The “Build A Bear” version of Gene Editing — go splice your own gene.
The biohacking movement has created a wealth of options for hobbyist scientists. In Brooklyn, a DIY lab offers a place for the curious to dabble.
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Category: biotech/medical – Page 2723
A genetic therapy has improved the vision of patients who would otherwise have gone blind.
A clinical study by British scientists has shown that the improvement is long-lasting and so the therapy is suitable to be offered as a treatment.
The researchers will apply for approval to begin trials to treat more common forms of blindness next year.
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The results pointed to MC1R, known previously as a gene for red hair and freckles.
Scientists say they have made a leap in knowing why some people retain their youthful looks while others age badly.
The new study is the first time that “a gene has been found that explains, in part, why some people look older and others younger for their age”, Manfred Kayser, a professor of forensic molecular genetics at Erasmus MC University Medical Center Rotterdam in the Netherlands and a senior author on the study, said in a statement.
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Scientists are now one step closer to neutralizing HIV.
In a study conducted at Vanderbilt University and published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers isolated antibodies with a loop-like structure that binds tightly to HIV and disables it. Unlike traditional vaccines, which jump-start an immune response by exposing the patient to a pathogen, this newly discovered method could work even in people who have not previously been exposed to by the virus.
Using computer modeling, the researchers identified the amino acid sequences that bound most tightly to HIV and re-engineered them in an optimal sequence that simulated vaccination.
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DNA used in a thermometer.
A thermometer 20,000-times smaller than a human hair has been developed by researchers using DNA that is capable of measuring temperatures within living cells.
The thermometer, unveiled this week in the journal Nano Letters, was built by scientists at the University of Montreal and is expected to improve human understanding of nanotechnologies.
DNA is made up of four different molecules: Nucleotide adenine (A), nucleotide thymine (T), nucleotide cytosine © and nucleotide guanine (G). Nucleotides A and T bind weakly together, whereas nucleotides C and G bind strongly together.
New keys unlock how words are stored in our brains.
Researchers have created a new map of the human brain which shows where we organize words depending on their meaning—and it could help us read minds more accurately than ever.
Scientists from the University of California, Berkeley, have published an interactive version of the map online. It allows you to explore the whole brain, clicking around to see where different types of words—from social and spatial, to violent and visual—are stored.
The team constructed the maps by playing seven different participants a two-hour chunk of The Moth Radio Hour while scanning their brains using functional MRI. The brain scans showed how the oxygen levels in blood across the brain changed, and this data was then used as a measure of how active a particular part of the brain was.
New research by UCSF scientists could accelerate – by 10 to 100-fold – the pace of many efforts to profile gene activity, ranging from basic research into how to build new tissues from stem cells to clinical efforts to detect cancer or auto-immune diseases by profiling single cells in a tiny drop of blood.
The study, published online April 27, 2016, in the journal Cell Systems, rigorously demonstrates how to extract high-quality information about the patterns of gene expression in individual cells without using expensive and time-consuming deep-sequencing technology. The paper’s senior authors are Hana El-Samad, PhD, an associate professor of biochemistry and biophysics at UCSF, and Matt Thomson, PhD, a faculty fellow in UCSF’s Center for Systems and Synthetic Biology.
“We believe the implications are huge because of the fundamental tradeoff between depth of sequencing and throughput, or cost,” said El-Samad. “For example, suddenly, one can think of profiling a whole tumor at the single cell level.”
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