Lifeboat Foundation

The strangest life forms on Earth just got a lot stranger.

In 2003, Didier Raoult of Aix-Marseille University in France and his colleagues discovered a new kind of virus lurking inside single-celled protozoans.

Like other viruses, it couldn’t grow on its own, lacking the biochemical machinery to build proteins and genes. Instead, it had to infect host cells and use their material to produce new viruses.

Continue reading “These bizarre organisms could represent a new branch on the tree of life” »

New genetic technologies like CRISPR/Cas9 gene editing and synthetic biology are leading us to entirely new definitions of disease. Now “patients” include people who want children who lack some of their own genes, or have additional ones that they themselves lack. Also among the new patients are people who in the past were too old to have children as well some women who get sick from pregnancy and childbirth, or even the idea of them. Technological advances on the horizon may eventually offer treatment for such conditions.

In February 2015 the British Parliament approved production of “three-parent” children by transferring the nucleus of one woman’s egg into the nucleus-less (“enucleated”) egg of a second woman to avoid the propagation of certain rare “mitochondrial” diseases, Though there were acknowledged risks of the unprecedented procedure (including the possibility of producing novel birth defects), the argument that prevailed was that some mitochondrial diseases are so devastating that it should be tried in the narrowly defined group of prospective mothers carrying defective mitochondria.

Not long afterward, news articles began to appear discussing use of the technique for an entirely different purpose. The procedure’s inventor, the Oregon Health & Science University biologist Dr. Shoukhrat Mitalipov, was now proposing to treat infertility in older women by transferring their egg nuclei into the enucleated eggs of younger women.

Continue reading “Human Babies from CRISPR Pigs” »

Computer illustration of the mimivirus particle. Credit Jose Antonio Penas. Mimiviruses are viruses so big they can actually be seen with the naked eye. European.

Brown University engineers have developed a new technique to help researchers understand how cells move through complex tissues in the body. They hope the tool will be useful in understanding all kinds of cell movements, from how cancer cells migrate to how immune cells make their way to infection sites.

The technique is described in a paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The traditional method for studying cell movement is called traction force microscopy (TFM). Scientists take images of cells as they move along 2-D surfaces or through 3-D gels that are designed as stand-ins for actual body tissue. By measuring the extent to which cells displace the 2-D surface or the 3-D gel as they move, researchers can calculate the forces generated by the cell. The problem is that in order to do the calculations, the stiffness and other mechanical properties of artificial tissue environment must be known.

Columbia University scientists recently tested a new optical technique to study how information is transmitted in the brains of mice and made a surprising discovery: When stimulated electrically to release dopamine (a neurotransmitter or chemical released by neurons, or nerve cells, to send signals to other nerve cells), only about 20 percent of synapses — the connections between cells that control brain activity — were active at any given time.

The effect had never been noticed. “Older techniques only revealed what was going on in large groups of synapses,” explained David Sulzer, PhD, professor of neurobiology in Psychiatry, Neurology, and Pharmacology at Columbia University Medical Center (CUMC). “We needed a way to observe the neurotransmitter activity of individual synapses, to help us better understand their intricate behavior.”

Continue reading “The case of the silent synapses: Why are only 20% of synapses active during neurotransmission?” »

Most biology students will be able to tell you that neural signals are sent via mechanisms such as synaptic transmission, gap junctions, and diffusion processes, but a new study suggests there’s another way that our brains transmit information from one place to another.

Researchers in the US have recorded neural spikes travelling too slowly in the brain to be explained by conventional signalling mechanisms. In the absence of other plausible explanations, the scientists believe these brain waves are being transmitted by a weak electrical field, and they’ve been able to detect one of these in mice.

“Researchers have thought that the brain’s endogenous electrical fields are too weak to propagate wave transmission,” said Dominique Durand, a biomedical engineer at Case Western Reserve University. “But it appears the brain may be using the fields to communicate without synaptic transmissions, gap junctions or diffusion.”

Continue reading “Scientists discover that our brain waves can be sent by electrical fields” »

EXCLUSIVE: STEM cells are being used to regrow damaged knee cartilage in world-first Melbourne trials it is hoped will make many joint replacements and other surgery unnecessary.

Thanks to the cocktail of drugs that make up antiretroviral therapy, HIV is no longer a death sentence. But there are downsides to antiretroviral therapy—taking the treatment for many years is expensive, increases drug resistance, and could cause adverse reactions in a patient. And, because the virus stays in reservoirs in the body, the disease can continue to progress in patients if they stop taking their medication.

Now a team of German researchers has found an enzyme that can “cut” the viral DNA out of a cell’s genetic code, which could eradicate the virus from a patient’s body altogether. The proof-of-concept study, published this week in Nature Biotechnology and reported by Ars Technica, was done in mice, but the researchers believe that their conclusions show that this DNA-snipping enzyme could be used in clinical practice. And if it can cut HIV’s genetic code out of a patient’s body, the technique could be a cure for the disease.

The researchers created the DNA-snipping enzyme called Brec1 using directed evolution, an engineering technique that mimics proteins’ natural evolution process. They programmed the enzyme to cut DNA on either side of a sequence characteristic of HIV—a difficult task since the DNA of organisms and of the virus itself mutates often. Still, the researchers identified a well-conserved sequence, then they tested how reliably the enzyme could snip out that sequence in cells taken from HIV-positive patients, in bacteria, and in mice infected with the human form of HIV. After a number of tweaks, Brec1 would cut only that sequence of DNA, patching up the cell’s genetic code once the HIV sequence was cleaved out. After 21 weeks, the cells treated with Brec1 showed no signs of HIV.

Vanna Belton from Baltimore has been blind for more than five years, but after undergoing surgery where stem cells extracted from her bone marrow were injected into her right eye’s retina and left eye’s optic nerve, she has regained some of her sight.

“When I realised I could see the license plates, we started walking around the neighbourhood reading them,” she told the Baltimore Sun, adding that for the first time since 2009, she’s been able to navigate her way around without a cane.

While Belton’s recovery is certainly remarkable, it’s also incredibly perplexing. The doctor who performed the stem cell treatment, ophthalmologist Jeffrey N. Weiss, cut so many corners to get her and 277 other patients into surgery, even he can’t explain why it works.

Continue reading “A blind woman has regained sight following a controversial stem cell treatment” »