Lifeboat Foundation

Salk scientists establish novel Link between cell nutrition and identity, say targeting nutrient-dependent activity could improve immunotherapies.

The decision between scrambled eggs or an apple for breakfast probably won’t make or break your day. However, for your cells, a decision between similar microscopic nutrients could determine their entire identity. If and how nutrient preference impacts cell identity has been a longstanding mystery for scientists—until a team of Salk Institute immunologists revealed a novel framework for the complicated relationship between nutrition and cell identity.

The findings were published in Science on December 12, 2024.

Introduction: The lips fulfill various critical physiological roles besides being viewed as a fundamental aesthetic feature contributing to the perception of health and beauty. Therefore, any lip injury, abnormality, or congenital malformation, such as cleft lip, needs special attention in order to restore proper lip function and aesthetics. To achieve this goal, a better understanding of the complex lip anatomy, function, and biology is required, which can only be provided by basic research endeavors. However, the current lack of clinically relevant human lip cells and three-dimensional in vitro lip models, capable of replacing ethically questionable animal experimentations, represents a significant limitation in this area of research.

Methods: To address these limitations, we aimed to pioneer the introduction of immortalized healthy lip-and cleft lip-derived keratinocytes. Primary keratinocytes were isolated from patients’ samples and immortalized by introducing the catalytic domain of telomerase, combined with the targeted knockdown of the cell cycle inhibitor gene, p16^INK4A. We then focused on validating the newly established cell lines by comparing their genetic stability and key phenotypic features with their primary keratinocyte counterparts.

Results: The newly established immortalized keratinocyte cell lines demonstrated genetic stability and preserved the main phenotypic characteristics of primary keratinocytes, such as cellular morphology and differentiation capacity. Three-dimensional lip models, generated using these cell lines, proved to be effective and convenient platforms for screening applications, including wound healing and microbial infection of the lip epithelium.

One of the most elusive challenges oncologists encounter is why some patients respond to a particular therapy while others do not. Thus, optimizing a personalized treatment regimen that gives a patient the best odds of success has become a cornerstone of cancer research. The desire to implement more individualized therapies has brought about an increasing the focus on personalized medicine. This promising approach uses specific patient characteristics, including genetic makeup, environment, and lifestyle, to develop an individualized treatment plan.

Working towards improving the speed and accuracy of genetic screening to inform personalized medicine, a team of researchers conducted a comprehensive study. The journal NPJ Precision Oncol recently published the results. The researchers meticulously investigated the gene expression of almost 800 cancer cell lines and their response to treatment. With this thorough process, the researchers identified specific genetic patterns that correlated with drug resistance.

The study identified 36 genes correlating to resistance to multiple anti-cancer drugs. The researchers calculated a score, called UAB36, based on the correlation coefficient of the 36 genes identified. This UAB36 score, a novel predictive tool, accurately forecasted resistance to tamoxifen, an anti-cancer drug used to treat some types of breast cancer and prevent cancer progression in women with ductal carcinoma in situ (DCIS).

Could there be billions of Earth-like planets in our galaxy? A groundbreaking study by researchers from the University of British Columbia (UBC) estimates that the Milky Way might host as many as 6 billion planets similar to Earth. This calculation is based on data collected during NASA’s Kepler mission, which observed over 200,000 stars from 2009 to 2018.

A doctoral candidate’s skill, patience and dedication resulted in a groundbreaking spider silk discovery.

The Giant Arc spans a distance nearly a fifteenth of the observable universe.

HPH-15, a compound developed by Kumamoto University, reduces blood glucose and fat accumulation more effectively than metformin, with added benefits like antifibrotic properties and a safer profile. This innovation may revolutionize diabetes treatment.

Scientists at Kumamoto University have unveiled a novel compound, HPH-15, which has dual effects: reducing blood glucose levels and combating fat accumulation. This breakthrough represents a significant advancement in diabetes treatment innovation.

Type 2 diabetes, a condition affecting millions worldwide, is often accompanied by complications such as fatty liver and insulin resistance, posing challenges for current treatment methods. The research team, led by Visiting Associate Professor Hiroshi Tateishi and Professor Eiichi Araki, has identified HPH-15 as a promising alternative to existing medications like metformin.

In the future we can envision FASQ* machines, Fault-Tolerant Application-Scale Quantum computers that can run a wide variety of useful applications, but that is still a rather distant goal. What term captures the path along the road from NISQ to FASQ? Various terms retaining the ISQ format of NISQ have been proposed[here, here, here], but I would prefer to leave ISQ behind as we move forward, so I’ll speak instead of a megaquop or gigaquop machine and so on meaning one capable of executing a million or a billion quantum operations, but with the understanding that mega means not precisely a million but somewhere in the vicinity of a million.

Naively, a megaquop machine would have an error rate per logical gate of order 10^{-6}, which we don’t expect to achieve anytime soon without using error correction and fault-tolerant operation. Or maybe the logical error rate could be somewhat larger, as we expect to be able to boost the simulable circuit volume using various error mitigation techniques in the megaquop era just as we do in the NISQ era. Importantly, the megaquop machine would be capable of achieving some tasks beyond the reach of classical, NISQ, or analog quantum devices, for example by executing circuits with of order 100 logical qubits and circuit depth of order 10,000.

- John Preskill.

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High overhead, there is a layer of the atmosphere called the mesosphere. It is located roughly 31 to 55 miles above ground.

The mesosphere might seem pretty far removed from everyday concerns. Still, it can be disturbed by severe weather far below.

On the day Helene hit, NASA’s instruments captured signs of a type of atmospheric wave, not related to the space-time ones Einstein predicted, but rather ones formed by events like hurricanes.