Culture
A team of international scientists has developed a suite of more than 200 new genetic techniques for using marine microbes to investigate a host of questions in biology. Published in Nature Methods, the new tools are an essential step forward in understanding the cellular instructions that underpin microbial life in the sea.
Today, the Arabian Peninsula is one of the most arid regions in the world. But its climate has not always been the same, and the past has seen both greater aridity and more humidity at different points in time. As a region at risk of water stress in a heating world, Arabia is of significant interest to scientists studying climate change.
Research led by scientists at the University of Southampton has found settlers arrived in East Polynesia around 200 years earlier than previously thought.
Colonisation of the vast eastern Pacific with its few and far-flung island archipelagos was a remarkable achievement in human history. Yet the timing, character, and drivers of this accomplishment remain poorly understood.
Almost half of apparently healthy people between the ages of 40 and 50 could be accumulating fatty plaques--atheromas--in their arteries at a much faster rate than was previously thought. The Journal of American College of Cardiology (JACC) has today published new data from the PESA-CNIC-Santander study demonstrating that atheroma plaques extend rapidly through the arteries of 40% of asymptomatic individuals aged between 40 and 50 years.
Scientists are hopeful that a new drug -- called EIDD-2801 -- could change the way doctors treat COVID-19. The drug shows promise in reducing lung damage, has finished testing in mice and will soon move to human clinical trials.
As of April 3, the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 had infected more than 1 million people with COVID-19 and caused more than 58,000 deaths in a worldwide pandemic. Currently, no antiviral drugs have been approved to treat SARS-CoV-2 or any of the other coronaviruses that cause human disease.
Apes in U.S. zoos host bacterial communities in their intestinal tracts that are more similar to those of people who eat a non-Western diet than to the gut makeup of their wild ape cousins, according to a new study from Washington University in St. Louis. Further, even wild apes that have never encountered antibiotics harbor microbes with antibiotic resistance genes.
A targeted therapy, currently being studied for treatment of certain cancers including glioblastoma, may also be beneficial in treating other neurologic diseases, a study at the University of Cincinnati shows.
What The Study Did: What combination of healthy lifestyle factors were associated with the most years lived without chronic diseases was the focus of this analysis that included data from more than 100,000 adults who were participants in 12 European studies. Participants' levels of smoking, weight, physical activity and alcohol consumption were compared with the number of years from age 40 to 75 that they were without chronic disease, including type 2 diabetes, coronary heart disease, stroke, cancer, asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.
What The Study Did: About 2,400 students in the 12th grade were surveyed about the frequency and mode of use (smoking, vaping and edibles) of marijuana from 2015 to 2018.
Authors: Megan E. Patrick, Ph.D., of the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, is the corresponding author.
To access the embargoed study: Visit our For The Media website at this link https://media.jamanetwork.com/
(doi:10.1001/jamapediatrics.2020.0175)
DURHAM, N.C. - Using a bedroom air filter that traps fine particles of pollution with diameters smaller than 2.5 micrometers can significantly improve breathing in asthmatic children, a new study by American and Chinese scientists shows.
It's the first study to document that physiological improvements occur in the childrens' airways when air filters are in use, and it suggests that with consistent use, the filters may help prevent, not just alleviate, asthmatic flare-ups.
With the goal of ensuring that single-cell RNA sequencing, a current focus of intense research, makes use of the best possible methods, an international group has benchmarked 13 different methods. The group, led by Holger Heyn of the Centro Nacional de Análisis Genómico (CNAG-CRG) in Spain, found that the Quartz-seq2 method, developed by a team in the RIKEN Center for Biosystems Dynamics Research, was overall the best method developed to sequence single-cell RNA. The research was published in Nature Biotechnology.
University of Groningen scientists observed the characteristics of a single enzyme inside a nanopore. This revealed that the enzyme can exist in four different folded states, or conformers, that play an active role in the reaction mechanism. These results will have consequences for enzyme engineering and the development of inhibitors. The study was published in Nature Chemistry on 6 April.
Researchers have made a major breakthrough in developing gene-editing tools to improve our understanding of one of the most important ocean microbes on the planet.
The international project, co-led by scientists at the University of East Anglia (UEA) in the UK, unlocks the potential of the largest untapped genetic resource for the development of natural products such as novel antibacterial, antiviral, anti-parasitic and antifungal compounds.
CAMBRIDGE, MA -- Imagine you are meeting a friend for dinner at a new restaurant. You may try dishes you haven't had before, and your surroundings will be completely new to you. However, your brain knows that you have had similar experiences -- perusing a menu, ordering appetizers, and splurging on dessert are all things that you have probably done when dining out.
A Japanese research team has successfully developed a system to predict the severity of Alport syndrome, a serious hereditary kidney disease that occurs in about 1 out of 5,000 people in the US. Patients with Alport syndrome have abnormalities in the causative protein, type IV collagen, that often lead to chronic renal dysfunction requiring dialysis. Without a kidney transplant, this can eventually lead to kidney failure and death.