The Scientific Discovery Thread: Blow Our Minds World!

[DJ_KiDDvIcIOUs]

Promising Study Shows the Power of Gene Therapy to Treat Deafness

An international team of researchers has used a virus to correct genetic defects and partially restore hearing in deaf mice. It’s an important proof-of-concept that could eventually lead to therapies in humans.

Genetic faults are responsible for approximately half of all cases of hearing loss in early life, and there are at least 70 genes that, when mutated, cause deafness. It’s no wonder, then, that scientists would like to use gene therapies to treat—and even possibly cur —certain forms of hearing impairments. Now, a research team led by Jeffrey Holt from the F. M. Kirby Neurobiology Center at Boston Children’s Hospital, along with Charles Askew and colleagues at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland, has shown that this may indeed be the right approach.

By focusing on a gene called TMC1—a gene that accounts for 4-to-8% of genetic deafness—the researchers have demonstrated that it’s possible to use a virus, in this case the adeno-associated virus 1 (AAV1), to deliver a functional version of TMC1 and restore partial hearing in mice. TMC1 is critical in that it encodes a protein that converts sound into electrical signals that travel to the brain. The results of their work now appears at Science Translational Medicine.

Writing in Science News, Sarah Schwartz explains more:

The scientists tried this therapy on two different deafness-causing mutations. Within a month, around half the mice with one mutation showed brainwave activity consistent with hearing and jumped when exposed to loud noises. Treated mice with the other mutation didn’t respond to noises, but the gene therapy helped their hair cells — which normally die off quickly due to the mutation — survive. All of the untreated mice remained deaf.

The mice that recovered hearing received a partial fix. Most of their inner hair cells, which allow basic hearing, used the new genes. But few outer hair cells, which amplify noises, accepted the viral delivery. It’s hard to get outer hair cells to respond to gene therapy...Still, inner hair cells control most sound transmission...​

Eventually, the scientists would like to use viruses to treat all hair cells and achieve complete recovery of hearing. The next step is to improve the viral infection rate and to see if they can get these treatments to last longer.

“Our gene therapy protocol is not yet ready for clinical trials—we need to tweak it a bit more—but in the not-too-distant future we think it could be developed for therapeutic use in humans,” noted Holt in a statement.

Excitingly, AAV1 is considered safe as a viral vector and has already been used in human gene therapy trials to treat blindness, heart disease, muscular dystrophy, and other conditions.

“This is a great example of how the basic science can lead to clinical therapies,” says Holt.

http://io9.com/promising-study-shows-the-power-of-gene-therapy-to-trea-1716750367

Pretty awesome stuff. I hope they are able to perfect this before all my loud music causes me to go completely deaf

 

[childeroland]

Neuroscientists establish brain-to-brain networks in primates, rodents*

http://www.terradaily.com/reports/Neuroscientists_establish_brain_to_brain_networks_in_primates_rodents__999.html

 

[DJ_KiDDvIcIOUs]

The LHC Has Discovered a New Sub-Atomic Particle Called a Pentaquark

After restarting to run at higher power than ever, the Large Hadron Collider has made its first proper discovery. Today, a team of scientists announced that they’ve found a new class of sub-atomic particles known as pentaquarks.

Quarks are a series of charged sub-atomic particles that come together to form larger particles—such as protons and neutrons, which are each made of three of the things (a class of particle referred to as baryons). First proposed in 1964 by American physicist Murray Gell-Mann, their existence changed the way people thought about particle physicists.

But quarks can come together to form other entities, too. For a long time, people have speculated that another class of quark ensemble, called the pentaquark, could in theory exist. The pentaquark is, perhaps unsurprisingly, supposed to be made up of five smaller entities—four quarks and an anti-quark. Now, for the first time, researchers working on the LHCb experiment at the Collider have found evidence for their existence.

“The pentaquark is not just any new particle,” said Guy Wilkinson from the LHCb in a press release. “It represents a way to aggregate quarks, namely the fundamental constituents of ordinary protons and neutrons, in a pattern that has never been observed before in over fifty years of experimental searches. Studying its properties may allow us to understand better how ordinary matter, the protons and neutrons from which we’re all made, is constituted.”

The team has identified the existence of the peantaquark by watching for the decay of a baryon known as Lambda b. As it split up into three well-known particles—well known to physicists at least: a J-psi, a proton and a charged kaon, if you’re keeping track—the scientists observed a transition state in which two previously unobserved particles could be identified.

“Benefiting from the large data set provided by the LHC, and the excellent precision of our detector, we have examined all possibilities for these signals, and conclude that they can only be explained by pentaquark states”, says LHCb physicist Tomasz Skwarnicki in a press release. “More precisely the states must be formed of two up quarks, one down quark, one charm quark and one anti-charm quark.”

Now, the scientists will study study the finer structure of the pentaquarks, to understand exactly how they’re bound together. It’s not the dark matter that CERN researchers are eventually hoping to find with the newly high-powered Collider, but it’s still another milestone in particle physics.

http://gizmodo.com/the-lhc-has-discovered-a-new-exotic-particle-called-a-p-1717676181

Can't wait to see what else the LHC will find now that it's running at full power

 

[DJ_KiDDvIcIOUs]

X-Rays Reveal a Mysterious Component of Human Hair

A new and surprising component of human hair has just been discovered, according to research recently presented at the annual meeting of the American Crystallographic Association. Remarkably, it’s a discovery that could lead to improved hair products.

Human hair has been extensively studied for decades, but until now, a complete understanding of its structure had proven elusive.

“Hair traditionally has been constituted of three regions: medulla (central part of the hair), cortex (biggest volume fraction of the hair) and the cuticle (external part of the hair),” project leader Vesna Stanic, a scientist working at the Brazilian Synchrotron Light Source, told Discovery News.

“We discovered a new intermediate zone, which is in between the cuticle and cortex,” she added.

Stanic and her team made the discovery by combining an ultra powerful submicron X-ray beam with cross-sectional geometry. The original goal was to just study materials used in hair treatments, and how they affect hair. While doing this, Stanic wondered about the diffraction patterns of hair.

Diffraction is the bending of waves around obstacles and openings. X-ray diffraction patterns of a given material can therefore reveal the local arrangement of both molecular and atomic structures.

Diffraction patterns of human hair have been documented before, but they usually involved pointing the X-ray beam perpendicular to the hair fiber axis. Stanic and her team decided to do something different.

“We performed a full diffraction map from a 30-micron-thick cross section of hair, with an incident beam parallel to the hair axis, and then compared it to the diffraction map with the beam perpendicular to the hair axis,” she explained.

Before this study, human hair was thought to be composed only of a fibrous protein called alpha keratin, as well as certain minerals and lipids. The scientists were therefore extremely surprised to find that a key diffraction feature of alpha keratin was absent in the area between a hair strand’s cuticle and cortex. The pattern instead corresponded to beta keratin.

Previously, beta-keratin was associated with reptiles and birds. It is what makes claws, scales, beaks and feathers strong, tough and, in the case of feathers, also flexible and elastic.

Alpha and beta keratin are similar molecules, but they have very different sizes and shapes.

Stanic explained, “The basic difference between alpha and beta keratin is the molecule conformations. We can say that beta keratin is essentially stretched alpha keratin. Alpha keratin has a helical structure, while beta is typically arranged in sheets.”

The discovery comes on the heels of other research helping to explain why humans from different parts of the world have distinctive hair types. The reason can be summed up in one word: Neanderthals.

Daven Presgraves, an associate professor in the Department of Biology at the University of Rochester, told Discovery News that people of non-African heritage today retain Neanderthal alleles (alternative gene types) at genes affecting keratin filaments.

“The implication is that these Neanderthal-derived alleles were particularly well adapted to Eurasian environments in which they’d evolved for several hundred thousands of years,” Presgraves told Discovery News. “Modern humans who interbred with Neanderthals on their way out of Africa were, in effect, able to borrow these keratin-associated alleles, perhaps accelerating adaptation to a Eurasian environment that was new to them.”

Both this study and Stanic’s will likely lead to new and improved hair products.

As Stanic said, it “is important to know the structure of hair in order to understand how this structure will change with different hair products.”

Fido might also enjoy a better shampoo in future too, since the researchers next plan to study animal hair using the same submicron X-ray beam/cross-section geometry technique.

http://io9.com/x-rays-reveal-a-mysterious-component-of-human-hair-1721280426

Fascinating

 

[DJ_KiDDvIcIOUs]

Scientists Have Discovered a New Human-Like Species in South Africa

In a burial chamber deep within a South African cave system, a team of scientists has discovered 15 partial skeletons — of a completely new human-like species.

The discovery, announced this morning by researchers from University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg and published in the journal E-Life, adds a completely new section to the Homo family tree. The researchers have dubbed the new species Homo naledi.

While Lee Berger, the lead researcher behind the study, tells New Scientist that the species “doesn’t look a lot like us,” his team believes that features observed in the skull, hands and teeth of the skeletons make it part of the Homo genus.

They certainly have enough evidence from which to draw that kind of conclusion: the fossil find in the cave system was particularly rich. In fact, the team uncovered an amazing 1,400 bones and 140 teeth during a single field trip to the site. The team reckons the fossils could date back as far as 3 million years — though an accurate date is yet to be confirmed.

Such a large find in a single location is pretty much unheard of in discoveries of Homo remains that are so old. The sheer number of bones found together suggests that the bodies may have been deliberately left in the cave, which in turn hints that primitive humans may have buried their dead. While further investigation is needed, the finding could change the way we think about ancient human behavior.

Berger claims that thousands more remains are still present in the cave. Rather than digging them all up in one go, though, a decision was made to take the current batch up to the surface and then create a larger-scale project to uncover the rest over the coming years.

The remains that have so far been studied suggest that Homo naledi was an unusual-looking creature. Its pelvis and shoulder are, apparently, reminiscent of apes that lived 4 million years ago, while its feet resemble Homo sapien remains from just 200,000 years ago. Meanwhile, its skull was much smaller, containing a brain less than half the size of modern humans. The team reckon the creature could have stood 5 feet tall and weighed almost 100 pounds.

The find is clearly important, though some researchers are understandably cautious about what it may tell us. Jeffrey Schwartz at the University of Pittsburgh, for instance, told New Scientist that “the specimens lumped together as Homo naledi represent two cranial morphs.”

That doesn’t detract from the importance of the find, though. While more work is clearly needed — to accurately date the finds, to excavate the other remains, to work out in more detail what we know about Homo naledi — the possibilities provided by such a large collection fossils is huge.

Perhaps most importantly, the find serves to remind us that the soil still have plenty of fossils to offer — and in turn plenty to teach us about the rich history of our ancestors.

http://gizmodo.com/scientists-have-discovered-a-new-human-like-species-in-1729771292

This is an insanely huge find! Very fascinating stuff

 

[DJ_KiDDvIcIOUs]

Scientists Have Created a System That Absorbs 99.7% of All Sound

Is this thing on? That’s likely what Hong Kong University of Science and Technology scientists thought, shortly after they’d developed a new system that absorbs 99.7 percent of all the sound that hits it.

Many systems use sonic insulators to deaden sound: materials which absorb sound, typically over a small range of frequencies. By combining different insulators into a composite, it’s possible to absorb a large range of sounds — but it’s difficult to create such a material that absorbs all the the frequencies. It would just be too big and complex. That means that there’s a limit to the amount of sound they can absorb.

Instead, the new technique uses a pair resonators, built as a single layer and designed to naturally vibrate at the frequency of whatever they’re attached to (every object has a natural frequency, a function of its physical and material properties). Sound is largely cancelled out by one of the resonators: it provides a route for sounds to dissipate through, made possible by tuning its natural frequency to that of the thing it’s attached to.

But at the quietest moments, even that absorbing resonator can scatter some sound at its own frequency. That’s where the second resonator comes in: tuned to match the frequency of the first resonator, it can be used to create destructive interference that cancels out any noise that it produces. Together, the pair manage to absorb 99.7 percent of all the noise that hits them, whatever the volume.

You can read the a detailed report of the research in Physical Review Letters. You might need some quiet, though.

http://gizmodo.com/scientists-have-created-a-system-that-absorbs-99-7-of-1730725855

Can't wait for this to be adapted to studios whilst making music

 

[Teelie]

Teenage Mutant Ninja Sea Turtle discovered

Or not really but still damned cool. It's a sea turtle that glows as if it were mutated.

There is a video at the link.

That's not a "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle" floating before your eyes. You're seeing the first biofluorescent reptile discovered by scientists.

While filming small sharks and coral reefs in the Solomon Islands in the South Pacific, marine biologists had a stunning encounter with a "glowing" sea turtle.

Scientists captured footage of a hawkbill sea turtle emitting neon green and red light. The discovery was made in late July by David Gruber of the City University of New York and his team. The footage was released for the first time on Monday.

Gruber, an emerging explorer for National Geographic, described the turtle as an alien spaceship when he initially saw it swimming in the water.

"It was absolutely gorgeous," Gruber said in an interview with CNN. The turtle swam into the team's lights while they were filming coral underwater. The turtle's appearance was unexpected and took everyone by surprise, he said.

In just a few years, scientists have started to pay more attention to biofluorescence in marine species.

"It's a bit like a mystery novel," Gruber said. "It started with jellyfish and coral, and the fluorescent molecules jellyfish and coral create has lead to monumental breakthroughs in biomedical science."

Fluorescence has helped provide a marker for scientists to see the inner workings of cells and that has partially lead to an explosion in research in the biofluorescence field, Gruber explained.

Finding a reptile that exhibits biofluorescence opens up a new set of questions: Why is a turtle emitting light? What is the chemical composition?

Unlike bioluminescence, which is when an organism produces its own light through chemical reactions, such as what fireflies do, biofluorescence is when an animal absorbs light, transforms it and radiates it, sometimes in different colors.

Scientists have discovered the presence of biofluorescence in corals; arthropods such as crabs and insects; and more than 200 species of sharks and fishes.

In certain cases, scientists have an idea as to how organisms use biofluorescence. In coral living in sun-drenched parts of the ocean, for example, biofluorescence functions as a form of sunscreen. It also can work as a lure as well. Early studies suggest some fish use biofluorescence as a way to signal to one another.

"For fish and sharks and now turtles, it's much more mysterious," Gruber said.

Typically biofluorescence is used to attract prey and is used as a form of defense. The neon lights may help with camouflaging the turtle. But Gruber explained that it may be too early to understand why the turtle radiates these lights.

"The ocean is the perfect place to evolve these kinds of fluorescent molecules because it is almost completely blue," he said. "The ocean absorbs almost every other color except for blue -- so these animals have been creating ways to take in that blue light and transform into other colors," he said.

Scientists are just starting to understand the process. "This is just another example showing how many mysteries the ocean has in store for us," he said.

However, the hawksbill turtle is critically endangered and the species is threatened because of climate change. In some areas, there are only several thousand breeding females left.

"Their numbers have really dwindled, and yet we still don't understand them. For me, there's a sense of urgency to protect and understand these species while they are still here," he said.

CNN

 

[DJ_KiDDvIcIOUs]

That's awesome!

 

[Teelie]

This is an interesting one. Mealworms that eat plastic falls under so many listings. Science, biology, technology, weird news.

These are mealworms that will eat plastic and literally **** biodegradable material (soil).

Hungry mealworms may be the future of EPS recycling

Outlawed in some U.S. cities as unrecyclable waste and controversial almost everywhere, the plastic foam carryout food container could become a new part of the mealworm’s diet — and solve a major garbage problem in the process.

Larvae of the darkling beetle will not only feed on expanded polystyrene, but microorganisms in their guts biodegrade it internally. And then, they poop out a seemingly safe product that may be suitable as soil for crops. Talk about waste disposal.

The promising trash-to-food chain is unfolding in a laboratory at Stanford University, where a research team is the first to provide detailed evidence of bacterial degradation of plastic in an animal’s gut.

“It’s actually astonishing to see the worms eating their way through the polystyrene,” Craig Criddle, a Stanford professor of civil and environmental engineering, said in a telephone interview. “It is surprising.”

Another surprise is that the PS doesn’t seem to be toxic to the insects, which also are getting potatoes and food scraps for a nutritious balanced diet.

“They’re fine with a little bit of the good stuff on the side,” Criddle said.

He is supervising the study at Stanford, which is being led by senior researcher Wei-Min Wu in collaboration with colleagues in China. The study is still in its early stages, but Wu described in an email the high hopes he has for its implications: “to find a way to remediate current plastic pollution.”

Gut reactions

Wu is building on research initiated at the Beihang University in China, where researchers observed waxworms, the larvae of Indian mealmoths, break down polyethylene in the form of plastic bags thanks to microorganisms in their guts. Wu said he decided to study EPS because it is commonly used for coffee cups and Americans throw away some 2.5 billion of those each year. The findings to date also are significant because EPS “has been considered basically non-biodegradable and it causes pollution problems in soil, rivers, lakes and oceans,” Wu said.

In the Stanford study, 100 mealworms ate 34-39 milligrams of EPS — the equivalent weight of a small pill — each day. Microbes in the guts of the baby bugs broke down the plastic and converted some of it into carbon dioxide and some of it into biodegradable fragments, which were excreted like tiny rabbit droppings within 24 hours.

So far, that excreted waste appears safe to use as soil, according to the researchers.

“Our findings have opened a new door to solve the global plastic pollution problem,” Wu said in a Sept. 29 news release.

But first, many other questions need to be answered about the microbes and their role in the processing of the plastic.

“The insects do some of the work because they’re chewing up the material,” Criddle said. “Then the microbes take it to an even smaller scale by breaking it down with enzymes and that effectively is recycling the material at a molecular scale. In the near term we’d like to find out what the enzymes are and understand the conditions under which they are operating.”

When the microbes are grown outside the insect, they still break down the polystyrene but not at as high of a rate, Criddle said.

“The rate of degradation seems to happen faster inside these worms,” he said. “Something is occurring inside the insect.”

Eating away

A lot of questions about how the mealworms process plastics and what that could mean for the polluted planet are eating away at the researchers.

“If we learn more about new enzymes or new processes, how can we engineer them in way that helps get rid of the problem,” Criddle asked. “…There are many issues with [EPS] and these other plastics so we need to find solutions to these problems for many reasons. Landfills are filling up. There’s ocean debris.”

Scientists could be at the forefront of engineering more powerful enzymes to degrade plastic or guiding manufacturers to design polymers that don’t accumulate in the environment or food chains.

“This is early stage research,” Criddle said. “We don’t know where it will go.”

The researchers at Stanford and in China plan to study whether the microorganisms in mealworms and other insects could biodegrade other plastics, such as polypropylene, mircobeads and bioplastics. Wu said they also begin looking for a marine equivalent of the mealworm.

The long-term ripple effect is exciting, Criddle said, but he doesn’t want to raise hopes too high.

“We’re human beings. We have those hopes, too,” he said. “We don’t want to raise expectations to a level where we can’t meet them. We want to be realistic about what’s possible this science. We just don’t know; there’s a lot we don’t know right now.”

Plastics News

 

[Micromind]

Promising Study Shows the Power of Gene Therapy to Treat Deafness

http://io9.com/promising-study-shows-the-power-of-gene-therapy-to-trea-1716750367

Pretty awesome stuff. I hope they are able to perfect this before all my loud music causes me to go completely deaf

I have been hearing about the miraculous gene therapy since my childhood, (which will supposedly cure almost everything under the Sun) still, I see no commercial products being developed for masses.

 

[Teelie]

It's because such advancements aren't overnight. There is no miracle one shot cure.

 

[wiegeabo]

Promising Study Shows the Power of Gene Therapy to Treat Deafness

A lot easier and more immediate way to treat deafness/hearing loss would be to develop high-quality affordable hearing aids.

Companies like google say they want to change the world. If google really wanted to do something, they should stop making stupid things like Glass (which they thankfully did) and get into making affordable medical supplies that would disrupt the industry. As just one example.

 

[Teelie]

And how do you expect Google to shift from a internet company to a medical one?

 

[KevanG]

This is an interesting one. Mealworms that eat plastic falls under so many listings. Science, biology, technology, weird news.

These are mealworms that will eat plastic and literally **** biodegradable material (soil).

Or maybe we could just be a tad more careful when recycling.

That's pretty neat though.

 

[wiegeabo]

And how do you expect Google to shift from a internet company to a medical one?

They were thinking of giving glass prescription lenses. They're big enough to get their hands in anything.

Especially now that they've done this whole Alphabet split/reorg thing. They could have some kind of humanitarian or medical section.

 

[Teelie]

Recycling isn't the panacea you might think. Nor is there a one answer solution but I agree recycling should have a higher priority.

And perscription lenses are a far ways off from what you're suggesting. For one thing the lenses would be more akin to their Google Glass experiment. And as you seemed so relieved by, they abandoned that project.

 

[wiegeabo]

The lenses were for Glass.

 

[Teelie]

Vaccine safety tested (again) by injection into infant macaques
Neither behavior nor brain structure change in response to vaccination.

It isn't stated in this article but this experiement was funded by anti-vaxxers who were certain it would prove their theory vaccines were dangerous.

Don't worry though, they immediately discounted and ignored the evidence that proved contrary to their beliefs by finding explanations for why it failed to show a non-existent link.

A new paper published in PNAS goes where many studies have gone over the last ten years: it shows that the administration of vaccines does not result in the development of autism-like behavior or brain malfunction. But it does so in dramatic fashion, by giving vaccines to young primates and tracking their development.

This paper, along with many others on this topic over the last several years, aims to correct misconceptions among the public (and presidential candidates) that vaccination is linked to autism. These were fueled by a 1998 publication (since retracted) Lancet paper by Andrew Wakefield. A sector of the public consciousness has been captured by the suggestion that there may be a link between the measles, mumps, rubella vaccine and Autism Spectrum Disorders.

The aforementioned paper was retracted due to questionable methodology and a financial conflict of interest. But it linked use of the vaccine preservative thimerosal to the development of autism in a very small cohort of participants. After the paper was published but before its problems became apparent, this preservative was removed from vaccines delivered in childhood as a precautionary measure to reassure parents.

Since then, several large-scale, methodologically sound studies have failed to link autism to vaccination. Yet there remains a strong anti-vaccination movement in the United States. Despite the risks of not vaccinating, parents continue to fear vaccination and are opting out of the recommend schedule. Recent upticks in our failure to vaccinate have contributed to outbreaks of preventable diseases, such as the 2015 Disneyland Measles outbreak.

The authors of this study examined 79 infant rhesus macaques. These monkeys were either placed into a control group, where they were given saline injections, or they were given an injection of the tri-valent MMR vaccine. This vaccine, which contained the preservative thimerosal, was very similar to the vaccine that Wakefield initially connected to autism in his 1998 paper.

After injections, the monkeys were tested for autism like nonsocial behavior, fear behaviors, and repetitive activities. The examined behaviors of the monkeys that received the MMR vaccine were not significantly different from those that received the saline injection. The researchers to conclude that the monkey’s propensity for autism-like behaviors was not affected by their exposure to the MMR vaccine with thimerosal.

The authors also examined the monkey’s brains post-injection, to look for brain abnormalities analogous to those that have been found in human patients with autism spectrum disorder. These included abnormalities in the cerebellum, the amygdala, and the hippocampus. The researchers found no significant differences between the brains of the vaccinated monkeys and the control monkeys for any of these regions. Again, there was nothing to implicate the MMR vaccine with thimerosal in altering neural development.

The data from this study add to a large body of literature supporting the conclusion that childhood vaccinations are not linked to autism like pathology or behavioral changes. Though there are many studies supporting these conclusions, it can be challenging to convince parents who are already strongly driven by fear of vaccination. It may take further events that display the dangers of forgoing vaccination for this fear to lose its grip on the minds of the public.

Ars Technica

 

[KevanG]

****heads will be ****heads.

 

[Teelie]

I blame Jenny McCarthy. I don't know why she is still relevant but somehow she found a second pseudo-celebrity life as the head of the anti-vaxxer movement.

 

[DJ_KiDDvIcIOUs]

Scientists Say Lab-Grown Burgers Will Be Available to the Public in Five Years

When a team of Dutch scientists unveiled the world’s first stem cell beef burger in 2013, it carried a $300,000 price tag. Worse, it was dry and tasteless. But since the initial lackluster reviews, Mark Post and his colleagues have been hard at work. Now, they say they hope to have a commercially saleable cow-less patty on the market in five years.

Until very recently, lab-grown beef sounded like science fiction. But rapid advances in molecular biology and stem cell technology have placed the futuristic concept within reach. And the arguments for removing animals from the meat equation are practically endless: The meat industry as it exists today swallows an enormous fraction of our land and natural resources, produces vast quantities of greenhouse gases, has contributed to the rise of antibiotic resistant infections, and in many cases, is downright cruel. If test tube burgers can eliminate or diminish even a fraction of these problems, then this seems like one crazy idea worth pursuing.

And pursue it scientists have. In addition to Mark Post’s stem cell burger effort, a team of Israeli researchers under the banner Future Meat are now trying to grow whole chicken breasts in the lab. Meanwhile, efforts to culture fish protein have cropped up intermittently over the years.

Still, five years until we’re slapping ketchup and pickles on artificial meat seems like an awfully fast turnaround for a technology that was at best very nascent two years ago. But Post, who recently founded the company Mosa Meat with the objective of fast-tracking his niche product to mass production, now feels that a five year goal is achievable. As Post told the BBC, the burgers would likely be available as an exclusive, “order on demand” product at first, but “would be on supermarket shelves once a demand had been established and the price comes down.”

While the exact cost of the burgers isn’t yet certain, it’s likely to be competitive. Earlier this year, Post’s team announced that his team had been able to slash the price tag to just a little over $11 per burger, or $36 per pound of cow-less beef. Which is totally comparable to what Western foodies are willing to dish out for a gourmet grass-fed patty at a gastropub these days.

But most importantly of all: Will Post’s future burger taste like juicy, delicious beef, or a sad, bloodless wannabe? There’s reason to be hopeful, because, as Post told me this summer, his team is currently in the process of incorporating the key ingredient that was missing from the 2013 burger demo: Fat. That’s right, stem cell burger 1.0 was pure, unadulterated muscle fibers. To human taste buds, this is pretty bland. The researchers are also trying to figure out how to up the iron content of the muscle fibers — another factor that makes a big contribution to flavor.

I’ve still got my doubts that I’ll be able to order Post’s crazy burger on Amazon in five years, but you can sure as hell bet that whenever it is available for less than $50 bucks, I’m gonna give it a try.

http://gizmodo.com/scientists-say-lab-grown-burgers-will-be-available-to-t-1737038934

I want to try one

 

[Silvermoth]

Ooh I can't wait to put that between my buns!

 

[DJ_KiDDvIcIOUs]

Now We Can Grow Kidney Structures from Stem Cells

Two research teams in the last two months have published studies on kidney structures grown from stem cells, which might be a step toward personalized replacement organs grown from patients’ own cells.

“We have converted skin cells to stem cells and developed a highly efficient process to convert these stem cells into kidney structures that resemble those found in a normal human kidney,” biologist Ryuji Morizane of Brigham and Women’s Hospital, lead author of a new study in the journal Nature Biotechnology, said in a statement.

Earlier this year, a team of Australian medical researchers lead by Minoru Takasato also succeeded in growing nephron organoids from stem cells in the lab. They published their results in the journal Nature.

Certain chemical signals can trigger stem cells to develop into specialized cells, or differentiate. In recent years, scientists have discovered ways to induce stem cells to differentiate into heart, liver, nerve, and pancreas cells. To grow kidney structures, Morizane and his team used genetic techniques to develop skin cells into stem cells, which they then developed into what are called “precursor cells,” a type of stem cell that’s only partially differentiated. These precursor cells developed into kidney cells and assembled themselves into structures that looked much like those found in real, live kidneys.

The results of their work are organoids, three dimensional organ structures grown in a lab, which are very similar to kidney structures called nephrons. Morizane and his colleagues published their work in the journal Nature Biotechnology.

Nephrons are the basic working structures in you kidneys; they filter excess water, salts, and harmful substances out of your blood and turn them into urine. Each kidney has about a million nephrons, which sounds like a lot — but it’s a finite supply. Once you lose nephrons to disease or injury, your body can’t replace them.

You Could Grow Your Own Kidney Transplant... Someday

That’s what happens to patients with chronic kidney disease, for instance. Between 9% and 11% of adults in the U.S. are gradually losing kidney function to chronic kidney disease caused by diabetes, inflammation, infection, or other problems. For most of these patients, the best options are dialysis and, in some cases, kidney transplants.

Donor kidneys are in short supply, however, and transplants come with some risk. Morizane and his colleagues hope that their research will be a step toward one day growing replacement kidneys from patients’ own cells - and idea that has long been a popular theme in discussions about stem cell research. They’ve grown nephron-like structures, not whole kidneys, but Morizane says it’s a step in the right direction.

“We’re hopeful that this finding will pave the way for the future creation of kidney tissues that could function in a patient and eliminate the need for transplantation from a donor,” said Morizane in a statement. If it comes to pass, such a breakthrough could help doctors and patients work around the short supply of donor organs, and it could make transplants less dangerous for patients. One of the biggest challenges of organ transplantation - besides finding a compatible donor in the first place - is keeping the body from rejecting the new organ as a foreign invader. A kidney grown from the patient’s own cells wouldn’t set off the immune system’s alarms, so rejection wouldn’t be an issue.

New Tools for Studying Kidney Disease

Of course, that optimistic future is still a long way off. In the short term, these lab-grown organoids are more likely to help researchers study kidney development and test new drugs for safety and effectiveness.

Many drugs used to treat diseases elsewhere in the body are harmful to the kidneys, whose role in filtering harmful substances out of the blood leaves them especially vulnerable to toxicity. Organoids like those developed by Takasato’s team and Morizane’s team could give medical researchers a new way to test new drugs’ effects on kidney structures in the lab.

They could also help create working models of kidney diseases in the lab, on which medical researchers could test potential treatments.

Because the development of these organoids from stem cells is so similar to the development of real kidney structures during gestation, they also offer a good way for researchers to study how kidney abnormalities develop in the womb, which could one day lead to better treatments or even prevention.

http://gizmodo.com/now-we-can-grow-kidney-structures-from-stem-cells-1737198553

That's very exciting news!

 

[Teelie]

Scientists Say Lab-Grown Burgers Will Be Available to the Public in Five Years

http://gizmodo.com/scientists-say-lab-grown-burgers-will-be-available-to-t-1737038934

I want to try one

Yeah, but they said that five years ago too.

 

[DJ_KiDDvIcIOUs]

Pioneering Gene-Editing Therapy Reverses Cancer in Baby Girl

A one-year-old girl diagnosed with incurable aggressive leukemia is now in remission after receiving “designer cells” from a donor. The therapy made use of a powerful new gene-editing technique that could eventually be used to treat an array of hereditary diseases.

Layla Richards from London, England, is the first patient in the world to receive the pioneering therapy, which was performed by Great Ormond Street hospital doctors. They’re not calling it a cure, but her condition has improved vastly from just a few months ago, when her prognosis looked grim. The therapy appears to be holding the leukemia at bay.

Her situation had been dire, prompting the medical staff, along with biotech firm Cellectis, to seek permission to use the untested technology. The only prior application of the technique, known as site-specific genome editing, was performed on mice. Layla, who was diagnosed with leukemia when she was three months old, started to take a turn for the worse, compelling her doctors—and her parents—to take the desperate measure, one that now appears to be paying off.

“I didn’t want to go down that road [and admit her to palliative care], I’d rather that she tried something new and I took the gamble,” noted Layla’s father, Ashleigh, in a BBC article. “And this is her today standing laughing and giggling, she was so weak before this treatment, it was horrible and I’m just thankful for this opportunity.”

For the therapy, the doctors made use of a biotechnology known as transcription activator-like effector nuclease, or TALENs for short. It’s an enzyme that allows scientists to cut DNA strands at specific sequences, which is why it’s often referred to as a molecular scissor. In this case, immunologist Wasseem Qasim and his team at GOSH used the TALENS scissor to deactivate the genes in healthy, donated immune T-cells that would normally cause the foreign cells to be rejected when transplanted into a leukemia patient. The cells were also modified to protect them from anti-cancer drugs.

The details of the procedure, which will be presented at the 54th American Society of Hematology, now appear at the science journal, Blood.

To make room for the new “designer cells,” Layla’s existing immune system had to be destroyed. After the procedure, Layla’s health improved almost instantly. Team member Paul Veys was quoted in the BBC as saying the transformation was one of the most remarkable things he’d seen in 20 years, describing the turn of events as “almost like a miracle.”

However, while Layla’s leukemia is currently in remission, it’s still early, and it represents a single case. The technique has not yet been tested in formal, long-term clinical trials. What’s more, the therapy is not meant to be permanent; as noted by Qasim in Nature News, it’s meant to serve as a “bridge” to keep Layla and future patients alive until a matched T-cell donor can be found.

Looking to the future, and assuming this technique can work in the ways intended, it could be used to treat an assortment of ailments, including hemophilia, beta thalassemia, and hemoglobinopathy (a hereditary condition involving an abnormality in the structure of hemoglobin).

http://gizmodo.com/pioneering-gene-...QhmMY_tue7bevQ.4&utm_referrer=http://io9.com/

This is absolutely amazing