Category Archives: Biology

Finnish patient gets new jaw from own stem cells

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Scientists in Finland said they had replaced a 65-year-old patient’s upper jaw with a bone transplant cultivated from stem cells isolated from his own fatty tissue and grown inside his abdomen.

Researchers said on Friday the breakthrough opened up new ways to treat severe tissue damage and made the prospect of custom-made living spares parts for humans a step closer to reality.

“There have been a couple of similar-sounding procedures before, but these didn’t use the patient’s own stem cells that were first cultured and expanded in laboratory and differentiated into bone tissue,” said Riitta Suuronen of the Regea Institute of Regenerative Medicine, part of the University of Tampere.

Reuters via Boing Boing

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Study of starling formations points way for swarming robots

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Scientists have uncovered a simple rule that explains how thousands of starlings flock in formation and hope to use the discovery in the future to coordinate swarms of robots.

The reasons why the starlings are able to fly with Red Arrow precision in vast numbers, tumbling and banking in nervous unison and without colliding, has tantalised scientists.

Now it turns out that the secret is for each bird to track seven others, says the first detailed direct observations to have been reported by STARFLAG – Starlings in Flight – a European project involving biologists, physicists, and economists.

The scientists wanted to find out how flocks remain so incredibly cohesive – never leaving a bird isolated – when under attack by a bird of prey.

The team used new methods to gather data on large flocks of starlings over the skies of Rome’s Termini railway station to test the various theories and found that the behaviour of flocking birds is very different from what was believed up to now.

Current computer models assume that each bird interacts with all birds within a certain distance. But the new observations, however, show that each bird keeps under control a fixed number of neighbours – seven other starlings – irrespective of their distance, which is the secret of how they stick together.

Telegraph.co.uk

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Great apes endangered by human viruses

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A new study published in the journal Current Biology by researchers of the Robert Koch Institute (Berlin), the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology (Leipzig) and the Centre Suisse des Recherches Scientifiques (Ivory Coast) confirms the disease threat, finding the first direct evidence of virus transmission from humans to wild apes. The study also showed however that research and tourism projects strongly suppressed the poaching of chimpanzees. This protective effect outweighed the substantial chimpanzee mortality caused by human disease introduction.

EurekAlert!

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Reversal Of Alzheimer’s Symptoms Within Minutes In Human Study

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An extraordinary new scientific study, which for the first time documents marked improvement in Alzheimer’s disease within minutes of administration of a therapeutic molecule, has just been published in the Journal of Neuroinflammation.

This new study highlights the importance of certain soluble proteins, called cytokines, in Alzheimer’s disease. The study focuses on one of these cytokines, tumor necrosis factor-alpha(TNF), a critical component of the brain’s immune system. Normally, TNF finely regulates the transmission of neural impulses in the brain. The authors hypothesized that elevated levels of TNF in Alzheimer’s disease interfere with this regulation. To reduce elevated TNF, the authors gave patients an injection of an anti-TNF therapeutic called etanercept. Excess TNF-alpha has been documented in the cerebrospinal fluid of patients with Alzheimer’s.

The new study documents a dramatic and unprecedented therapeutic effect in an Alzheimer’s patient: improvement within minutes following delivery of perispinal etanercept, which is etanercept given by injection in the spine. Etanercept (trade name Enbrel) binds and inactivates excess TNF. Etanercept is FDA approved to treat a number of immune-mediated disorders and is used off label in the study.

Science Daily

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Scientists Restore Walking In Mice After Spinal Cord Injury

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Spinal cord damage blocks the routes that the brain uses to send messages to the nerve cells that control walking. Until now, doctors believed that the only way for injured patients to walk again was to re-grow the long nerve highways that link the brain and base of the spinal cord. For the first time, a UCLA study shows that the central nervous system can reorganize itself and follow new pathways to restore the cellular communication required for movement.

The discovery could lead to new therapies for the estimated 250,000 Americans who suffer from traumatic spinal cord injuries. An additional 10,000 cases occur each year, according to the Christopher and Dana Reeve Foundation, which helped fund the UCLA study.

“Imagine the long nerve fibers that run between the cells in the brain and lower spinal cord as major freeways,” explained Dr. Michael Sofroniew, lead author and professor of neurobiology at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. “When there’s a traffic accident on the freeway, what do drivers do? They take shorter surface streets. These detours aren’t as fast or direct, but still allow drivers to reach their destination.

“We saw something similar in our research,” he added. “When spinal cord damage blocked direct signals from the brain, under certain conditions the messages were able to make detours around the injury. The message would follow a series of shorter connections to deliver the brain’s command to move the legs.”

Science Daily

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Fuel Cell That Uses Bacteria To Generate Electricity

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Researchers at the Biodesign Institute are using the tiniest organisms on the planet ‘bacteria’ as a viable option to make electricity. In a new study featured in the journal Biotechnology and Bioengineering, lead author Andrew Kato Marcus and colleagues Cesar Torres and Bruce Rittmann have gained critical insights that may lead to commercialization of a promising microbial fuel cell (MFC) technology.

“We can use any kind of waste, such as sewage or pig manure, and the microbial fuel cell will generate electrical energy,” said Marcus, a Civil and Environmental Engineering graduate student and a member of the institute’s Center for Environmental Biotechnology. Unlike conventional fuel cells that rely on hydrogen gas as a fuel source, the microbial fuel cell can handle a variety of water-based organic fuels.

Science Daily

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Scientists find cultural differences among chimpanzee colonies

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Socially-learned cultural behaviour thought to be unique to humans is also found among chimpanzees colonies, scientists at the University of Liverpool have found.

Historically, scientists believed that behavioural differences between colonies of chimpanzees were due to variations in genetics. A team at Liverpool, however, has now discovered that variations in behaviour are down to chimpanzees migrating to other colonies, proving that they build their ‘cultures’ in a similar way to humans.

Physorg

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Study: Monkeys ‘Pay’ for Sex by Grooming

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Male macaque monkeys pay for sex by grooming females, according to a recent study that suggests the primates may treat sex as a commodity.

“In primate societies, grooming is the underlying fabric of it all,” Dr. Michael Gumert, a primatologist at the Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, said in a telephone interview Saturday.

“It’s a sign of friendship and family, and it’s also something that can be exchanged for sexual services,” Gumert said.

Associated Press

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Sea Cucumber Protein Used To Inhibit Development Of Malaria Parasite

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Scientists have genetically engineered a mosquito to release a sea-cucumber protein into its gut which impairs the development of malaria parasites, according to new research. Researchers say this development is a step towards developing future methods of preventing the transmission of malaria.

Malaria is caused by parasites whose lives begin in the bodies of mosquitoes. When mosquitoes feed on the blood of an infected human, the malaria parasites undergo complex development in the insect’s gut. The new study has focused on disrupting this growth and development with a lethal protein, CEL-III, found in sea cucumbers, to prevent the mosquito from passing on the parasite.

Science Daily via Kurzweil AI

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Scientists look at sperm energy for robots

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U.S. scientists are examining whether they can capture the energy driving human sperm to propel nanoscale robots to deliver medicine.

By analyzing stages in the biological pathway sperm cells use to generate energy, Cornell University College of Veterinary Medicine researchers said they hope to recreate that process artificially to deliver medicine to targeted sites in the body, Canadian Broadcasting Corp. reported.

Earth Times

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‘Golden Bullet’ Shows Promise For Killing Common Parasite

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Researchers in Australia report development of a new type of gold nanoparticle that destroys the parasite responsible for toxoplasmosis, a potentially serious disease acquired by handling the feces of infected cats or eating undercooked meat. Their so-called “golden bullet” could provide a safer, more effective alternative for treating the disease than conventional drug therapy, they say.

Science Daily

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Researchers Create Robot Driven by Moth’s Brain

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In a notion taken from science fiction afficionados, University of Arizona researchers presented a robot that moves by using the brain impulses of a moth at the 37th annual Society for Neuroscience meeting in San Diego.

Charles M. Higgins, UA associate professor of electrical and computer engineering, and doctoral student Timothy Melano presented their findings and outlined the mechanics behind the robot’s movements.

The robot’s motion is guided by a tiny electrode implanted in the moth’s brain, Higgins said, specifically to a single neuron that is responsible for keeping the moth’s vision steady during flight. The neuron transmits electrical signals which are then amplified in the robot’s base and through a mathematical formula, a computer translates the signals into action, making the robot move.

The moth is immobilize inside a plastic tube mounted atop the 6-inch-tall wheeled robot. To get the moth to imitate flight, Higgins and his team placed the moth in its apparatus on a circular platform surrounded by a 14-inch-high revolving wall painted with vertical stripes. The moth’s neuron reacts to the movement of the stripes and the process begins.

PhysOrg via KurzweilAI

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A Programming Language for DNA

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Researchers have made an important leap in designing DNA-based circuits, reports this week’s Science. They’ve created the first system that allows amplification of desired DNA sequences without using enzymes—a step towards creating artificial biochemical circuits inside cells.

“They’ve begun to develop a programming language, a software, for DNA,” said Andrew Ellington of the University of Texas at Austin. The work is “a significant advance over previous [attempts],” he added.

Scientists have previously used DNA to build synthetic biochemical circuits. But these networks have generally only been designed to perform one task. “These were machines that carried out a particular function or solved a particular problem,” Ellington told The Scientist.

In the new work, “we show a method of designing them generally so that it can be applied basically to any sequence you want,” said first author David Yu Zhang of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.

The Scientist

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New Nanoparticle Technique Captures Chemical Reactions In Single Living Cell With Amazing Clarity

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Bioengineers at the University of California, Berkeley, have discovered a technique that for the first time enables the detection of biomolecules’ dynamic reactions in a single living cell.

By taking advantage of the signature frequency by which organic and inorganic molecules absorb light, the team of researchers, led by Luke Lee, professor of bioengineering and director of UC Berkeley’s Biomolecular Nanotechnology Center, can determine in real time whether specific enzymes are activated or particular genes are expressed, all with unprecedented resolution within a single living cell.

The technique could lead to a new era in molecular imaging with implications for cell-based drug discovery and biomedical diagnostics.

Science Daily

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Researchers Show Evidence of ‘Memory’ in Cells and Molecules

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Research to be reported October 29 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences provides evidence that some molecular interactions on cell surfaces may have a “memory” that affects their future interactions. The report could lead to a re-examination of results from certain single-molecule research.

physorg

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