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Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on June 14, 2024 at 6:31am

Permanent gene edits to tardigrades help shed light on their amazing resilience

Some species of tardigrades are highly and unusually resilient to various extreme conditions fatal to most other forms of life. And we need to know the genetic basis of this resilience to use the knowledge. 

For the first time, researchers successfully edited genes using the CRISPR technique in a highly resilient tardigrade species previously impossible to study with genome-editing tools. The work has been published in PLoS Genetics.

The successful delivery of CRISPR to an asexual tardigrade species directly produces gene-edited offspring. The design and editing of specific tardigrade genes allow researchers to investigate which are responsible for tardigrade resilience and how such resilience can work.

If you've heard about tardigrades, then you've no doubt heard about their uncommon abilities to survive things like extreme heat, cold, drought, and even the vacuum of space, which different members of the species possess. So naturally, they attract researchers keen to explore these novelties, not just out of curiosity, but also to look at what applications might one day be possible if we learn their secrets.

To understand tardigrades' superpowers, we first need to understand the way their genes function. 

Researchers have developed a method to edit genes—adding, removing or overwriting them—like you would do on computer data, in a very tolerant species of tardigrade, Ramazzottius varieornatus. This can now allow researchers to study tardigrade genetic traits as they might more established lab-based animals, such as fruit flies or nematodes.

The team used a recently-developed technique called direct parental CRISPR (DIPA-CRISPR), based on the now-famous CRISPR gene-editing technique, which can serve as a genetic scalpel to cut and modify specific genes more efficiently than ever before. DIPA-CRISPR has the advantage of being able to affect the genome of a target organism's offspring and had previously been shown to work on insects, but this is the first time it's been used on the non-insect organisms that include tardigrades.

Single-step generation of homozygous knockout/knock-in individuals in an extremotolerant parthenogenetic tardigrade using DIPA-CRISPR, PLoS Genetics (2024). DOI: 10.1371/journal.pgen.1011298

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on June 13, 2024 at 11:33am

Chronic Insomnia Linked to Ultra-Processed Foods

Ultra-processed foods (UPFs) have been linked to health problems such as heart disease and diabetes, and a new study suggests they might also be contributing to chronic insomnia in some people. These UPFs can be any foodstuffs that are heavily modified to improve their taste, or produce them on a mass scale, or help them to last longer. They contrast with foods like fruit or vegetables, that come mostly as they are.

Researchers led by a team from Sorbonne Paris Nord University in France looked at data collected on 38,570 adults as part of the NutriNet-Santé research project, mapping diet information against sleep variables.
Researchers found a statistically significant association between higher UPF consumption and increased chronic insomnia risk, after allowances were made for sociodemographic, lifestyle, diet quality, and mental health factors.
Overall, the study participants got 16 percent of their daily energy from UPFs, while 19.4 percent of the cohort reported symptoms of chronic insomnia – and this group tended to have more UPFs in their dietary intake.

The data also showed a slightly stronger association in men. The study only assessed single points in time, and relied on self reporting, but the large number of people involved suggests this is a link that's worthy of future investigation.
https://www.jandonline.org/article/S2212-2672(24)00094-7/fulltext

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on June 13, 2024 at 11:28am

Imaging techniques peek into the placenta
Researchers are finding ways to monitor an understudied human organ: the placenta. Defects in the placenta might be responsible for many miscarriages and stillbirths. The mysterious organ has proven difficult to study, largely because of the risks to pregnant women and their historical exclusion from clinical trials. Magnetic resonance imaging and ultrasounds help researchers to visualize the placenta and its blood flow in a non-invasive way, and spot potential problems before they lead to pregnancy loss. But progress remains slow. We’re dealing with a paradigm change, and there’s a lot of resistance to changing the paradigm now.  

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2024/06/placenta-stillbi...

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on June 13, 2024 at 11:25am

Drug that ‘melts away’ tumours hailed as ‘gamechanger’ for some bowel cancer patients
Pembrolizumab triples chance of survival for the 10-15% of patients with the 'right genetic makeup', study finds
A “gamechanger” immunotherapy drug that “melts away” tumours dramatically increases the chances of curing some bowel cancers and may even replace the need for surgery, doctors have said.

Pembrolizumab targets and blocks a specific protein on the surface of immune cells that then seek out and destroy cancer cells.

Giving the drug before surgery instead of chemotherapy led to a huge increase in patients being declared cancer-free, a clinical trial found. The results were presented at the annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO), the world’s largest cancer conference.

https://meetings.asco.org/abstracts-presentations/234190?utm_source...

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on June 13, 2024 at 11:17am

A glass that builds and heals itself

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on June 13, 2024 at 11:13am

A glass that builds and heals itself

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on June 13, 2024 at 11:11am

How spaceflight disrupts a person’s biology
Just a few days in orbit can cause immune-cell disruption, dehydration and cloudy thinking — but most of these conditions revert to normal soon after travellers return to Earth, according to the largest catalogue of data detailing the impacts of space travel on the human body. The reports aim to chart how spaceflight affects space tourists, who have a wider variety of health histories than trained astronauts. This is the beginning of precision medicine for spaceflight.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07639-y.epdf?sharing_tok...

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07648-x.epdf?sharing_tok...

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Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on June 13, 2024 at 10:47am

New theory describes how waves carry information from surroundings

Waves pick up information from their environment through which they propagate. A theory of information carried by waves has now been developed at TU Wien—with astonishing results that can be utilized for technical applications.

Ultrasound is used to analyze the body, radar systems to study airspace or seismic waves to study the interior of our planet. Many areas of research are dealing with waves that are deflected, scattered or reflected by their surroundings. As a result, these waves carry a certain amount of information about their environment, and this information must then be extracted as comprehensively and precisely as possible.

Searching for the best way to do this has been the subject of research around the world for many years. Researchers have now succeeded in describing the information carried by a wave about its environment with mathematical precision. This has made it possible to show how waves pick up information about an object and then transport it to a measuring device.

This can now be used to generate customized waves to extract the maximum amount of information from the environment—for more precise imaging processes, for example. This theory was confirmed with microwave experiments. The results were published in the journal Nature Physics.

Jakob Hüpfl et al, Continuity equation for the flow of Fisher information in wave scattering, Nature Physics (2024). DOI: 10.1038/s41567-024-02519-8

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on June 13, 2024 at 10:24am

Scientists engineer human antibodies that could neutralize black widow toxin

There are various types of widow spiders, including black, red, and brown varieties in North and South America, the Australian redback spider, and several button spider species that inhabit South Africa. In Europe, Latrodectus tredecimguttatus—the European black widow—inhabits the Mediterranean region, but recently and due to the changing climate, the widows have been expanding their habitat.

Widow spiders' bites can cause latrodectism, a disease where the spider's venom, a neurotoxin known as alpha-latrotoxin, attacks the nervous system and causes symptoms like severe pain, hypertension, headache, and nausea. Black widow bites can be treated with antibodies derived from horses, but to make treatment safer for patients, researchers have set out to develop fully human antibodies.

For the first time, they presented human antibodies which show neutralization of black widow spider venom in a cell-based assay. This is the first step to replace the horse sera that are still used to treat the severe symptoms after a black widow spider bite.

Many patients bitten by black widows aren't treated altogether because the antivenom is made from proteins derived from horses which are foreign to the human body and can cause undesirable side effects. These include serum sickness, a reaction to proteins in antisera derived from non-human animal sources, and serious allergic reaction. The available antivenom is also an undefined mix of antibodies that varies from batch to batch. Despite these shortcomings, this antivenom is the most efficient treatment option available right now.

Scientists set out to replace horse sera with recombinant human antibodies to get a better product for the patients and to avoid the use of horses for serum production. 

To do so, the scientists used an in vitro method called antibody phage display.

This approach uses extremely diverse gene collections of more than 10 billion different antibodies. From this large diversity of antibodies, phage display can fish out antibodies which can bind the desired target, in this case the toxin.

Antibodies engineered in such a way can be reproduced in the same quality again and again because the DNA sequence of the human antibody is known. They also could also improve animal welfare because horses do not need to be immunized and bled to produce black window anti-toxins.

Human antibodies neutralizing the alpha-latrotoxin of the European black widow, Frontiers in Immunology (2024). DOI: 10.3389/fimmu.2024.1407398

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on June 13, 2024 at 9:46am

Study confirms the rotation of Earth's inner core has slowed

 Scientists have proven that the Earth's inner core is backtracking—slowing down—in relation to the planet's surface, as shown in new research published in Nature.

Movement of the inner core has been debated by the scientific community for two decades, with some research indicating that the inner core rotates faster than the planet's surface. The new study provides unambiguous evidence that the inner core began to decrease its speed around 2010, moving slower than the Earth's surface.

The inner core is considered to be reversing and backtracking relative to the planet's surface due to moving slightly slower instead of faster than the Earth's mantle for the first time in approximately 40 years. Relative to its speed in previous decades, the inner core is slowing down.

The inner core is a solid iron-nickel sphere surrounded by the liquid iron-nickel outer core. Roughly the size of the moon, the inner core sits more than 3,000 miles under our feet and presents a challenge to researchers: It can't be visited or viewed. Scientists must use the seismic waves of earthquakes to create renderings of the inner core's movement.

In this study, the researchers compiled and analyzed seismic data recorded around the South Sandwich Islands from 121 repeating earthquakes that occurred between 1991 and 2023. They have also utilized data from twin Soviet nuclear tests between 1971 and 1974, as well as repeated French and American nuclear tests from other studies of the inner core.

The inner core's slowing speed was caused by the churning of the liquid iron outer core that surrounds it, which generates Earth's magnetic field, as well as gravitational tugs from the dense regions of the overlying rocky mantle.

The implications of this change in the inner core's movement for Earth's surface can only be speculated. The backtracking of the inner core may alter the length of a day by fractions of a second and we can't notice this clearly.

Wei Wang et al, Inner core backtracking by seismic waveform change reversals, Nature (2024). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-024-07536-4

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