called “Adoptaxolotl,” asks people for as little as 600 pesos (about $35) to virtually adopt one of the tiny “water monsters.” Virtual adoption comes with live updates on your axolotl’s health. For less, donors can buy one of the creatures a virtual dinner.
In their main habitat the population density of Mexican axolotls (ah-ho-LOH’-tulz) has plummeted 99.5% in under two decades, according to scientists behind the fundraiser.
The groundbreaking gene-editing technology known as Crispr, which acts like a molecular pair of scissors that can be used to cut and modify a DNA sequence, has moved rather quickly from the pages of scientific journals to the medical setting. Earlier this month, about three years after Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for describing how bacteria’s immune system could be used as a tool to edit genes, regulators in the U.K. approved the first Crispr-based treatment for sickle cell disease and beta-thalassemia patients. The treatment, from Vertex Pharmaceuticals and Crispr Therapeutics, could be approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration early next month for sickle cell patients.
While many obstacles lie ahead for the nascent field, such as how to pay for treatments that typically cost more than $1 million, these regulatory approvals are just the start as newer gene-editing technologies such as base and prime editing make their way through human studies. In an interview, Prof. Doudna says the approval is “a turning point in medicine because it really shows how genome editing can be used as a one-and-done cure for disease.”
Gene editing is part of a broader therapeutic revolution that encompasses genetic and cellular medicine. The pills and injections we are all familiar with generally target proteins or pathways in the body to treat disease. With gene and cell therapy, we can now target the root cause of disease, sometimes curing patients.
Microbial sequence databases contain a wealth of information about enzymes and other molecules that could be adapted for biotechnology. But these databases have grown so large in recent years that they’ve become difficult to search efficiently for enzymes of interest.
Now, scientists at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT, and the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) at the National Institutes of Health have developed a new search algorithm that has identified 188 kinds of new rare CRISPR systems in bacterial genomes, encompassing thousands of individual systems. The work appears in Science.
The algorithm, which comes from the lab of CRISPR pioneer Feng Zhang, uses big-data clustering approaches to rapidly search massive amounts of genomic data. The team used their algorithm, called Fast Locality-Sensitive Hashing-based clustering (FLSHclust) to mine three major public databases that contain data from a wide range of unusual bacteria, including ones found in coal mines, breweries, Antarctic lakes, and dog saliva.
