Designer Babies
Preimplantation genetic testing. Useful for pre-selecting embryos that will:
Create babies that do not carry debilitating genetic mutations that have been in you family history.
Create babies to be a matching bone marrow donor for someone in your family who needs a bone marrow transplant; such as in multiple myelome or leukemia.
Fascinating…
Molecular visualizations of DNA. Stunning. Especially replication, which begins at 1:42.
Tiny camera mounted on mouse take live video of the brain
A new thumbnail-sized microscope will give researchers a way to see what’s happening in the brain of a mouse as it moves around and goes about its business. The microscope, described earlier this week in Nature Methods, weighs less than 2 grams—little enough that it can be fitted atop a rodent’s head—and tracks the activity of up to 200 brain cells.
To watch a living brain in action, researchers usually have to make sure the animal that brain belongs to is keeping very still, be it a human in an
MRI machine or a mouse under a benchtop microscope. That’s not such a problem for researchers studying, say, vision or memory—but it’s difficult to investigate the neuroscience of movement or behavior when your subjects can’t move around and behave.The new device is a fluorescence microscope, meaning it shines light on a sample, then captures the glow that bounces back. Despite the scope’s tiny size, the researchers fit all the necessary optical components—lenses, sensors, a mirror, an LED light, and more—inside it. In addition to being mobile, the microscope captures the activity of more cells than a traditional benchtop microscope does, letting researchers see what’s happening in a larger area of the brain.
The video is seriously amazing. Make sure to check it out.
This is a MUST SEE, I could stare at this all day. Amazing! I can only think of how this technology would be useful in my old lab.
The Brain’s Silent Majority: How the Other 90 Percent of Your Brain Works
Neurons are the brain’s rock stars. But without the glial cells — astrocytes, microglia and oligodendrocytes — there would be no show at all.
VERY interesting. One of my favorite articles I’ve read about neuroscience. Definitely worth reading.
Cell Phone-Based Imaging Technique to Read ELISA Results
How people in science see each other…
Gut coils with help from its elastic neighbor
Mathematicians and biologists at Harvard explain why vertebrate intestines are so predictably loopy
Cambridge, Mass. - August 10, 2011 - Between conception and birth, the human gut grows more than two meters long, looping and coiling within the tiny abdomen. Within a given species, the developing vertebrate gut always loops into the same formation—however, until now, it has not been clear why.
Using a combination of experimental observations, biological and biophysical manipulations, theory, and computation, researchers at Harvard have shown that a “simple” balance of forces determines the form of the gut.
The finding may shed light on how the gut has been able to evolve to accommodate changes in diet.
The interdisciplinary research, published in the August 4th issue of Nature, demonstrates that differences in growth rates between the gut tube and the neighboring mesenteric tissue force the tube to coil, regardless of the space constraints….
NASA Researchers: DNA Building Blocks Can Be Made in Space
“We are star stuff” is becoming “We are comet/meteorite stuff”.
Big news in the astrobiology community today as NASA announced that they have discovered components of DNA in meteorites from Australia and Antarctica. The exact components are called nucleobases, and are the part of DNA involved in base pairing (adenine, guanine, etc.). This points to a possible extra-terrestrial origin for at least part of the primordial soup that became life.
The major concern with findings like this is to ensure that the DNA components you find are not contaminants from Earth. The NASA team worked hard to eliminate this possibility by noting that the meteorites also contain close relatives of nucleobases that are rare or not present on Earth. They also failed to find them in any large amount in the area surrounding the meteorites and used advanced chemistry to show that the nucleobases were formed in completely non-biological reactions (the kind you would see inside a comet, for instance).
This meteorite only carried purine nucleobases (the A and G of DNA and RNA), but previously discovered meteorites (such as the Murchison meteorite) have contained the other base building blocks ( called pyrimidines, the C/T of DNA and the C/U of RNA).
The extraterrestrial origin of nucleic acids and protein building blocks is not a new theory, but this is some of the best evidence yet that space could be the source of some of the keys to life. Commence scrutiny and debate …
(via NASA, image by Chris Smith/NASA)
directed evolution of biomolecules, a technique that leads to compounds with improved properties, works in a fraction of the time of previous methods
“When omecamtiv mecarbil binds to cardiac myosins, the small molecule boosts the proteins’ rate of ATP hydrolysis, thereby increasing cardiac function, Malik says. Imagine that a heart contraction is like a “tug of war,” he says, where the myosin proteins are people tugging. “This molecule allows people’s hands to get on the rope faster, resulting in more hands pulling on the rope,” Malik explains.”
The “decline effect” in the process of publishing scientific research and an interesting method by Jonathan Schooler to mitigate the problem.
Bacteria may be able to exchange large molecules — including those that confer antibiotic resistance — via microscopic tubes, but some researchers are skeptical
Read more: Trading resistance via nanotubes? - The Scientist - Magazine of the Life Sciences http://www.the-scientist.com/news/display/57991/#ixzz1EF9dpMK7
