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An endoscopic mapping device, developed over the course of a decade by scientists at the Auckland Bioengineering Institute, consists of an inflatable sphere covered in sensors, delivered down the esophagus and able to measure electrical activity in the gut.

In the same way, abnormal heart electrical signals can cause serious heart problems, research has found faulty bioelectric gut waves can lead to stomach pain, nausea, vomiting and bloating.

But often doctors can’t find out what the problem is. That’s because gut electrics aren’t nearly as strong or as easily measured as heart waves; without surgery it’s hard to know if someone has a so-called ‘dysrhythmic’ gut—and if so, where the problem is.

As a therapy for vision impairment resulting from inherited retinal degeneration, the mRNA would instruct cells in the retina, which are impaired because of a genetic mutation, to manufacture the proteins needed for sight. Inherited retinal degeneration, commonly abbreviated to IRD, encompasses a group of disorders of varying severity and prevalence that affect one out of every few thousand people worldwide.

An example of a genetic pulmonary condition is cystic fibrosis, a progressive disorder that results in persistent lung infection and affects 30,000 people in the U.S., with about 1,000 new cases identified every year. One faulty gene—the cystic fibrosis transmembrane conductance regulator, or CFTR—causes the disease, which is characterized by lung dehydration and mucus buildup that blocks the airway.

The thiophene-based LNP study, which involved mice and non-human primates, stems from a $3.2 million grant from the National Eye Institute. The grant’s purpose is addressing limitations associated with the current primary means of delivery for gene editing: adeno-associated virus, or AAV.

Plant genomics has come a long way since Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) helped sequence the first plant genome. But engineering the perfect crop is still, in many ways, a game of chance. Making the same DNA mutation in two different plants doesn’t always give us the crop traits we want. The question is why not? CSHL plant biologists just dug up a reason.

CSHL Professor and HHMI Investigator Zachary Lippman and his team discovered that tomato and Arabidopsis thaliana plants can use very different regulatory systems to control the same exact gene. Incredibly, they linked this behavior to extreme genetic makeovers that occurred over 125 million years of evolution.

The scientists used genome editing to create over 70 mutant strains of tomato and Arabidopsis thaliana plants. Each mutation deleted a piece of regulatory DNA around a gene known as CLV3. They then analyzed the effect each mutation had on plant growth and development. When the DNA keeping CLV3 in check was mutated too much, fruit growth exploded. They published their findings in PLoS Genetics.

Using lipid nanoparticles (LNPs), engineers have successfully delivered genetic material to the lung that suppresses lung tumors in mice.

Retrotransposons can insert new genes into a “safe harbor” in the genome, complementing CRISPR gene editing.

The recent greenlighting of a CRISPR-Cas9 treatment for sickle cell disease underscores the efficacy of gene editing technologies in deactivating genes to heal inherited illnesses. However, the capability to integrate entire genes into the human genome as replacements for faulty or harmful ones remains unachievable.

A new technique that employs a retrotransposon from birds to insert genes into the genome holds more promise for gene therapy, since it inserts genes into a “safe harbor” in the human genome where the insertion won’t disrupt essential genes or lead to cancer.

“Even primary school students and old farmers can master gene editing,” says [Southern University of Science and Technology, or SUSTech] scientist Zhu Jian-Kang, who has helped develop a new approach that could greatly simplify the difficult and time-consuming process of editing genes in plants.

While conventional methods of heritable gene editing in plants often take months, and in some cases up to a year, this innovative approach could reduce the process to about two weeks, according to [Cao Xuesong, a scientist at SUSTech and a member of Zhu’s team], who is also the first author of the study.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tFx_UNW9I1U&si=QxOgeE59dOkGDFck

This definitely is a Lifeboat post embodying what Lifeboat is about, and it’s only about AI. They did a really good job explaining the 10 stages.

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In November last year, UK approved a therapy that uses the CRISPR gene editing tool to treat sickle cell disease and β-thalassaemia.

Lung cancer is not the most common form of cancer, but it is by far among the deadliest. Despite treatments such as surgery, radiation therapy, and chemotherapy, only about a quarter of all people with the disease will live more than five years after diagnosis, and lung cancer kills more than 1.8 million people worldwide each year, according to the World Health Organization.

To improve the odds for patients with lung cancer, researchers from The University of Texas at Arlington and UT Southwestern Medical Center have pioneered a novel approach to deliver cancer-killing drugs directly into cancer cells.

“Our method uses the patient’s own cellular material as a trojan horse to transport a targeted drug payload directly to the lung cancer cells,” said Kytai T. Nguyen, lead author of a new study on the technique in the journal Bioactive Materials and the Alfred R. and Janet H. Potvin Distinguished Professor in Bioengineering at UTA.