Lifeboat Foundation

Imagine being one cartwheel away from changing your appearance. One flip, and your brunette locks are platinum blond. That’s not too far from what happens in some prokaryotes, or single-cell organisms, such as bacteria, that undergo something called inversions.

A study led by scientists at Stanford Medicine has shown that inversions, which cause a physical flip of a segment of DNA and change an organism’s genetic identity, can occur within a single gene, challenging a central dogma of biology — that one gene can code for only one protein.

“Bacteria are even cooler than I originally thought, and I’m a microbiologist, so I already thought they were pretty cool,” said Rachael Chanin, PhD, a postdoctoral scholar in hematology. Microbiologists have known for decades that bacteria can flip small sections of their DNA to activate or deactivate genes, Chanin said. To the team’s knowledge, however, those somersaulting pieces have never been found within the confines of a single gene.

Robert C Williams performed genetic analysis to understand how the HLA and SLC16A11 genes affect Type 2 diabetes in Indigenous Americans.

GC Therapeutics’ plug-and-play stem cell programming platform aims to reduce cell therapy development time by up to 100 times.

Cell therapies have revolutionized the treatment of certain disease areas; however, challenges in scaling these therapies…

Cell therapy startup GC Therapeutics (GCTx) has emerged from the lab of renowned geneticist George Church, securing a $65 million Series A funding round that brings the total raised by the company to a cool $75 million. The company is on a mission to enable the next generation of cell therapies through its proprietary TFome platform, which GCTx claims is the first plug-and-play induced pluripotent stem cell (iPSC) cellular programming platform.

Continue reading “George Church lab spawns $75m cell therapy startup” »

RNA interference (RNAi) technology has gradually become a cutting-edge technology for treating diseases such as genetic disorders and cancer due to its huge potential in gene expression regulation. However, the efficient delivery and safety of short interfering RNA (siRNA) remain key challenges for its clinical application.

In the next couple of decades, we will be able to do things that would have seemed like magic to our grandparents.

This phenomenon is not new, but it will be newly accelerated. People have become dramatically more capable over time; we can already accomplish things now that our predecessors would have believed to be impossible.

We are more capable not because of genetic change, but because we benefit from the infrastructure of society being way smarter and more capable than any one of us; in an important sense, society itself is a form of advanced intelligence. Our grandparents – and the generations that came before them – built and achieved great things. They contributed to the scaffolding of human progress that we all benefit from. AI will give people tools to solve hard problems and help us add new struts to that scaffolding that we couldn’t have figured out on our own. The story of progress will continue, and our children will be able to do things we can’t.

Summary: The largest and most diverse study on recessive genetic changes in developmental disorders reveals that over 80% of cases caused by recessive variants are linked to known genes. Researchers analyzed data from nearly 30,000 families and found that a shift in focus from gene discovery to interpreting changes in known genes could double diagnosis rates.

The study highlights the importance of genetic background in diagnosis and suggests that some patients may have multiple contributing genetic factors. These findings could lead to more personalized and accurate diagnoses for families affected by developmental disorders.

Model grounded in biology reveals the tissue structures linked to the disorder. A researcher’s mathematical modeling approach for brain imaging analysis reveals links between genes, brain structure and autism.

A multi-university research team co-led by University of Virginia engineering professor Gustavo K. Rohde has developed a system that can spot genetic markers of autism in brain images with 89 to 95% accuracy.

Their findings suggest doctors may one day see, classify and treat autism and related neurological conditions with this method, without having to rely on, or wait for, behavioral cues. And that means this truly personalized medicine could result in earlier interventions.

Year 2022 Solar powered mitochondria could enable humans to use light to recharge their mitochondria and extend life also their bodies would be recharged by fuel from the sun.

Using light to optogenetically power mitochondria, this study shows that opposing the age-related decline in mitochondrial membrane potential leads to increased healthspan and lifespan in Caenorhabditis elegans. This result points to mitochondrial charge as a fundamental regulator of biological aging.

Randal Koene discusses Whole Brain Emulation on the H+ Magazine podcast. He touches on the subjects of connectomics, neural mapping, optogenetics, and neural prosthesis.