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Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on November 8, 2020 at 7:09am

Heavy Metal Pollution Is Weakening Scallop Shells And Threatening T...

Shellfish such as scallops, mussels and oysters – bivalve molluscs – readily take up tiny specs of metals into their tissues and shells. In sufficient concentrations this can harm their growth and survival chances, and even threaten the health of any human who eats their contaminated meat. Such shellfish provide one-quarter of the world’s seafood, so the impact of pollution from the “heavy metals” such as lead, zinc and copper, is hugely important.

https://theconversation.com/metal-pollution-is-leaving-scallops-hel...

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on November 7, 2020 at 9:09am

First Case Study of Its Kind Documents Girl With Mirror Movement And Rare Disorder

If you sit down at a piano, hitting different notes with each hand would be the first step to mastering the instrument. But what if both hands are intent on doing the same thing? That's the experience of people with a rare condition known as mirror movement, and doctors have now documented a unique case.

Several years ago, researchers in India identified a case of this extremely rare condition in a 13-year-old girl who also has a diagnosis of the chromosomal disorder Turner syndrome.  

Finding the two conditions together is a first for the medical community, raising questions of how – or even whether – the two might potentially be connected.

Most tiny humans take a while to become dextrous, but by age 10 the communication between the two halves of our brain allows us to pinch, poke, wave and wiggle the fingers on each hand independently of one another.

For about one in every million children, this development is incomplete, meaning one hand's actions are echoed simultaneously by the other. Make a victory sign with your left hand, and your right will be forced to approximate a similar shape.

The fundamental cause of such copy-cat movement is still largely a matter of speculation, though there's reason to suspect key nerves in the brain are 'cross-talking' as a result of the formation of false synapses between neurons.

In about a third of all cases mutations in a couple of genes appear to be responsible, impairing development of the nervous system in such a way that instructions from either side of the brain are accidentally transmitted to both sides of the body.

individuals who also have cerebral palsy will display degrees of mirror movements. Parkinson's disease is another condition that can come with this form of so-called synkinesia, especially if it affects more one side of the brain than the other.

Having breaks or an absence of connection between the hemispheres – a bridge of neurons called the corpus callosum – can also coincide with the behaviour. It's in many of these cases that a genetic link has been uncovered.

Kallmann syndrome is a condition caused by lack of certain hormones, giving rise to characteristics such as a lack of smell and delayed puberty. And, sometimes, mirror movements.

Turner syndrome is also a condition that impacts on a body's ability to coordinate hormonal responses.

Before this case, nobody had recorded a person who had the chromosomal abnormality and would experience mirror movements as well.

https://casereports.bmj.com/content/13/11/e238482

https://www.sciencealert.com/adolescent-girl-diagnosed-with-mirror-...

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on November 7, 2020 at 8:59am

Scientists Just Successfully Regenerated Mouse Optic Nerve Cells in The Lab

Scientists have found a new way to regenerate damaged optic nerve cells taken from mice and grown in a dish. This exciting development could lead to potential eye disease treatments in the future.

Damage to full-grown nerve cells causes irreversible and life-altering consequences, because once nerve fibres mature, they lose their ability to regenerate after injury or disease. The new experiments show how activating part of a nerve cell's regenerative machinery, a protein known as protrudin, could stimulate nerves in the eye to regrow after injury. 

With more research, the achievement is a step towards future treatments for glaucoma, a group of eye diseases which cause vision loss by damaging the optic nerve (that links the eye to the brain).

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-19436-y

https://www.sciencealert.com/scientists-succeed-in-regenerating-opt...

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on November 7, 2020 at 8:34am

The COVID-19 Clinical Neuroscience Study (COVID-CNS)

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on November 7, 2020 at 8:29am

A month delay to cancer care might raise death risk: study

Delaying cancer treatment by just a month can put patients at a sharply greater risk of dying, according to research published Wednesday, the latest to sound the alarm over the coronavirus pandemic's impact on other health conditions. Treatment delays happen in normal times, but the spread of Covid-19 has caused unprecedented disruption to healthcare services. In a new study published in the BMJ medical journal, researchers in the UK and Canada found that delays in treatment -- whether for surgery, radiotherapy, or other treatments such as chemotherapy -- for seven types of cancers had a significant impact on patient mortality. There has never been a systematic attempt to look at all the evidence on what delays in different types of treatment mean for cancer patient outcomes.

https://www.bmj.com/content/371/bmj.m4087

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on November 7, 2020 at 8:24am

DNA might replace barcodes to tag art, voter ballots: study

Easy-to-remove barcodes and QR codes used to tag everything from T-shirts to car engines may soon be replaced by a tagging system based on DNA and invisible to the naked eye, according to scientists.

The DNA-based system could help anti-forgery efforts, according to researchers who said thieves struggle to find or tamper with a transparent splash of DNA on valuable or vulnerable items, such as election ballots, works of art, or secret documents.

In an article published in Nature Communications, researchers said that the molecular tagging system, called Porcupine, is -- unlike most alternatives -- cost-effective.

Using DNA for tagging objects has been out of reach in the past because it is expensive and time consuming to write and read, and requires expensive lab equipment.

Porcupine gets around this by prefabricating fragments of DNA that users can mix together arbitrarily to create new tags, the researchers said.

Instead of radio waves or printed lines, the Porcupine tagging scheme relies on a set of distinct DNA strands called molecular bits, or 'molbits' for short.

To encode an ID, scientists pair each digital bit with a molbit.

If the digital bit is 1, they add its molbit to the tag, and if it's 0 they leave it out. Then they can dry it until it's ready to be decoded later. Once the item has been tagged, it can then be shipped or stored.

When someone wants to read the tag, water is added to rehydrate the molecular tag, which is read by a nanopore sequencer -- a DNA-reading device smaller than an Iphone.

The name Porcupine comes from a play on words (PORE-cupine, as in nanopore) and the idea that porcupines can 'tag' objects, and critters that dare to get too close.

Unlike existing systems to tag objects, DNA tags are undetectable by sight or touch. Practically speaking, this means they are difficult to tamper with.

1. Kathryn Doroschak, Karen Zhang, Melissa Queen, Aishwarya Mandyam, Karin Strauss, Luis Ceze, Jeff Nivala. Rapid and robust assembly and decoding of molecular tags with DNA-based nanopore signatures. Nature Communications, 2020; 11 (1) DOI: 10.1038/s41467-020-19151-8

https://researchnews.cc/news/3442/DNA-might-replace-barcodes-to-tag...

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on November 7, 2020 at 7:42am

A potential new treatment for premature aging diseases keeps stem cells fresh longer

The drug helps keep stem cells telomeres long, preventing them from aging too quickly.

The ends of our DNA, called telomeres, get shorter as we age. Our cells lose a bit of telomere every time they divide. This shortening is a normal and needed process that serves a protective function against cancer. This is because the older our cells get, the more likely they are to have accumulated damage or mutations that make them function incorrectly. Telomere shortening helps to take old cells that are reaching their “best before date” off the shelf before they can cause trouble.

But this can backfire: cells can shorten their telomeres too quickly, age rapidly, and die. This is what causes a subset of genetic premature aging diseases, including idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, forms of aplastic anemia, and a rare disease called dyskeratosis congenita. Unfortunately, there are currently no available drug-based therapies for treating telomere-driven premature aging diseases.

Now, a candidate drug has found a new potential purpose in treating premature aging disease. 

This drug, called RG7834, was originally identified as an inhibitor of hepatitis B virus (HBV). While it has been found to be well-tolerated in short-term administration to living organisms (like rodents and primates), this drug does not cure HBV, and is not yet publicly available. Interestingly, the host cell proteins affected by RG7834 are two enzymes that modify many different RNAs. These enzymes can cause degradation of host cell RNA — so RG7834 keeps RNA around that the cell otherwise might get rid of.

https://massivesci.com/articles/telomere-telomerase-rna-drug-premat...

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on November 7, 2020 at 6:52am

**SARS-CoV-2 uses 'genome origami' to infect and replicate inside host cells

Scientists at the University of Cambridge, in collaboration with Justus-Liebig University, Germany, have uncovered how the genome of SARS-CoV-2—the coronavirus that causes COVID-19—uses genome origami to infect and replicate successfully inside host cells. This could inform the development of effective drugs that target specific parts of the virus genome, in the fight against COVID-19.

Most current work to find drugs and vaccines for COVID-19 is focused on targeting the proteins of the virus. Because the shape of the RNA molecule is critical to its function, targeting the RNA directly with drugs to disrupt its structure would block the lifecycle and stop the virus replicating.

the team uncovered the entire structure of the SARS-CoV-2 genome inside the host cell, revealing a network of RNA-RNA interactions spanning very long sections of the genome. Different functional parts along the genome need to work together despite the great distance between them, and the new structural data shows how this is accomplished to enable the coronavirus life cycle and cause disease.

"The RNA genome of coronaviruses is about three times bigger than an average viral RNA genome—it's huge

In all cells the genome holds the code for the production of specific proteins, which are made when a molecular machine called a ribosome runs along the RNA reading the code until a 'stop sign' tells it to terminate. In coronaviruses, there is a special spot where the ribosome only stops 50% of the times in front of the stop sign. In the other 50% of cases, a unique RNA shape makes the ribosome jump over the stop sign and produce additional viral proteins. By mapping this RNA structure and the long-range interactions involved, the new research uncovers the strategies by which coronaviruses produce their proteins to manipulate our cells.

The genome of most human viruses is made of RNA rather than DNA. Ziv developed methods to investigate such long-range interactions across viral RNA genomes inside the host cells, in work to understand the Zika virus genome. This has proved a valuable methodological basis for understanding SARS-CoV-2.

 Omer Ziv et al, The short- and long-range RNA-RNA Interactome of SARS-CoV-2, Molecular Cell (2020). DOI: 10.1016/j.molcel.2020.11.004

https://phys.org/news/2020-11-sars-cov-genome-origami-infect-replic...

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on November 7, 2020 at 6:32am

**Has the hidden matter of the universe been discovered?

Astrophysicists consider that around 40% of the ordinary matter that makes up stars, planets and galaxies remains undetected, concealed in the form of a hot gas in the complex cosmic web. Today, scientists at the Institut d'Astrophysique Spatiale (CNRS/Université Paris-Saclay) may have detected, for the first time, this hidden matter through an innovative statistical analysis of 20-year-old data.

 H. T Tanimura et al. First detection of stacked X-ray emission from cosmic web filaments, Astronomy & Astrophysics (2020). DOI: 10.1051/0004-6361/202038521

https://phys.org/news/2020-11-hidden-universe.html?utm_source=nwlet...

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**Coronavirus testing finally gathers speed

The imminent large-scale rollout of rapid coronavirus tests promises to aid public health responses to COVID-19 — but a rapid home test remains elusive.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41587-020-00021-z?utm_source=Natur...

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on November 7, 2020 at 6:21am

Gold-catalyzed reaction releases an active drug to kill cancer cells

Drugs that are activated inside the body with catalytic quantities of gold could offer a new option for treating cancer and other diseases.

Using metals to convert masked "prodrugs" into their active forms inside the body is an emerging area of biomedical research. These drug-release reactions are designed to be triggered by metals that are not naturally present in the body, providing a new way to trigger drug release that promises to increase the efficacy and reduce the side effects of a therapy.

Kenward Vong et al. Bioorthogonal release of anticancer drugs via gold-triggered 2-alkynylbenzamide cyclization, Chemical Science (2020). DOI: 10.1039/d0sc04329j

https://phys.org/news/2020-11-gold-catalyzed-reaction-drug-cancer-c...

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