Lifeboat Foundation

“The possibility to selectively activate genes using various engineered variants of the CRISPR-Cas9 system left many researchers questioning which of the available synthetic activating Cas9 proteins to use for their purposes. The main challenge was that all had been uniquely designed and tested in different settings; there was no side-by-side comparison of their relative potentials,” said George Church, Ph.D., who is Core Faculty Member at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University, leader of its Synthetic Biology Platform, and Professor of Genetics at Harvard Medical School. “We wanted to provide that side-by-side comparison to the biomedical research community.”

In a study published on 23 May in Nature Methods, the Wyss Institute team reports how it rigorously compared and ranked the most commonly used artificial Cas9 activators in different cell types from organisms including humans, mice and flies. The findings provide a valuable guide to researchers, allowing them to streamline their endeavors.

The team also included Wyss Core Faculty Member James Collins, Ph.D., who also is the Termeer Professor of Medical Engineering & Science and Professor of Biological Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)’s Department of Biological Engineering and Norbert Perrimon, Ph.D., a Professor of Genetics at Harvard Medical School.

Continue reading “A Guide to CRISPR Gene Activation” »

For the first time ever, scientists were able to successfully cut out the HIV genes from live animals, and they had over a 50% success rate.

A significant milestone was achieved today in the fight against HIV—scientists led by Kamel Khalili of the Comprehensive NeuroAIDS Center at Temple University just reported that, for the first time, HIV genes have been successfully eliminated from the genomes of animals infected with the virus.

Continue reading “HIV Genes Have Been Cut Out of Live Animals Using CRISPR” »

Fox 29 — Good Day Philadelphia

http://www.fox29.com/140735577-video

NBC TV 10

Continue reading “Bringing The Dead Back To Life — Reanima Project / Bioquark Inc. Media Coverage” »

Continue reading “A robot with human-like grace and precision” »

KITCHENER — Big jumps in life expectancy will begin in as little as 10 years thanks to advances in nanotechnology and 3D printing that will also enable wireless connections among human brains and cloud computers, a leading futurist said Thursday.

“In 10 or 15 years from now we will be adding more than a year, every year, to your life expectancy,” Ray Kurzweil told an audience of 800 people at Communtech’s annual Tech Leadership conference.

Kurzweil, a futurist, inventor and author, as well as a director of engineering at Google, calls this “radical life extension.”

Continue reading “‘Radical life extension’ coming, futurist says” »

Hope for HIV patients.

In 2014, a team of researchers in the Lewis Katz School of Medicine at Temple University became the first to successfully eliminate the HIV-1 virus from cultured human cells. Fewer than two years later, the team has made further strides in its research by eliminating the virus from the genome of human T-cells using the specialized gene editing system they designed.

In a new study published in Scientific Reports, the researchers show that the method can both effectively and safely eliminate the virus from the DNA of human cells grown in culture.

Continue reading “Scientists prove effectiveness of gene editing system in eliminating HIV from DNA of CD4+ T-cells” »

Next time you go for a brain scan; you could actually see dissolvable electrodes.

Hmmm

Scientists at the University of Pennsylvania in a study funded by the Defense Advance Research Projects Agency (DARPA) are developing implantable electrodes for brain monitoring that melt away at a predetermined rate. The devices could come in handy for monitoring and treating certain neurophysiological disorders such as Parkinson’s, depression and chronic pain.

Continue reading “DARPA-backed researchers create dissolvable electrodes for brain monitoring” »

Samsung get into the cancer treatment space with their own Q-Dot technology? Another reason for the FDA to show up in tech’s backyard; lookout for all those future federal and state regs & compliance training that will be coming that eats up 20 hours each month of your scientists and engineering talent’s time.

For a lot of users, Samsung might be known best for their smartphones and other mobile devices, but the company is so much more than that. Many of you reading this might have one of Samsung’s Super HD TV sets, a curved Samsung TV or some other model of theirs. Next to smartphones one of their more popular consumer electronics is of course of TVs, and with the advent of new technology such as Quantum Dot, Samsung is getting even better at producing a great image. One area that you might expect to find this Quantum Dot technology being used is for medical uses, but that’s just what researchers have been exploring recently.

Explaining a Quantum Dot can become quite tricky, but to cut a long story short, they are semiconductors that are so small they register at the nanoscale side of things. In terms of Quantum Dots used in television displays, it’s their ability to precisely tune to a specific and exact part of the color spectrum that makes them so attractive, not to mention their much lower power draw. Now, Kim Sung-jee, a professor of the Chemistry department at Pohang University of Science and Technology (POSTECH), has said that “when combining protein which clings to cancer cells and quantum dots, it can be used to seek out cancer cells in the body”. It’s reasoned that the potential for these Quantum Dots to be so precise in terms of color reproduction can help physicians track down certain cancer cells.

Continue reading “Samsung’s Quantum Dot TV Tech to Find Medical Applications” »

A study performed at IRB Barcelona offers an explanation as to why the genetic code stopped growing 3,000 million years ago. This is attributed to the structure of transfer RNAs—the key molecules in the translation of genes into proteins. The genetic code is limited to 20 amino acids—the building blocks of proteins—the maximum number that prevents systematic mutations, which are fatal for life. The discovery could have applications in synthetic biology.

Nature is constantly evolving—its limits determined only by variations that threaten the viability of species. Research into the origin and expansion of the genetic code are fundamental to explain the evolution of life. In Science Advances, a team of biologists specialised in this field explain a limitation that put the brakes on the further development of the genetic code, which is the universal set of rules that all organisms on Earth use to translate genetic sequences of nucleic acids (DNA and RNA) into the amino acid sequences that comprise the proteins that undertake cell functions.

Headed by ICREA researcher Lluís Ribas de Pouplana at the Institute for Research in Biomedicine (IRB Barcelona) and in collaboration with Fyodor A. Kondrashov, at the Centre for Genomic Regulation (CRG) and Modesto Orozco, from IRB Barcelona, the team of scientists has demonstrated that the genetic code evolved to include a maximum of 20 amino acids and that it was unable to grow further because of a functional limitation of transfer RNAs—the molecules that serve as interpreters between the language of genes and that of proteins. This halt in the increase in the complexity of life happened more than 3,000 million years ago, before the separate evolution of bacteria, eukaryotes and archaebacteria, as all organisms use the same code to produce proteins from genetic information.

Continue reading “Discovery of a fundamental limit to the evolution of the genetic code” »