Lifeboat Foundation

Wait until you see how Quantum bio is applied in Biosecurity.

By guest author Devang Mehta

The world in 1918 was emerging from under the pall of a World War that had claimed 38 million lives, and yet in the span of only one year, just as many lives would be lost to the Spanish Flu — an influenza pandemic that is still regarded the single deadliest epidemic in recorded history. The disease reached all corners of the world, from the Antipodes to Europe and Asia, eventually claiming 20–50 million lives. The 1918 virus caused unusually strong symptoms, described by one physician at the time as “a blood-tinged froth that sometimes gushed from (the) nose and mouth”. The disease also had an incredibly high mortality rate of 10–20%, which combined with a high rate of infection meant that up to 6% of the world’s population died due to the virus.

Continue reading “Synbio and Biosecurity” »

A year on and we catch up with two kids who were genetically engineered to treat their cancer. This is the future of medicine.

By Michael Le Page.

Two children treated with gene-edited cells to kill their cancers are both doing well more than a year later. The baby girls were both given the experimental treatment only as a last resort, but clinical trials of the therapy are now getting underway in children and adults in the UK.

Continue reading “Gene editing has saved the lives of two children with leukaemia” »

Nice read.

The results demonstrate that the positions of tens of thousands of atoms can be precisely identified and then fed into quantum mechanics calculations to correlate imperfections and defects with material properties at the single-atom level. This research will be published Feb 2. in the journal Nature.

Jianwei (John) Miao, a UCLA professor of physics and astronomy and a member of UCLA’s California NanoSystems Institute, led the international team in mapping the atomic-level details of the bimetallic nanoparticle, more than a trillion of which could fit within a grain of sand.

Continue reading “Coordinates of more than 23,000 atoms in technologically important material mapped” »

Scientists successfully grew a half pig/half human embryo.

A Salmonella pathogen manages a trade-off between virulence and transmission by manipulating the gut–brain axis and blocking appetite loss.

More progress for tissue engineering.

Skin is one of the easier starting points for 3D bioprinting, the application of rapid prototyping technologies to the construction of living tissue. Since skin is a thin tissue, the challenging issue of producing the intricate blood vessel networks needed to supply inner cells with oxygen and nutrients can be skipped. Thin tissue sections can be supported in a suitable nutrient bath, and after transplant, patient blood vessels will grow into the new skin. Further, there is a fairly large and long-established research and development industry involved in various forms of skin regeneration. Numerous forms of prototype skin-like tissues have been created over the years, lacking many of the features of the real thing, but still useful in the treatment of, for example, burn victims. Further, skin structure is by now well understood, and considerable progress has been made in deciphering the signals and environment needed for suitable cells to self-assemble into the correct arrangements. All told, it should not be a complete surprise to see significant progress emerge in this part of the field.

To better understand how life might have started on Earth.

Scientists have engineered the first ever ‘semi-synthetic’ organisms, by breeding E. coli bacteria with an expanded, six-letter genetic code.

While every living thing on Earth is formed according to a DNA code made up of four bases (represented by the letters G, T, C and A), these modified E. coli carry an entirely new type of DNA, with two additional DNA bases, X and Y, nestled in their genetic code.

The team, led by Floyd Romesberg from the Scripps Research Institute in California, engineered synthetic nucleotides — molecules that serve as the building blocks of DNA and RNA — to create an additional base pair, and they’ve successfully inserted this into the E. coli’s genetic code.

Continue reading “New Organisms Have Been Formed Using the First Ever 6-Letter Genetic Code” »

Created by a team of bioengineers, the semisynthetic organism has DNA made up of four natural bases and two manmade bases.