Cancer causes the genetic code of DNA to change and the alterations can now be read
The cause of cancer is written into the DNA of tumors, scientists have discovered, in a breakthrough which could finally show how much disease is attributable to factors like air pollution or pesticides.
Until now the roots of many cancers have proved elusive, with doctors unable to tease out the impact of a myriad of carcinogenic causes which people encounter everyday.
Even with lung cancer, it is not known just how much can be attributed to smoking and how much could be linked to other factors, such as living by a busy road, or inhaling pollutants at work.
A two-year study on fecal transplants in autism sufferers has found they can reduce symptoms by as much as 45 percent(Credit: Arizona State University)
Scientific research continues to uncover interesting connections between the gut microbiome and human health, including everything from depression to PTSD to autoimmune disease. Another example of this are the emerging ties between gut health and autism, with an exciting new study demonstrating how boosting microbial diversity via fecal transplants can dramatically reduce its symptoms in the long term.
A quest to understand how human intelligence evolved raises some ethical questions.
Human intelligence is one of evolution’s most consequential inventions. It is the result of a sprint that started millions of years ago, leading to ever bigger brains and new abilities. Eventually, humans stood upright, took up the plow, and created civilization, while our primate cousins stayed in the trees.
Now scientists in southern China report that they’ve tried to narrow the evolutionary gap, creating several transgenic macaque monkeys with extra copies of a human gene suspected of playing a role in shaping human intelligence.
“This was the first attempt to understand the evolution of human cognition using a transgenic monkey model,” says Bing Su, the geneticist at the Kunming Institute of Zoology who led the effort.
A team at Harvard has released a study on panther worms which revealed a regenerative master switch called early growth response, or EGR.
Scientists want to know why some fauna, like some species of the humble jellyfish, can regenerate their whole bodies following an injury. In a paper published last Friday, a team at Harvard have made some breakthroughs.
With three-banded panther worms as their test subjects, Harvard’s Assistant Professor of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology Mansi Srivastava and her team discovered a master control gene that’s activated by noncoding DNA, according to the Harvard Gazette.
A piece of non-coding DNA may hold the key to how humans could regenerate body parts
Humans may one day have the ability to regrow limbs after scientists at Harvard University uncovered the DNA switch that controls genes for whole-body regeneration.
Some animals can achieve extraordinary feats of repair, such as salamanders which grow back legs, or geckos which can shed their tails to escape predators and then form new ones in just two months.
Planarian worms, jellyfish, and sea anemones go even further, actually regenerating their entire bodies after being cut in half.
Now scientists have discovered that that in worms, a section of non-coding or ‘junk’ DNA controls the activation of a ‘master control gene’ called early growth response (EGR) which acts like a power switch, turning regeneration on or off.
The genetic-engineering tool could help combat malaria and invasive species. But should we use it?
Charles Darwin had no idea what a gene was. If we dropped the father of evolution into 2019, the idea that humans can willfully alter the genes of an entire species would surely seem like wizardry to him.
But CRISPR gene drives — a new, inconceivably powerful technique that forces genes to spread through a population — have the ability to do just that. Gene drives allow us to hone the blunt edges of natural selection for our own purposes, potentially preventing the spread of disease or eradicating invasive pests.
Yet as with any science performed at the frontier of our knowledge, we are still coming to terms with how powerful CRISPR gene drives might be. Playing the game of genomes means we may, in the future, choose which species live and which die — a near-unbelievable capability that scientists and ethicists agree presents us with unique moral, social and ethical challenges.
Facial recognition can help unlock your phone. Could it also be able to play a far more valuable role in people’s lives by identifying whether or not a person has a rare genetic disorder, based exclusively on their facial features? DeepGestalt, an artificial intelligence built by the Boston-based tech company FDNA, suggests that the answer is a resounding “yes.”
The algorithm is already being used by leading geneticists at more than 2,000 sites in upward of 130 countries around the world. In a new study, published in the journal Nature Medicine, researchers show how the algorithm was able to outperform clinicians when it came to identifying diseases.
The study involved 17,000 kids with 200-plus genetic disorders. Its best performance came in distinguishing between different subtypes of a genetic disorder called Noonan syndrome, one of whose symptoms includes mildly unusual facial features. The A.I. was able to make the correct distinction 64 percent of the time. That is far from perfect, but it is significantly better than human clinicians, who identified Noonan syndrome correctly in just 20 percent of cases.
Apparently, the newest scientific discovery can possibly leave dentures and implants in the past, and make millions of people extremely happy.
These two methods for a missing tooth or teeth can lead to serious dental health issues, such as discomfort and irritations, difficulties to eat, and pain in the case of dentures, while implants can cause infections, nerve damage, injury or damage to the surrounding structures, and sinus problems.
Doctors could soon be able to grow new brain cells, which would help treat people with strokes or other neurological conditions, using just a small blood sample.
Scientists from Heidelberg University Hospital in Germany and the University of Innsbruck in Austria figured out how to reprogram mature human blood cells into neural stem cells. Scientists have reprogrammed stem cells before, but these new cells are the first ones that can continue to multiply and propagate in the lab thanks to specific genetic tweaks, according to research published Thursday in the journal Stem Cell.
Coloured scanning electron micrograph of dividing breast cancer cells.
Inexpensive procedure shows whether patient has cancerous cells in the body, but does not reveal where or how serious it is.
Scientists have developed a universal cancer test that can detect traces of the disease in a patient’s bloodstream.
The cheap and simple test uses a colour-changing fluid to reveal the presence of malignant cells anywhere in the body and provides results in less than 10 minutes.
A daring effort is under way to create the first children whose DNA has been tailored using gene editing.
When Chinese researchers first edited the genes of a human embryo in a lab dish in 2015, it sparked global outcry and pleas from scientists not to make a baby using the technology, at least for the present.
It was the invention of a powerful gene-editing tool, CRISPR, which is cheap and easy to deploy, that made the birth of humans genetically modified in an in vitro fertilization (IVF) center a theoretical possibility.
Thanks to genetically engineered pigs, the donor-organ shortage could soon be a think of the past.
ANCHORING A ROW of family photos in Joseph Tector’s office is a framed, autographed picture of Baby Fae, the California newborn who made headlines in 1984 when she received a baboon’s heart to replace her own malfunctioning organ.
It’s inscribed “To Joe” by Leonard L. Bailey, the surgeon who turned to the monkey heart as the only option to keep his patient alive. Bailey snapped the picture about five days after the operation, while Stephanie Fae Beauclair was sleeping. A strip of surgical tape runs down the center of her chest from neck to diaper, marking the incision line where her rib cage was pulled apart to make the swap. Baby Fae would die less than three weeks later.
It’s an unsettling image to come upon while glancing over snapshots of someone’s dutifully smiling children. But to Tector, who was 19 at the time of Baby Fae’s surgery, the cross-species organ transplant was the most inspiring thing he’d ever heard of. “I remember where I was when the news broke,” he says. “At that moment I knew exactly what I wanted to do with my life.” What he wanted to do with his life, though he may not have articulated it precisely this way, was to become a surgeon-scientist trying to crack the problem of xenotransplantation — the placing of animal organs into human bodies.
