The biology of aphids is bizarre: they can be born pregnant and males sometimes lack mouths, causing them to die not long after mating. In an addition to their list of anomalies, work published this week indicates that they may also capture sunlight and use the energy for metabolic purposes.
They collated data from over 900 publications to account for everything going on inside the bacterial cell. But it wasn't just a case of running a model of each cellular process. They had to account for all the interactions that go on -- basically, a hell of a lot of math. The team managed to recreate cell division using the model, although a single pass took almost 10 hours withMATLAB software running on a 128-core Linux cluster.
These silicon polymer chips havemicrofluidic channels carved into them that contain human cells; pumps and other mechanical systems act on the chips to replicate the motions involved in the beating of a heart, the expansion of the lungs, or the peristalsis of the intestines. These simple organ-chips could be used to study diseases, toxins, and pharmaceuticals. Researchers say these studies may be faster, easier, and more predictive than either animal testing or in vitro experiments.
Program Snapshot
The Common Fund's Human Microbiome Project (HMP) aims to characterize the microbial communities found at several different sites on the human body, including nasal passages, oral cavities, skin, gastrointestinal tract, and urogenital tract, and to analyze the role of these microbes in human health and disease. HMP includes the following initiatives.
http://commonfund.nih.gov/hmp/
The cost of sequencing human genomes is plunging—in the most advanced genomics centers, it's falling five times faster than the cost of computing. Increasingly, people are getting their DNA sequenced by companies and research labs in a search for clues about genetic variation and disease.
But the industry must figure out how to cheaply store all the resulting data. Each of the 3.2 billion DNA base pairs in a human genome can be encoded by two bits—800 megabytes for the entire genome. But considerable data about each base is usually collected, and genes are often sequenced many times to ensure accuracy, so it's common to save around 100 gigabytes when sequencing a human genome with a machine made by industry leader Illumina. Keeping this much data about every person on the planet would require about as much digital storage as was available in the whole world in 2010.
The trick, then, will be to save less. Harvard geneticist George Church says that eventually only the differences between a newly sequenced genome and a reference genome will need to be stored. That information could be encoded in as little as four megabytes. Then your genome might be just another e-mail attachment.
前半段關於基因改造食物的部份差點看不下去 就算那是James D. Watson說的 後面有關基因治療的部份 我也是不是很同意 （我支持體細胞（Somatic Cell)基因治療 而不支持性細胞（Germline Cell)基因治療）因為如果你知道目前把好的基因植入你的細胞是使用反轉錄病毒而且你完全不知道會把基因植到哪邊 光是這一點就讓人不放心（對於重大的基因疾病這是兩難的選擇）Watson對基因工程的看法太過天真了 但是我同意我門應該對基因做更多的研究 甚至於找出與行為相關的基因 不是要逃避責任而是知道有這樣的缺陷才能用適當的教育或是環境來改善
Exome sequencing could help to identify the causes of intellectual disability in children such as Siebe.
...
About 2% of children experience some form of intellectual disability. Many have disorders such as Down’s syndrome and fragile X syndrome, which are linked to known genetic abnormalities and so are easily diagnosed. Others have experienced environmental risk factors, such as fetal alcohol exposure, that rule out a simple genetic explanation. However, a large proportion of intellectual disability cases are thought to be the work of single, as-yet-unidentified mutations.
Scientists estimate that about 1,000 genes are involved in the function of the healthy brain. “There are so many genes that can go wrong and give you intellectual disability,” says André Reis, a medical geneticist at Erlangen University Hospital in Germany. Reis’s group, the German Mental Retardation Network, has already sequenced the exomes — the 1–2% of the genome that contains instructions for building proteins — of about 50 patients with severe intellectual disability.
...
http://www.nature.com/news/gene-hunt-is-on-for-mental-disability-1.10463
"We augmented a protein nanopore we developed for this purpose with a molecular motor that moves a DNA strand through the pore a nucleotide at a time," says Jens Gundlach, a University of Washington physics professor who leads the research team, in a press release covering the research. “The motor pulls the strand through the pore at a manageable speed of tens of milliseconds per nucleotide, which is slow enough to be able to read the current signal.”
Researchers may finally have uncovered the brain mechanism for storage of long term memories. It's long been suspected that synaptic connections between neurons were part of the mechanism. But somehow our memories survive while individual neurons die and are replaced. There's a new paper on the subject by Travis J. A. Craddock, Jack A. Tuszynski, and Stuart Hameroff, titled "Cytoskeletal Signaling: Is Memory Encoded in Microtubule Lattices by CaMKII Phosphorylation?"
The technology relies on the fact that a DNA base, or a combination of bases on a DNA strand creates a characteristic disruption in a current as it passes through the nanopore. Electrodes measure the change in current flow as DNA molecules are fed through protein nanopores; an electrical gradient drives the DNA through the pore, while molecular "controllers" attached to the molecules mechanically slow them down so that their electrical signals may be recorded.
This approach has two important advantages.
First, the system is compact and doesn't require a supply of expensive reagents. That means sequencing can come out of the lab, making it useful for personalized medicine or for use in resource-poor clinics. Indeed, the disposable sequencer the company is about to introduce is the size of a USB memory stick.
Second, the technology reads much longer stretches of DNA than other rapid sequencing approaches, which means it has the potential to be better at spotting important "structural variants" related to disease. These variants occur when a whole segment of chromosome is moved, inverted, duplicated, or otherwise changed. When DNA is chopped into shorter stretches to be sequenced and then put back together on a computer, it is easier to miss, or misinterpret, such variants.
這是一本非常美的書 裡面很多的蛋白質機器和細胞都是用水彩話的！
http://www.springer.com/life+sciences/cell+biology/book/978-0-387-84924-9
MinION is a disposable device that contains a sensor chip, ASIC and the fluidics system that are needed to perform a complete single molecule sensing experiment. Plugging directly into a laptop or desktop computer through a USB port, it is a self contained device to deliver real time experimental data.
The MinION is adaptable for DNA sequencing, protein sensing and other nanopore sensing techniques.
This past week, researchers in Cambridge -- alongside scientists from MicroCHIPS, Inc. -- announced that they have successfully used the aforementioned chip to give osteoporosis patients their daily allotment of teriparatide. "You can do remote control delivery, you can do pulsatile drug delivery, and you can deliver multiple drugs,"
At $149,000, the new machine is about three times the price of the Personal Genome Machine, the sequencer that the company debuted about a year ago. But the DNA-reading chip inside it is 1,000 times more powerful, according to Rothberg, allowing the device to sequence an entire human genome in a day for $1,000—a price the biotech industry has been working toward for years because it would bring the cost down to the level of a medical test.
In the last few years, scientists have uncovered clues not just to what the lives of Neanderthals may have been like, but also clues that tell us more about what it means to be a modern human.
Most interesting of all is that, although Neanderthals disappeared long ago, their DNA lives on in all non-African people.
http://spittoon.23andme.com/2011/12/15/find-your-inner-neanderthal/
PS.我在網路上的看過那個分析資料 蠻有趣的 因為收集到的尼安德塔人的基因量真的很少 如何分析這些資料和方法很有趣 (沒記錯的話是MIT Bioinformatics的課 一個很cool的年輕教授）
a 14-channel digital wireless neural/EMG telemetry system, suitable for in-flight neural recording from flying insects such as dragonflies. It has a system mass of only 38 milligrams. The IC is powered by RF energy harvesting and consumes less than 1.23mW. It digitizes 10 neural and 4 EMG signals with 11 bit resolution as a 5 Mbps backscattered data stream at UHF (902-928 MHz). It has been fabricated in a 0.35um 4M1P CMOS process.
All the drama in the European Union right now — the debt crisis, the North-South divide and the kvetching over the wisdom of a common currency — has reignited talk about the cultural divide between people on the continent.
But is the divide more than a political and cultural one? Is there a deeper difference among the people of Europe or those of European ancestry than whether Germans have a firmer handshake or are more punctual, or which nationality prefers a kielbasa to köttbulla?
There may be, and those differences can be seen in people’s DNA.
Although all humans are over 99 percent identical genetically, even in the tight geographic confines of Europe there is enough genetic variation that 23andMe researchers can use it to determine from where in Europe a person, or a person’s ancestors, came.
For over a decade, researchers have been arduously attempting to reconstruct the folded shape of M-PMV with the aid of the task-specific Rosetta software, but to no avail. Now, in what they're calling a possible first, gamers were able to do what scientific brains and algorithms could not, creating a sufficient model for molecular replacement -- all in just three weeks. Feel like dedicating your leisure hours to this worthwhile cause? Then be sure to hit up the source link below, and transform yourself from couch potato to couch crusader.
把蛋白質折疊當成Game來玩 請Game玩家來解決科學家一直找不出來的方法 (玩家們只花了3星期 兒科學家花了10年)
The spread of electronic patient records, with their computer-readable entries, is opening new possibilities for medical data mining. Instead of being limited to carefully planned studies on volunteers, scientists can increasingly carry out research virtually by sifting through troves of data collected from the unplanned experiments of real life, as preserved in medical records from scores of hospitals.
Such techniques are allowing researchers to ask questions never envisioned at the time of a drug's approval, such as how a medicine might affect particular ethnicities. They are also being used to uncover evidence of economic problems, such as overbilling and unnecessary procedures. Mining of health records "is going to build advancements in research, but also efficiencies in the health delivery system," says Margaret Anderson, executive director of FasterCures, a think tank in Washington, D.C.
ECGs are used to diagnose irregular heartbeats, or arrhythmias, a common type of medical problem that can also be the result of a heart attack. AliveCor's monitor is built into a case that slips onto an iPhone. It has two electrodes that pick up voltage changes on the skin—the ECG signal—produced by the contraction of the heart. A low-power wireless transmitter sends the signal to the phone. Power comes from a lithium watch battery that Albert claims will last for 180 hours of continuous use.
via MIT Technology Review <--- Check the video!
Mitchell Guttman, first author of the study and a graduate student at MIT and the Broad Institute, says that when the Broad team discovered more than 3,500 unique lincRNAs in the human and mouse genomes in 2009, "the potential was enormous, and we wanted to know what they could be doing."
To answer that question, the researchers focused on understanding lincRNAs' role in embryonic stem cells. Using a technique called RNA interference, they systematically shut down the function of each of more than 200 lincRNAs previously identified as playing a role in embryonic stem cells. They then profiled the genes expressed in the cells and studied their functions. They found that most lincRNAs have widespread effects on cells, and that they help control the fate of stem cells. The team identified about two dozen lincRNAs that help maintain the cell's pluripotency—its ability to beget all other kinds of cells—and a similar number of lincRNAs that repress genes involved in differentiating into other cell types.
Checking blood glucose levels used to mean a finger prick and a test-strip, but researchers at the University of Tokyo are offering a different approach: a glowing skin implant. After being injected with the 1 mm wide filament, it monitors your blood sugar by glowing when your level changes. Based on existing glowing glucose sensor technology, this hydrogel fiber is considered more accurate and stable than its predecessors, plus it requires no oxygen to function. So far, it's worked in mice for up to 140 days. Note to future human patients: don't eat a candy bar before you go to bed unless you want your arm looking like a nightlight.
就是把一種東西直入你的皮下 當你的血糖飆高的時候會發出螢光來警告你
Researchers at the Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI) have developed j5, a technology that automates and optimizes the design of the molecular biological process of cloning/constructing DNA. j5 enables users to benefit from multi-part scar-less SLIC, Gibson, CPEC, (combinatorial) Golden-gate assembly, or variants thereof, where automation software does not exist, without the current level of intense labor associated with the process. The j5 manual provides a step-by-step user’s guide and describes the software’s feature set in greater detail.
Features:
• USB 2.0 compatible
•Plug-and-play, easy operation
•No batteries required — draws power from USB
•Operating Systems: Win 98, ME, 2000, XP, Vista, Linux 2.4 or higher, Mac OS 8.6 or higher
•20 test strips included
•99% accuracy*
While most home tests can detect a level of 15-50 mIU/mL of hCG, the enhanced methodology of the USB Pregnancy Test Kit can detect 5-50 mIU/mL, and will show you the exact concentration via its friendly onscreen interface. In addition, the LCD display on the device itself will light up and show you the symbol of a baby, no baby, or multiples and your Estimated Delivery Date based on the concentration of hCG, hCG-H, and LH in your urine. So you can clear your calendar in advance.
The awesome science of microfluidics has the potential to revolutionize diagnostics, particularly in developing countries where well-equipped labs are hard to come by. Small, inexpensive and accurate diagnostic tools like this one from Columbia University researchers could save countless lives by detecting deadly diseases like HIV without the need for complicated equipment.
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