Category: 5. Biology
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‘Nutritional quality must be at the heart of climate smart agriculture’ — researchers
Farmers in sub-Saharan Africa need to diversify away from growing maize and switch to crops that are resilient to climate change and supply key micronutrients for the population, say researchers. Maize is a staple crop across the region where it is grown and consumed in vast quantities. Led by Dr Stewart Jennings from the University of Leeds,…
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The Immune System’s Surprise Role in Creating Blood Stem Cells
Blood stem cells forming in the trunk of a zebrafish embryo. The blood stem cells are yellow, with the red tubes are the aorta on the top and a vein on the bottom. Credit: Xiaoyi Cheng A groundbreaking study reveals that the Nod1 microbial sensor is essential for blood stem cell development. This discovery opens…
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Aging’s Antidote? The Crucial Role of HKDC1 in Keeping Cells Youthful
Osaka University research highlights the protein HKDC1’s critical role in preserving mitochondria and lysosomes, thus preventing cellular aging and related diseases. This finding opens potential new therapeutic approaches for aging-related conditions. Credit: SciTechDaily.com Researchers from Osaka University have identified a protein called HKDC1 that’s crucial to maintaining two subcellular structures, mitochondria and lysosomes, thereby preventing…
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First Complete Cellular Map of a Mammalian Brain Reveals Over 5,300 Cell Types
Researchers have created a groundbreaking cellular map of a mammalian brain, detailing over 5,300 cell types in an adult mouse brain. This atlas, derived from extensive research, is a significant step in understanding brain function and evolution and holds promise for precision treatments of brain disorders. Credit: SciTechDaily.com High-resolution atlas charts neural neighborhoods for more…
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Ant face patterns like swirls and stubble might have practical value
National Harbor, Md. — Looking at face patterns in photos of more than 11,000 kinds of ants struck entomologist Clint Penick as a fine pandemic-lockdown project for his students. From that socially distanced slog came the idea that the texture patterns might offer practical benefits, says Penick, of Auburn University in Alabama. For instance, some…
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Small molecule-switchable RNA platform enables control of therapeutic protein expression
Just like a doctor adjusts the dose of a medication to the patient’s needs, the expression of therapeutic genes, those modified in a person to treat or cure a disease via gene therapy, also needs to be maintained within a therapeutic window. Staying within the therapeutic window is important as too much of the protein…
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A protein identified as key player in keeping cells tidy
Just as healthy organs are vital to our well-being, healthy organelles are vital to the proper functioning of the cell. These subcellular structures carry out specific jobs within the cell, for example, mitochondria power the cell and lysosomes keep the cell tidy. Although damage to these two organelles has been linked to aging, cellular senescence,…
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Immune imprinting | Nature Immunology
The emergence of SARS-CoV-2 variants requires informed vaccine strategies. In Nature, Yisimayi et al. show that repeated Omicron exposure mitigates the immune imprinting conferred by ancestral (‘WT’) SARS-CoV-2 exposure. Mice vaccinated with WT SARS-CoV-2 (CoronaVac) that received one booster of BA.1, BA.5, BQ.1.1 or XBB mRNA vaccines had lower serum NT50 (50% neutralizing titer) values…
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ECOLE: Learning to call copy number variants on whole exome sequencing data
ECOLE overview Our model ECOLE is a deep neural network model which uses a variant of the transformer architecture20 at its core. The transformer is a parallelizable encoder-decoder model that receives an input and applies alternating layers of multi-headed self-attention, multi-layer perceptron (MLP), and layer normalization layers to it. Transformer architecture has achieved state-of-the-art results…
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Transcriptomic comparison between populations selected for higher and lower mobility in the red flour beetle Tribolium castaneum
Insects The red flour beetle, Tribolium castaneum (Herbst, 1797), is a stored-product insect found worldwide and a model species for genomics. The T. castaneum beetle culture used in this study has been maintained in the laboratory for more than 40 years22 according to the rearing method described by a previous study22. The T. castaneum population used…