Stories tagged Cells
Join the fight!: Grimace is doing his part.Courtesy GiantGinkoOkay…I don’t want to alarm anyone, but I think it’s important that you’re all made aware of this threat before it’s too late. I mean, like, we didn’t used to be afraid of that little ball of goo until it became the blob, and now we’re in deep, deep fudge. That kind of thing.
Okay, so…ugh, why do I have to do this? Just prepare yourself, get a fresh pair of pants ready, and please, please don’t panic. Not yet. That could be dangerous.
There is…somewhere, like, out there…a bacteria that is literally a million times bigger than other bacteria. Do you understand what this means? Do you understand what “literally” means? It doesn’t mean, “I’m literally going to starve to death if I don’t get that pizza!” It means for real. For really real. And do you know what “a million” means? Of course you do. It’s like, if you had to fight another guy and his ninety nine friends, and then had to fight nine hundred and ninety nine more groups just like his, and then fight just as many people nine more times—you’d be fighting a million guys. Could you win a fight like that? No, try again, you couldn’t. So what chance do we stand against this gargantuan bacteria? You know that bacteria have no emotions, right? They’ll eat you and your new puppy, and then eat, like, a pumpkin, and they wouldn’t feel any worse about you and your lousy puppy than they would about the dumb pumpkin.
Oh, this is the worst.
Okay, okay, I was the one who said we shouldn’t panic. So let’s look at this beast rationally—maybe we can find a weakness.
What do we know? Well, the monstrosity in question, of the epulopiscium genus, is a million times the size of an E. coli bacterium. A million times bigger. That means that epulopiscium is, let’s see…about the size of a grain of salt. If you, for instance, were for some reason one-hundredth the size of a grain of salt, epulopiscium would be a hundred times bigger than you. A hundred times bigger than you! What else? Well, it seems that the bacteria only live in the stomachs of surgeonfish, in the area of Australia’s Great Barrier Reef. That’s where they live for now—the surgeonfish lives in a symbiotic relationship with epulopiscium, so there’s no reason to assume that it will keep its horrible buddy under wraps.
How can we fight this thing? Guns? What good would bullets do against something like this? Nuclear weapons? Only as a last resort. But what if… What if we could turn epulopiscium’s own size against it, like we did with King Kong when we shot him off that building?
Let’s see…Normally bacteria have to be itty-bitty because they haven’t got the specialized organelles to move nutrients around, and their DNA—of which there are only a hundred or so copies—isn’t bound in nuclei; basically their Schmidt is all over the place, so they have to be tiny to keep things working. It seems, however, that the epulopiscium is unique in that it has thousands of copies of its genome incorporated into its cell membrane. That way, if anything remarkable happens in the cell, DNA will be right there to react quickly, locally producing RNA or whatever proteins are necessary for the situation.
So that means we need to destroy its fancy DNA, and then its own bulk will bring the epulopiscium down! And what can damage DNA? Electromagnetic radiation! We need to start dumping radioactive waste into the waters of the Great Barrier Reef immediately! Stat! Ionize their fancy little DNA!
Get to it, Buzzketeers. This will be a modern-day David and Goliath story.
Tags : Finger tip regenerated by "pixie dust"
Lee Spievak had the end of his finger chopped off by the propeller of a model airplane. Today it has grown back. It's all there, tissue, nerves, nail, skin, even his finger print.
Speivak's brother, Alan - who was working in the field of regenerative medicine - sent him some powder which Lee calls pixie dust. For ten days Spievak put a little on his finger. The "pixie dust" comes from the University of Pittsburgh and is made by scraping the cells from the lining of a pig's bladder.
"The remaining tissue is then placed into acid, "cleaned" of all cells, and dried out. When the extra cellular matrix (pixie dust) is put on a wound, scientists believe it stimulates cells in the tissue to grow rather than scar.
Future research proposals
Researchers are anxious to conduct clinical trials involving regeneration of an oesophagus and to re-grow burnt skin. A follow up article quoted other scientists who were skeptical of the claimed results. I recommend watching the video and then using the comments box below to tell us what you think.
Source article; BBC News
Bristlecone pines are actually much smaller than this: So the chopping should be pretty easy.Courtesy purplekeyThe world has finally gotten sick of California’s bristlecone pine Methuselah, and offered up something better.
The bristlecone pines of the White Mountains in California are some of the oldest living objects in the world, with one individual, nicknamed “Methuselah,” having been aged at around 5,000 years. Now five thousand years is older than most people I know, but I don’t think that I’d go around calling those trees “super old” or anything. More along the lines of “kind of old,” and for decades we’ve had to put up with complaints over these kind-of-old trees (e.g. “Don’t cut it down! It’s kind of old!”) Since when has something being kind of old ever stopped us from destroying it?
Well, now Methuselah won’t even be able to play that card anymore, because its kind of old woody butt has been blown out of the water by a new old tree, an 8000-year-old Norway spruce, found, ironically, in Sweden. 8000 years—I think we can safely call that “pretty old.”
While an individual trunk of the spruce may only live about 600 years, the organism will put up a new one as soon as the old trunk dies, which has allowed some of the trees to survive since just about the end of the last ice age.
A cultivated dwarf spruce: This Norway spruce was made to be small, but the ancient stunted ones in Sweden probably look about the same.Courtesy SEWilco
The carbon-dated pretty-old tree was found in a cluster of similarly aged Norway spruces in the mountains of western Sweden, in an area that has remained untouched by commercial logging. The harsh environmental conditions of the area have forced the trees to stay very small—only about a foot and a half tall—but last several decades have brought a warmer climate to the area, and the trees have “popped up like mushrooms,” making them much easier to find in the mountainous terrain. This will also make them more fun for me to chop down when an older tree is found.
Update!
According to this article, one of the trees is 9,550 years old. There's actually a cluster of about twenty spruce that are at least 8,000 years old.
Researchers at Veredus Laboratories and STMicroelectronics developed VereFlu™, a small and automated diagnostic test that rapidly detects all major influenza types.
Why is this significant?
Current rapid tests can detect:
- only influenza A viruses
- both influenza A and B viruses, but doesn't distinguish between the two types
- both influenza A and B and distinguish between the two
None of the rapid tests provide any information about influenza A subtypes. VereFlu™ is highly sensitive, accurate and it can identify and differentiate human strains of Influenza A and its subtypes and B viruses, including the Avian Flu strain H5N1, in a single test. A test like this currently needs to be done in specialized labs and can take days or weeks for results.
From the company’s press release:
“VereFlu™ will enable healthcare professionals to effectively monitor mutations of flu viruses and quickly identify the main strain of the season,” said Dr Rosemary Tan, Chief Executive Officer of Veredus Laboratories. “This unique capability can significantly increase the effectiveness of flu vaccination and reduce public health risks associated with the emergence of a new flu virus.”
An exciting collaboration
VereFlu™ is the market’s first test which has integrated two powerful molecular biological applications into a new test the size of a fingernail. Combining Veredus Laboratories’ expertise in developing diagnostic tests and STMicroelectornics expertise in ST’s microfluidic lab-on-chip technology has created this new product. The two companies are planning to work together to develop additional diagnostic tests. They have set up a new venture in Singapore called Bio-Application Lab.
This new test sounds really cool and it got me wondering about how it works. I will contact the company and add to the post if I find out!
Our precious water supply may be at riskCourtesy TsjalWell, this is not good to hear.
An investigation by the Associated Press has revealed that the drinking water of more than two dozen US cities is polluted with pharmaceuticals and over-the-counter drugs.
The medications, which include antibiotics, sex hormones, and mood stabilizers, along with commonly used medications such as ibuprofen, were detected in trace amounts – quantities of parts per billions or even trillions - but let’s face it, this is really disturbing news.
How the drugs got there is obvious; our country’s population is a highly medicated one. We pop a lot pill for all sorts of conditions, headaches, depression, high cholesterol and elevated blood pressure, birth control, sexual dysfunction, to name just a few. Our bodies metabolize a large portion of these drugs but any part not absorbed, ends up going down the toilet and back into the water system.
“People think that if they take a medication, their body absorbs it and it disappears, but of course that’s not the case,” said Christian Daughton, an EPA scientist who was one of the first to bring attention to the issue.
Waste treatment plants filter the water before it gets discharged back into reservoirs or into the water table, and the water is treated again for drinking but unfortunately the treatment plants just aren’t set up to filter out the drug traces. The AP’s five-month investigation also turned up disturbing data that shows some natural watersheds are also contaminated, meaning this stuff is getting into everything.
The trace amounts don’t seem to be a concern, at least not in the short term. But what about in the long term? The effect of ingesting low-levels of all these different types of medications over a lifetime –or even during the critical nine months of gestation – just isn’t clearly understood. Some recent studies have shown disturbing alterations in human cells and wildlife exposed to water laced with pharmaceuticals and industrial pollutants, but these studies aren’t well known to the general population.
And human waste isn’t the only source of contamination. Steroids given to cattle have been shown to find their way from feedlots back into the water system. And here’s an unsettling statistic I learned recently: 75 percent of the antibiotics sold by the US drug companies is used on livestock -such as chickens- to keep them healthy while they grow fat for the slaughterhouse. Some of their manure is then used to fertilize crop fields and the antibiotics get into the aquifers.
So what to do? At the moment, the federal government has no requirement for testing water for drugs and many major cities don’t do it. Less than 50 percent of the 62 cities the AP investigated didn’t test for that kind of contamination. These included major metropolitan centers such as Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Houston, Chicago, New York City and Phoenix. Some water providers told the AP investigators that they had found no traces of pharmaceuticals in their water, only to have an independent test show that wasn’t true.
You might think, as I did, that maybe bottled water is the answer. Unfortunately much of that is just repackaged (and untested) tap water. And most home purification systems don’t filter out drug contaminates. There is a process called reverse osmosis that can rid the water of all traces of medical contaminants but at the moment, it is very expensive and results in a lot of contaminated waste water just to get a single gallon of potable water.
And the US is not alone in this problem. Traces of pharmaceuticals have been detected in lakes, rivers, reservoirs, and aquifers around the world. Considering that only 3 percent of Earth’s water is fresh water, something needs to be done.
SOURCE and LINKS
AP Story
National Sleep Awareness Week® (NSAW), is a public education, information, and awareness campaign that coincides with the return of Daylight Saving Time, the annual "springing forward" of clocks that can cause Americans to lose an hour of sleep.
--NSAW website (NSAW.org)
Check out the sleep quizzes, tools and other information on the National Sleep Foundation website.
- Do you get enough sleep?
- What are you planning to do to recognize NSAW?
- Share your sleep strategies with us!
Researchers at Yale School of Medicine developed a blood test with enough sensitivity and specificity to detect early stage ovarian cancer with 99 percent accuracy.
Why is this important?
Ovarian cancer is (from the United States Cancer Statistics):
- the fifth leading cause of cancer-related death in women in the United States
- the leading cause of gynecologic cancer deaths
- one-tenth as common as breast cancer but three times more lethal
- carries a 1:70 lifetime risk
The high rate of death due to ovarian cancer is a result of the lack of a good screening strategy to detect early stage disease. There is currently no proven screening test for ovarian cancer – no mammogram or Pap smear equivalent. It is this reason that women must become extremely diligent about understanding symptoms and talking with their doctors. Additionally, this makes ovarian cancer difficult to diagnose. The Minnesota Ovarian Cancer Alliance and the Centers for Disease Control have more information about ovarian cancer.
What’s the test?
The researches looked at six different proteins in the blood of 362 healthy controls and 156 newly diagnosed ovarian cancer patients. Four of the proteins are related to the normal physiology of the ovaries and the levels of these proteins are maintained by a delicate balance in the body. They hypothesize that the abnormal or cancer cells alter this delicate balance producing the atypical amounts in the blood. They are not necessarily factors that are produced by the tumor (like the additional two proteins) but represent the body’s response to the cancer. The researchers go on to propose that significant levels of the tumor's products (the additional two proteins studied) could only be detected in the blood at later stages of tumor development. Therefore based on this study the protein panel identified can detect early stages of the disease.
Conclusion
This study was a phase II study – meaning more testing is needed. This test is better then the only currently available test, CA-125. The use of this test will enhance the potential of treating ovarian cancer in its early stages and therefore, increases the successful treatment of the disease (Vistintin et. al. Clin Cancer Res 2008:14(4) February 15, 2008). But it still isn’t good enough to use as screening test for the general population. The researchers for this study have begun a phase III evaluation in a multi-center clinical trial. In collaboration with EDRN/NCI and Laboratories Corporation of America (LabCorp), they are testing close to 2,000 patients (Yale news release).
Hetero, homo, and 3-way embryo creation
Embryo - 5 weeksCourtesy Ed Uthman Lesbian couples could one day have children who share both their genes. Karim Nayernia, Professor of Stem Cell Biology at Newcastle University, has applied for ethical approval from the university to use bone marrow stem cells from women to start experiments to derive female sperm.
“I think, in principle, it will be scientifically possible,” Prof Nayernia told New Scientist.
Babies from two men
Other research is setting the stage for a gay man to donate skin cells that could be used to make eggs, which could then be fertilized by his partner’s sperm. A surrogate's uterus would be needed to bring the baby to term.
In Brazil, a team led by Dr Irina Kerkis of the Butantan Institute in Saõ Paulo claims to have made both sperm and eggs from cultures of male mouse embryonic stem cells in the journal Cloning and Stem Cells.
Babies from a man and two women
A whole class of hereditary diseases, including some forms of epilepsy, result from faulty DNA related to mitochondria. Starting with 10 severely abnormal embryos left over from traditional fertility treatment, researchers removed the nucleus, containing DNA from the mother and father, from the embryo, and implanted it into a donor egg whose DNA had been largely removed. The only genetic information remaining from the donor egg was the tiny bit that controls production of mitochondria. The embryos then began to develop normally, but were destroyed within six days.
"We believe that from this work, and work we have done on other animals that in principle we could develop this technique and offer treatment in the forseeable future that will give families some hope of avoiding passing these diseases to their children." said Patrick Chinnery, a member of the Newcastle team.
If you have an opinion on these types of research, feel free to comment.
Read more
- Telegraph.co.uk: Sperm cells created from female embryo
- BBC News: Three-parent embryo formed in lab
Often you read about people afraid or worried about vaccines but a recent article published in the Journal of the American Medical Association reports that vaccines have decreased hospitalizations and deaths related to the most vaccine-preventable diseases. And occurrences of these diseases are at an all time low. The researchers compared illness and death before and after widespread implementation of national vaccine recommendations for 13 different vaccine-preventable diseases. These include: diphtheria, invasive Haemophilus influenzae type b, hepatitis A, acute hepatitis B, measles, mumps, pertussis, poliomyelitis, rubella, Streptococcus pneumoniae, smallpox, tetanus and varicella. The data showed large reductions in the number of cases after vaccinations were recommended for each of the diseases. For an interesting view of a vaccine life cycle go to this web site
Vaccines changed medicine
(From the Vaccine Education Center)
Official Rubella Fighter: The “rubella umbrella” campaign urged parents to have their children immunized from this viral infection. Rubella, or more commonly referred to as the German measles, is a mild childhood illness that can pose a serious threat to a fetus, if the mother contracts the illness during pregnancy. More than 20,000 babies were born with congenital rubella syndrome (CRS) during an outbreak of rubella in 1964-65. This epidemic cost the country an estimated $1.5 billion. The rubella vaccine was first licensed in the U.S. in 1969.Courtesy CDC
Vaccines have literally transformed the landscape of medicine over the course of the 20th century.
Before vaccines, parents in the United States could expect that every year:
• Polio would paralyze 10,000 children.
• Rubella (German measles) would cause birth defects and mental retardation in as many as 20,000 newborns.
• Measles would infect about 4 million children, killing 3,000.
• Diphtheria would be one of the most common causes of death in school-aged children.
• A bacterium called Haemophilus influenzae type b (Hib) would cause meningitis in 15,000 children, leaving many with permanent brain damage.
• Pertussis (whooping cough) would kill thousands of infants.
Vaccines have reduced and, in some cases, eliminated many diseases that killed or severely disabled people just a few generations before. For most Americans today, vaccines are a routine part of healthcare.
However, the disappearance of many childhood diseases has led some parents to question whether vaccines are still necessary. Further, a growing number of parents are concerned that vaccines may actually be the cause of diseases such as autism, hyperactivity, developmental delay, attention deficit disorder, diabetes, multiple sclerosis, and sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS) among others. These concerns have caused some parents to delay vaccines or withhold them altogether from their children.
For information on vaccine safety go to this page on the CDC website or this page on the Vaccine Education Center website.
How vaccines work
(from the CDC)
Children are born with a full immune system composed of cells, glands, organs, and fluids that are located throughout his or her body to fight invading bacteria and viruses. The immune system recognizes germs that enter the body as "foreign" invaders, or antigens, and produces protein substances called antibodies to fight them. A normal, healthy immune system has the ability to produce millions of these antibodies to defend against thousands of attacks every day, doing it so naturally that people are not even aware they are being attacked and defended so often (Whitney, 1990). Many antibodies disappear once they have destroyed the invading antigens, but the cells involved in antibody production remain and become "memory cells." Memory cells remember the original antigen and then defend against it when the antigen attempts to re-infect a person, even after many decades. This protection is called immunity.
Vaccines contain the same antigens or parts of antigens that cause diseases, but the antigens in vaccines are either killed or greatly weakened. When they are injected into fatty tissue or muscle, vaccine antigens are not strong enough to produce the symptoms and signs of the disease but are strong enough for the immune system to produce antibodies against them (Tortora and Anagnostakos, 1981). The memory cells that remain prevent re-infection when they encounter that disease in the future. Thus, through vaccination, children develop immunity without suffering from the actual diseases that vaccines prevent. But remember…what's in the vaccine is just strong enough to promote the body's response to make antibodies, but much weaker than the viruses or bacteria in their natural, or "wild," states. For another description see this webpage
Template for life created out of lab chemicals
Mycoplasma genitaliumCourtesy Department of Energy Starting with simple laboratory chemicals, a group of scientists led by Craig Venter have replicated an entire bacterial genome. Based on an existing organism, the molecule of DNA Mycoplasma genitalium, composed of 582,970 base pairs, could come "alive" and start to replicate itself when inserted into a "hollow" bacterial host from which the DNA has been removed. The procedure titled, Complete Chemical Synthesis, Assembly, and Cloning of a Mycoplasma genitalium Genome was just published in Science.
"Venter and his colleagues have already managed to transplant the DNA from one bacteria into another, making it change species (see Genome transplant makes species switch/news070625-9). These bacteria were closely related to M. genitalium. If the transplant can be repeated with a man-made genome adapted from M. genitalium, the result could qualify as the first artificial life form (see 'What is artificial life?')" Nature News.
Customizing bacteria to solve problems
The genome of M. genitalium is one of the simplest, consisting of only 470 coding regions. Venter suspects about 100 of these are not necessary. The next step is to strip out various segments in an attempt to build the minimal amount of code that is essential for "life". This minimal component could then serve as a chassis to which "designer" genes could be attached, genes that could turn the bacteria into biological factories for making hydrogen (or other fuels).
Recommended reading:
Longest Piece of Synthetic DNA Yet (Scientific American)
