Category Archives: Genetic Engineering

For the launch of the Year of Biology, the neurobiologist Daniel Choquet explains how progress in imaging has contributed to the current explosion of knowledge in the life sciences.

Is it fair to say that advances in imaging technology have brought about a new era in the life sciences?Daniel Choquet:Absolutely. Imaging is part of a series of revolutionary methods that are rapidly expanding knowledge in biology. I like quoting a remark by the South African biologist Sydney Brenner: Progress in science depends on new technologies, new discoveries, and new ideas, probably in that order. This is especially true in biology, for seeing new things enables us to raise fresh questions. Advanced imaging technologies have helped increase our exploration capacities.

What are the milestones of this imaging revolution?D. C.:Imaging has a long history, as the first microscopes go all the way back to the late sixteenth century. But this new revolution can be dated to the 1980s with the use in biology of fluorescent proteins, which can label molecules and thereby help study the mechanisms and processes at work in cells. Another milestone was the development of confocal microscopy and multiphoton microscopy, which provide three-dimensional images of tissue samples. Another key moment was the emergence, beginning in 2006, of super-resolution microscopes which can generate images of objects smaller than 250 nanometres, in both living and functioning tissue.

What objects and processes do these new technologies make possible?D. C.:I will use my favourite cells, neurons, as an example. The cell body of a neuron is approximately 20 microns. It is therefore within reach of conventional microscopes, which are limited by diffraction to a resolution of approximately a quarter micron. The discovery that the brain is not a gelatinous mass, and instead consists of individual cells, was actually made in the late nineteenth century by the Spanish neuroscientist Ramn y Cajal.

A synapse, or the connection between two neurons, typically measures one micron, which is close to the limits of conventional microscopy. It therefore cannot provide high-precision measurement or decode their complex organisation. With a resolution of one hundredth of a micron, super-resolution microscopy can observe not only synapses in action, but also the individual proteins behind a nervous signal.

These technologies enable us to study the dynamics at play when neurons are communicating. For example, my team has shown that synaptic receptors are not fixed to the membrane, but are instead constantly moving about.

Electron microscopy has also seen spectacular advances. What does this mean for the life sciences?D. C.:Electron microscopy has always been important for biology. It enabled the first visualisation of viruses, although the role of this technology has often been underestimated. From the 1980s, electron cryomicroscopy brought about another revolution, namely the ability to study the structure of proteins in 3D with a resolution on the order of the atom. Whats more, it makes it possible to see the different conformations adopted by these proteins, thereby helping us elucidate the functioning of these molecular machines while they are performing their task.

Another recent development involves imaging techniques for studying processes at the level of entire organs or living animals. What do they enable you to do?D. C.:This is a very important point, and here we are on the other side of the spectrum of cryomicroscopy. Thanks to labelling techniques and the miniaturisation of microscopes, we can obtain imaging of an entire animal while it is in action.

For example, we can install a microscope weighing a few grams on a rats head, and let it interact with its congeners or move through a labyrinth. This shows which neurons and regions of the brain are activated during a particular activity. It has already yielded important discoveries, such as the functioning of space and place cells, the neurons that enable us to remember specific locations, and to return to them at a later time.

These technologies show which cells are activated when an animal discovers or revisits an environment.

In other words, you can see memory as it is forming.D. C.:Precisely, this is the brain in action. This research can also be used for other organs, such as the spleen and the thymus gland. We can study organs affected by various diseases, and identify differences as compared with normal functioning. This research can also be coupled with genetic engineering in animals.

So new imaging technologies give you access to all scales. How do you coordinate this information?D. C.:This is a challenge of the future: how can we produce knowledge using a continuum of technologies that allows us to go from the atom to the human, from the angstrom to the metre? In an ideal world, we would be able to describe an entire human being at the molecular scale. This may be possible at some point, but today it is the stuff of science fiction. What we can do now is correlate the different scales of observation. Take for example a mouse performing a task. I discover that a specific part of the brain is active, and that a particular neuron in that region is communicating with its neighbours. I can collect a tissue sample and observe this neuron using super-resolution microscopy in order to see which synapses are active, and how they behave. I can then freeze these synapses and examine them with an electron microscope to study the 3D structure of membrane proteins, and to see how this structure changes when the neuron is activated. By overlapping correlation on different scales, we can move across scales and understand, for instance, which changes in protein conformation are connected to which behaviours in the animal.

What effect do these new technologies have on our approach to diseases, such as Alzheimers and Parkinsons?D. C.:Absolutely fascinating things are underway. In particular, there is a new method that combines imaging and transcriptomics, the study of all genes expressed in a cell or tissue. This enables us to study why certain individuals are severely affected by neurodegenerative diseases while others are not. Today we can image these differences between healthy and sick individuals, something that will be decisive in developing therapies. This is a step towards personalised medicine.

We are still in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic. Can these imaging technologies contribute to the fight against infectious diseases?D. C.:They can indeed. First, it is thanks to electron microscopy that we know what the virus looks like. If we only had its genetic sequence, we would be half blind. For instance, we would not be aware of the importance of the Spike protein, which becomes quite obvious when we see it at the tip of SARS-CoV-2 spikes. Imaging also shows us the parts of the protein that medicine or neutralising antibodies should target in order to block it. Another example is research on Covid-19 symptoms. To study them we must know which tissues are infected, with imaging being decisive in this effort.

Supercomputers, artificial intelligence, learning algorithms How can computing power and analysis be combined with imaging to understand the living world?D. C.:We are in the midst of a boom. Artificial intelligence is invading our everyday lives without us knowing, and biology is no exception. It is indispensable if we want to study numerous parameters on multiple scales. The quantity of information produced is way beyond the grasp of the human brain: without computational resources, it would be impossible to analyse these petabytes of information. A particularly useful application involves teaching artificial neural networks to recognise protruding shapes. This is used widely in cryomicroscopy, as thousands of images are needed to determine the three-dimensional structure of proteins.

In your opinion, what will be the next technological revolution in imaging?D. C.:If I knew, I would have invested already! I think multi-scale analyses will increase. In situ imaging to study organs while they are functioning will become ever more important. Finally, there will be progress in the automation, robotisation, and miniaturisation of microscopes. These could eventually be small enough to enter the body and observe certain organs. What I expect from these advances is a better understanding of living things, and the development of personalised medicine. I think new therapies adapted to each genetic heritage will emerge. Concerning the brain, I think imaging will help with early detection of neurodegenerative diseases, as well as the development of treatments for disorders such as autism.

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How imaging is revolutionising biology - ScienceBlog.com - ScienceBlog.com

Special Report

November 28, 2021 12:00 pm

No one is quite sure what the earliest works of science fiction are. Of course, it depends on definitions. One of the often noted precursor works is Jonathan Swifts Gullivers Travels, released in 1726, while Mary Shelleys Frankenstein, released in 1818, is perhaps the most famous pre-20th century work of science fiction.

Frankenstein has become part of the pantheon of older science fiction characters, which include Dracula, who first appeared in 1897 in Bram Stokers book of the same name. These stories and characters also appear in many science fiction films, including some of the best. But the best science fiction movie of all time is Alien (1979). (These are the 50 greatest heroes in the movies.)

To determine the best sci-fi movie of all time, 24/7 Tempo developed an index using average ratings on IMDb and a combination of audience scores and Tomatometer scores on Rotten Tomatoes as of October 2021. Great sci-fi doesnt just entertain. It criticizes the present and warns us (or excites us) about the future. It makes us think. It provides us with a sense of wonder. But mostly it can be pretty darn entertaining. (These are the 100 greatest movies ever made.)

Alien is a great example of science fiction that makes us think. Despite director Ridley Scotts assertion that his only intention with the movie was terror, according to Slate, Alien spawned many academic analyses, remaining relevant to this day.

The movie (spoilers ahead) tells the story of the crew of a commercial space tug named Nostromo, who are awoken from stasis on their way back to Earth in order to investigate a transmission coming from a nearby alien moon. All hell breaks loose after they land, and before long theres a horrifying rogue alien brilliantly designed by H.R. Giger terrorizing them (and bursting forth from poor John Hurts chest).

With its fast-paced, edge-of-your-seat storyline, Alien was a smash hit that captured audiences and inspired countless films and TV shows, and it launched a franchise thats still going strong.

Click here to see the 50 best sci-fi movies of all time

Methodology

To determine the best sci-fi movie of all time, 24/7 Tempo developed an index using average ratings on Internet Movie Database, an online movie database owned by Amazon, and a combination of audience scores and Tomatometer scores on Rotten Tomatoes, an online movie and TV review aggregator, as of October 2021. All ratings were weighted equally. Only movies with at least 15,000 audience votes on either IMDb or Rotten Tomatoes were considered. The countless Star Wars movies and superhero fantasies based on Marvel Comics or DC Comics characters were excluded from consideration. Directorial credits and cast information comes from IMDb.

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This Is the Best Sci-Fi Movie of All Time - 24/7 Wall St.

GAITHERSBURG, Md., Nov. 23, 2021 /PRNewswire/ --Novavax, Inc. (Nasdaq: NVAX), a biotechnology company dedicated to developing and commercializing next-generation vaccines for serious infectious diseases, today announced that it will participate in Evercore ISI's 4th Annual HealthCONx Virtual Conference. Novavax' recombinant nanoparticle protein-based COVID-19 vaccine candidate, NVX-CoV2373, will be a topic of discussion.

Conference Details:

Fireside Chat

Date:

Thursday, December 2, 2021

Time:

9:15 9:35 a.m. Eastern Time (ET)

Moderator:

Josh Schimmer

Novavax participants:

Gregory M. Glenn, M.D., President, Research and Development and John J. Trizzino, Executive Vice President, Chief Commercial Officer and Chief Business Officer

Conference

Event:

Investor meetings

Date:

Thursday, December 2, 2021

A replay of the recorded fireside session will be available through the events page of the Company's website at ir.novavax.com for 90 days.

About NovavaxNovavax, Inc. (Nasdaq: NVAX) is a biotechnology company that promotes improved health globally through the discovery, development and commercialization of innovative vaccines to prevent serious infectious diseases. The company's proprietary recombinant technology platform harnesses the power and speed of genetic engineering to efficiently produce highly immunogenic nanoparticles designed to address urgent global health needs. NVX-CoV2373, the company's COVID-19 vaccine, received Emergency Use Authorization in Indonesia and the Philippines and has been submitted for regulatory authorization in multiple markets globally. NanoFlu, the company's quadrivalent influenza nanoparticle vaccine, met all primary objectives in its pivotal Phase 3 clinical trial in older adults. Novavax is currently evaluating a COVID-NanoFluTMcombination vaccine in a Phase 1/2 clinical trial, which combines the company's NVX-CoV2373 and NanoFluTM vaccine candidates. These vaccine candidates incorporate Novavax' proprietary saponin-based Matrix-M adjuvant to enhance the immune response and stimulate high levels of neutralizing antibodies.

For more information, visit http://www.novavax.com and connect with us on Twitter and LinkedIn.

Contacts:

InvestorsNovavax, Inc. Erika Schultz | 240-268-2022[emailprotected]

Solebury TroutAlexandra Roy | 617-221-9197[emailprotected]

MediaAlison Chartan | 240-720-7804Laura Keenan Lindsey | 202-709-7521 [emailprotected]

SOURCE Novavax, Inc.

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Novavax to Participate in Evercore ISI's 4th Annual HealthCONx Virtual Conference - PRNewswire

Havana November 27 A full Today, the regular session of the Cuban Academy of Sciences (ACC) will meet in person and in practice at the headquarters of the Information Technology and Advanced Remote Services Company (CITMATEL).

The deliberations will take place by video conference in four rooms prepared for academics from the provinces of Havana and Mayabeque, Doctor of Physical and Mathematical Sciences, Liliam Alvarez Diaz, Secretary of the Foundation, told CNA.

He explained that those belonging to the provincial branches will participate in the online discussions in each of the delegations of the Ministry of Science, Technology and Environment (CITMA).

According to its programme, one of the issues to be brought into academic consideration concerns the overall programs corresponding to the National Economic and Social Development Plan 2030.

The other will consist of the accountability of the ACC, by its chair, Luis Velzquez Perez, MD, a second-tier specialist in physiology.

The Cuban Academy of Sciences expanded its advisory job last May, when 420 scientific figures included it in its most recent internal election.

The latter is held every six years, and the academic body currently consists of those elected for the period 2018-2024, with a total of 183 full members and Merit 100; The honorable 44-year-old and the 31-year-old reporter to exercise their advisory role.

CITMATEL is one of the four national entities with High Technology status, characterized by demonstrating extensive R&D and innovation activity, as well as production and marketing of high value-added products and services, with an emphasis on exports.

The same is done by the Centers for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology, Molecular Immunology (in the province of Havana) and the National Biopreparados (in Mayabeque). (Lino Lupine Perez)

Creator. Devoted pop culture specialist. Certified web fanatic. Unapologetic coffee lover.

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The plenary session of the Cuban Academy of Sciences today - SmallCapNews.co.uk

Has social media already done too much damage? Image: Shutterstock

Unchecked technological advancement is destroying our shared reality and sewing severe discord in social democracies, 2021 Nobel Peace Prize winner Maria Ressa has warned.

Speaking at the Australian Strategic Policy Institutes Sydney Dialogue event last week, Ressa founder of Filipino news site Rappler and the countrys first Nobel Laureate described what she called big techs insidious manipulation of human biology.

Theres something fundamentally wrong with our information ecosystem because the platforms that deliver the facts are actually biased against the facts, Ressa said.

The worlds largest delivery platform for news is Facebook and social media in general has become a big behaviour modification system.

Ressa was talking to questions about whether social media companies ought to create different versions of their platforms to protect weaker democracies from the damaging effects of online propaganda campaigns and misinformation.

One of the revelations in the recent Facebook Papers was that the social media company struggled to effectively moderate content to match its growing scale the more places Facebook reached, it seemed, the less control its Silicon Valley headquarters appeared to have over the way information moved.

Our biology is very, very vulnerable to this technolgoy, Ressa said.

The design of this technology and the way it can insidiously manipulate people is powerful in the same way as genetic engineering technology.

She used the example of gene editing technology CRISPR, saying that governments and regulators put guard rails in place very quickly around it during its development.

This is what we failed to do collectively on information technology, Ressa continued.

Now it is manipulating our minds insidiously, creating alternate realities, and making it impossible for us to think slow at a time when we need to solve existential problems.

Junk food for the mind

Ressas fellow panelist in the discussion, Dr Zeynep Tufekci, an Associate Professor with the University of North Carolina and long-time critic of the use of data to manipulate information flows, agreed that the information technology landscape as it stands is toxic to individuals and societies.

Dr Tufekci said the ongoing debate around censorship by tech companies and social media often ignores the more fundamental problem with how these products get designed in the first place.

Its easier to try and say who should we kick off which platform and harder to think about how we need to shift the entire information ecology by design, she said.

Its like food. If you have humans who evolved under conditions of hunger and then you build a cafeteria the business model of which is to keep you there that cafeteria is going to serve you chips, ice cream, chips, ice cream one after the other.

In that case you have taken a very human vulnerability hunger and youve monetised it using an automated cafeteria.

Similarly, Dr Tufekci suggests the human need for information, knowledge, and social connection has been monetised in a way that takes advantage, as Ressa said, of our very biology.

She doesnt blame the engineers working on these technologies, but rather suggests we have done a poor job of incentivising companies to build more careful products.

Its not because the people working on these technologies are not great or smart or well-meaning, Dr Tufeki said.

[Fixing this] has to be something that we ask them to do, rather than not telling them what to do, then getting mad at them.

One fix at a time

Twitters Head of Legal, Policy and Trust, Vijaya Gadde, defended the position of social media companies by saying that solving some of the well-known problems with these platforms isnt always simple but that it can be done.

We piloted a bunch of things at Twitter like what we call nudges, Gadde said.

These are just quick little pop-ups that appear before youre tweeting information or before you re-tweeting an article which might say did you actually read this article? or a warning to say this was considered misleading by certain groups, are you sure you want to retweet this.

And weve had remarkable incidents of reducing harm on the platform because of those little speed bumps that were putting in place.

So those are the types of things I want to encourage platforms to do and experiment with but the thing is that if the solutions were easy, we would have found them and implemented them already.

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Technology is killing our shared reality | Information Age | ACS - ACS

For half a year, Anthony Fauci, the nation's top infectious-disease official, and Kentucky senator and physician Rand Paul have been locked in a battle over whether the National Institutes of Health funded dangerous "gain of function" research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) and whether that research could have played a role in the pandemic. Against Senator Paul's aggressive questioning over three separate hearings, Dr. Fauci adamantly denied the charge. "The NIH has not ever and does not now fund gain-of-function research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology," he said in their first fracas on May 11, a position he has steadfastly maintained.

Recently, however, a tranche of documents surfaced that complicate Dr. Fauci's denials. The documents, obtained by Freedom of Information Act requests, show that the NIH was funding research at the Wuhan lab that involved manipulating coronaviruses in ways that could have made them more transmissible and deadly to humanswork that arguably fits the definition of gain-of-function. The documents establish that top NIH officials were concerned that the work may have crossed a line the U.S. government had drawn against funding such risky research. The funding came from the NIH's National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), which Dr. Fauci heads.

The resistance among Dr. Fauci and other NIH officials to be forthcoming with information that could inform the debate over the origins of COVID-19 illustrates the old Watergate-era saw that the coverup is often worse than the crime. There's no evidence that the experiments in question had any direct bearing on the pandemic. In the past, Dr. Fauci has made strong arguments for why this type of research, albeit risky, was necessary to prevent future pandemics, and he could have done so again. But the NIH has dragged its feet over FOIA requests on the matter, handing over documents only after The Intercept took the agency to court.

The apparent eagerness to conceal the documents has only raised suspicions about the controversial research and put the NIH on the defensive. Fauci told ABC, "neither I nor Dr. Francis Collins, the director of the NIH, lied or misled about what we've done." The episode is a self-inflicted wound that has further eroded trust in the nation's public health officials at a time when that trust is most important.

While Dr. Fauci takes the political heat, the revelations center on another figure in this drama: Peter Daszak, president of the private research firm EcoHealth Alliance, which received the $3 million NIH grant for coronavirus research and subcontracted the gain-of-function experiments to the Wuhan lab. The activities of Daszak and EcoHealth before the pandemic and during it show a startling lack of transparency about their work with coronaviruses and raise questions about what more there may be to learn.

From the start, Daszak has worked vigorously to discredit any notion that the pandemic could have been the result of a lab accident. When the media was first grappling with the basics of the situation, Daszak organized a letter in the prestigious medical journal The Lancet from 27 scientists, to "strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin," and got himself appointed to the WHO team investigating COVID origins, where he successfully argued that there was no need to look into the WIV's archives.

What Daszak didn't reveal at the time was that the WIV had been using the NIH grant money to genetically engineer dozens of novel coronaviruses discovered in bat samples, and that he knew it was entirely possible that one of those samples had contained SARS-CoV-2 and had infected a researcher, as he conceded to the journal Science in a November 17 interview: "Of course it's possiblethings have happened in the past."

The NIH fought for more than a year to keep details about the EcoHealth grant under wraps. The 528 pages of proposals, conditions, emails, and progress reports revealed that EcoHealth had funded experiments at the WIV that were considerably riskier than the ones previously disclosed.

The trouble began in May 2016, when EcoHealth informed the NIH that it wanted to conduct a series of new experiments during the third year of its five-year grant. One proposed producing "chimeras" made from one SARS-like virus and the spike proteins (which the virus uses to infiltrate animal cells) of others, and testing them in "humanized" mice, which had been genetically engineered to have human-like receptors in their lungs, making them better stand-ins for people. When such novel viruses are created, there is always a risk they will turn out to be dangerous pathogens in their own right.

Another risky experiment involved the MERS virus. Although MERS is lethalit kills 35 percent of those who catch itit's not highly transmissible, which is partly why it has claimed fewer than 900 lives so far. EcoHealth wanted to graft the spikes of other related coronaviruses onto MERS to see how that changed its abilities.

Both experiments seemed to cross the gain-of-function line. NIH program officers said as much, sending Daszak a letter asking him to explain why he thought they didn't.

In his reply, Daszak argued that because the new spikes being added to the chimeras were more distantly related to SARS and MERS than their original spikes, he didn't anticipate any enhanced pathogenicity or infectiousness. That was a key distinction that arguably made them exempt from the NIH's prohibition on gain-of-function experiments. But, of course, one never knows; as a precaution, he offered that if any of the chimeric viruses began to grow 10 times better than the natural viruses, which would suggest enhanced fitness, EcoHealth would immediately stop all experiments, inform the NIH program officers, and together they'd figure out what to do next.

The NIH accepted Daszak's terms, inserting his suggestions into the grant conditions. Scientists at WIV conducted the experiments in 2018. To their surprise, the SARS-like chimeras quickly grew 10,000 times better than the natural virus, flourishing in the lab's humanized mice and making them sicker than the original. They had the hallmarks of very dangerous pathogens.

WIV and EcoHealth did not stop the experiment as required. Nor did they let the NIH know what was going on. The results were buried in figure 35 of EcoHealth's year-four progress report, delivered in April 2018.

Did the NIH call Peter Daszak in to explain himself? It did not. There are no signs in the released documents that the NIH even noticed the alarming results. In fact, NIH signaled its enthusiasm for the project by granting EcoHealth a $7.5 million, five-year renewal in 2019. (The Trump administration suspended the grant in 2020, when EcoHealth's relationship with the WIV came under scrutiny.)

In a letter to Congress on October 20, the NIH's Principal Deputy Director, Lawrence Tabak, acknowledged the screwup, but he placed the blame on EcoHealth's door, citing its duty to immediately report the enhanced growth that had occurred: "EcoHealth failed to report this finding right away, as was required by the terms of the grant." In a follow-up interview with the Washington Post, NIH Director Francis Collins was more blunt: "They messed up here. There's going to be some consequences for EcoHealth." So far, the NIH has not elaborated on what those consequences might be.

As damning as the NIH grant documents are, they pale in comparison to another EcoHealth grant proposal leaked to the online investigative group DRASTIC in September. In that 2018 proposal to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, a Pentagon research arm, EcoHealth sketched an elaborate plan to discover what it would take to turn a garden-variety coronavirus into a pandemic pathogen. They proposed widely sampling Chinese bats in search of new SARS-related viruses, grafting the spike proteins from those viruses onto other viruses they had in the lab to create a suite of chimeras, then, through genetic engineering, introducing mutations into those chimeras and testing them in humanized mice.

One piece of the proposal was especially Strangelovian. For years, scientists had known that adding a special type of "cleavage site" to the spike could supercharge a virus's transmissibility. Although many viruses in nature have such sites, neither SARS nor any of its cousins do. EcoHealth proposed incorporating human-optimized cleavage sites into the SARS-like viruses it discovered and testing their infectiousness. Such a cleavage site, of course, is exactly what makes SARS-CoV-2 wildly more infectious than its kin. That detail was the reason some scientists initially suspected SARS-CoV-2 might have been engineered in a lab. And while there's no proof that EcoHealth or the WIV ever actively experimented with cleavage sitesEcoHealth says that "the research was never conducted"the proposal makes it clear that they were considering taking that step as early as 2018.

DARPA rejected the proposal, listing among its shortcomings the failures to address the risks of gain-of-function research and the lack of discussion of ethical, legal, and social issues. It was a levelheaded assessment. What's remarkable is that much of the same work that crossed a line for the Department of Defense was embraced by the National Institutes of Health.

The NIH and EcoHealth have asserted that none of the engineered viruses created with the NIH grant could have become SARS-CoV-2. On that, everyone agreesthe viruses are too distantly related. But the detailed recipe in the DARPA application is a blueprint for doing just that with a more closely related virus.

In September, scientists from France's Pasteur Institute announced the discovery of just such a virusSARS-CoV-2's closest known relativein a bat cave in Laos. Although still too distant from SARS-CoV-2 to have been the direct progenitor, and lacking the all-important cleavage site, it was a kissing cousin.

The discovery was hailed by some scientists as evidence that SARS-CoV-2 must have had a natural origin. But the plot turned in November, when another trove of NIH documentsreleased in response to a FOIA request by the White Coat Waste Projectbrought the evidence trail right to EcoHealth's doorstep.

In 2017, EcoHealth had informed the NIH that it would be shifting its focus to Laos and other countries in Southeast Asia, where the wildlife trade was more active, relying on local partner organizations to do the sample collecting and to send the samples to the WIV for their ongoing work. EcoHealth told Newsweek that it did not directly undertake or fund any of the sampling in Laos. "Any samples or results from Laos are based on WIV's work, funded through other mechanisms," says a company spokesman.

Regardless of who paid for the collecting portion of the project, it's clear that for years, a large number of bat samples from the region that harbors viruses similar to SARS-CoV-2 were sent to the WIV. In other words, EcoHealth's team was in the right place at the right time to have found things very close to SARS-CoV-2 and to have sent them to Wuhan. Because there's a lag of several years between when samples are collected and when experiments involving those viruses are published, the most recent papers from EcoHealth and the WIV date to 2015. The identity of the viruses found between 2016 and 2019 are known only to the two organizations, neither of which has been willing to share that information with the world.

A lack of evidence proves nothing, but neither does it put EcoHealth's or the WIV's actions in the early days of the pandemic in a good light. Why choose not to share valuable information on SARS-like coronaviruses with the world? Why not explain your projects and proposals and give scientists access to the unpublished virus sequences in your databases?

For whatever reason, they chose crisis-management mode instead. The WIV went into lockdown. Databases were taken offline. Daszak launched his preemptive campaign to prevent anyone from looking behind the curtain. And EcoHealth and the NIH tried hard to keep the details of their collaboration private.

Congressional inquiries focusing on Dr. Fauci and the NIH's decisions to fund unnecessarily risky research by a lab in Wuhan are probably forthcoming if, as appears increasingly likely, Republicans take control of Congress after the 2022 midterms. While it's important to understand how the NIH came to use such poor judgment in its dealings with EcoHealth Alliance, that won't tell us much about the WIV's research in the months leading up to the pandemic, especially since China is not likely to open its books. Answers are more likely to lie in the records of EcoHealth Alliance. Republicans and Democrats alike should be eager to find them.

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How Dr. Fauci and Other Officials Withheld Information on China's Coronavirus Experiments - Newsweek

During the pandemic, Cambridge-based AstraZeneca became a household name for its role in creating a Covid-19 vaccination alongside scientists from Oxford University.

But the biopharmaceutical company has also led the way in several other cutting-edge scientific innovations.

The company has more than 76,000 employees worldwide, and its work focuses on developing prescription medication in areas such as oncology, rare diseases and the respiratory system.

Much of that work will now be driven from its new 1bn Cambridge headquarters - so here are five ways that the research centre is leading the way.

1. 'Heart-in-a-jar'

In collaboration with biotech company Novoheart, scientists at AZ are re-creating miniature organs to help them better understand things like the human heart.

A mini beating heart is created using the company's "3D human ventricular cardiac organoid chamber" - better known as the heart-in-a-jar. Scientists hope it will help them understand the characteristics of heart failure better, and therefore get treatments to patients quicker.

2. Functional genomics

Scientists are finding new ways of understanding how human genes work. Through what they call 'functional geonomics', AZ is testing the function of a given gene in a relevant disease model. And that, they say, will help them understand the complex relationship between our DNA and disease.

3. Using 'living medicines' to find cancer cells hiding in the body

Scientist are looking at regenerating tissues and organs by extracting a patient's own cells or using cells which have been expanded in the lab or enhanced through genetic engineering.

Those cells are then used to produce "living medicines" and are administered to the patient - known as cell therapy. It builds on research that analyses the way serious diseases affect different parts of the body.

The aim is to find ways to target and arm these living medicines to locate and destroy cancer cells that hide in the body, including even the hardest-to-treat solid tumours.

4. Cancer 'warheads'

AZ scientists say they are "re-defining" cancer by replacing chemotherapy with targeted, personalised therapies. While chemo kills cancer cells, it also impacts healthy ones too.

AZ is working on a tailored treatment it calls "the warhead". It is designed to kill cells and - unlike chemotherapy - scientists can now achieve precise cancer cell killing by attaching the warhead to an antibody, that provides cancer cell selectivity for example by targeting a protein that is highly expressed in breast cancer.

5. Clinical trials of the future

AstraZeneca is hoping to change the way pharmaceutical companies conduct clinical research, encouraging a more "holistic and human-centred" type of care.

Scientists want to do this by altering the design of clinical trials themselves in a way that gives patients the best experience possible.

Read more about science innovation in the Anglia region here:

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AstraZeneca: Five innovations from Cambridge's new 1bn headquarters - ITV News

SRINAGAR: Bringing laurels to Kashmir, a young Botanist, Dr Parvaiz Ahmad has been included in the top one percent Highly cited Researcher-2021 in the field of Plant Sciences.

The list has been compiled on the basis of multiple citation indicators and their composite across scientific disciplines.

Clarivate for Academia and Government in association with a web of Science and Publon unfold the Highly cited Researcher every year throughout the globe. Approximately 8.8 million researchers are working this time in different fields like engineering, science, medicine, Economics and Business, Computer sciences etc. and among these less than 1% have published many papers over a decade and that rank in the top 1% of citations for a particular field.

Hailing from Payir area of south Kashmirs Pulwama district, Dr Parvaiz Ahmad was also included in the top 2% scientists of 2021 by Standford University, California, United States of America.

It is worth mentioning that in 2020, he was also listed in the top 2% list of scientists provided by Stanford University, Stanford, California, United States of America.

Dr Parvaiz completed his M.Sc in Botany from Hamdard University New Delhi and later completed his PhD from the Indian Institute of Technology-Delhi (IITD).

He also worked as postdoc fellow in International Council For Genetic Engineering And Biotechnology (ICGEB)- New Delhi.

Presently, he is the Senior Assistant Professor at Government Degree College, Pulwama.

Dr Parvaiz has published around 25 books with eminent international publishers like Elsevier, Springer, John Wiley etc.

He has also published 272 research papers in the research field according to the web of science and Publon.

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Kashmir Botanist Among Top 1% Highly Cited Researchers-2021 - Kashmir Life

DUBLIN, November 19, 2021--(BUSINESS WIRE)--The "Growth Opportunities in Synthetic Biology, AI Augmented Diagnostics, Microbiome Enablers, Biomarker Discovery, and Lab Automation" report has been added to ResearchAndMarkets.com's offering.

This edition of the Life Science, Health & Wellness Technology Opportunity Engine (TOE) focuses on microbiome-based technologies, such as high throughput isolation and culturing of microbes, microbial biomarker-based diagnostics, microbial single cell genomic analysis, and so on.

Recent advances in synthetic biology platforms along with developments in lab automation and microfluidics technologies, which are bolstering the field have also been covered. Innovations around artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) augmented diagnostics have been highlighted, and this includes both image-based diagnostics and molecular diagnostics. Many of the innovations covered in this issue support new biomarker discovery and novel therapeutics development.

The Life Science, Health & Wellness TOE will feature disruptive technology advances in the global life sciences industry. The technologies and innovations profiled will encompass developments across genetic engineering, drug discovery and development, biomarkers, tissue engineering, synthetic biology, microbiome, disease management, as well as health and wellness among several other platforms.

The Health & Wellness cluster tracks developments in a myriad of areas including genetic engineering, regenerative medicine, drug discovery and development, nanomedicine, nutrition, cosmetic procedures, pain and disease management and therapies, drug delivery, personalized medicine, and smart healthcare.

Key Topics Covered:

Innovations in Life Sciences, Health & Wellness

High-Throughput Microbial, Cultivation, Isolation and Screening Platform

Automation in Microbial Culture

Galt Inc. - Investor Dashboard

Noninvasive Colorectal Cancer Screening Testing

Detection of Colon Polyps Thorough Microbial Biomarkers

Metabiomics Corp. - Investor Dashboard

Microbiome Single-Cell Genomic Analysis

Therapeutics and Diagnostic Development Tool

Bitbiome Inc. - Investor Dashboard

Picodroplet Microfluidic Technology for Single-Cell Analysis

Acceleration of Antibody Discovery and Cell-Line Development Processes Through Picodroplet Technology

Sphere Fluidics - Investor Dashboard

Clostridium-Assisted Drug Development Platform Supports Oral Drug Delivery

The Engineered Strain of Clostridium Serves as a Live Biotherapeutic Product

Chain Biotechnology - Investor Dashboard

Xenonucleic Acid and Superbdna Technologies for Diagnostics

XNA and Superbdna Offer High Sensitivity and Specificity in Detection of Cancer and COVID-19

Diacarta - Investor Dashboard

Robotic Cloud Lab for Drug Discovery and Development

Robotic Cloud Labs Revolutionize the Scientists' Workday

Strateos - Investor Dashboard

Developing Personalized Medicine to Slow Cell Senescence

Cancer Biomarker Detection for Faster Diagnosis

Developing Targeted Protein Degradation Technology

Automated Library Preparation for Next-Generation Sequencing

Machine Learning and AI-Based Cardiovascular Imaging Solutions

AI and Big Data-Enabled Genomic Diagnostics Targeting Rare Diseases

Exosomes Characterization to Study Disease-Specific Biomarkers

Machine Learning-Enabled Mutation Calling to Detect Cancer

Companies Mentioned

Story continues

Bitbiome Inc.

Chain Biotechnology

Diacarta

Galt Inc.

Metabiomics Corp.

Sphere Fluidics

Strateos

For more information about this report visit https://www.researchandmarkets.com/r/btqnmd

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Growth Opportunities in Synthetic Biology, AI Augmented Diagnostics, Microbiome Enablers, Biomarker Discovery and Lab Automation 2021 -...

Why do humans spend a third of their lives sleeping? Why do animals sleep, even when there may be a continuous threat of predators? The question of how sleep benefits the brain and individual cells has remained a mystery, but studies in zebrafish, and in mice, by Bar-Ilan University researchers, have now provided a detailed description of the chain of events explaining sleep at the single-cell level. Their results indicated that a buildup of DNA damage in neurons during wakefulness increases sleep pressure. A protein called Parp1 senses this mounting DNA damage, signals when its time to sleep. During sleep efficient DNA repair occurs, which reduces the cellular homeostatic pressure that drives the need for sleep.

The team, led by Lior Appelbaum, PhD, a professor at Bar-Ilans Goodman Faculty of Life Sciences and Gonda (Goldschmied) Multidisciplinary Brain Research Center, suggests that the mechanism uncovered may explain the link between sleep disturbances, aging and neurodegenerative disorders such as Parkinsons disease and Alzheimers disease. Appelbaum believes that future research will help to apply this sleep function to other animals, ranging from lower invertebrates to eventually, humans.

The authors reported on their findings in Molecular Cell, in a paper titled, Parp1 promotes sleep, which enhances DNA repair in neurons, in which they concluded that their results demonstrate that DNA damage is a homeostatic driver for sleep, and Parp1 pathways sense this cellular pressure and facilitate sleep and repair activity.

Sleep, accompanied by reduced responsiveness to external stimuli, is a vulnerable behavioral state, the authors wrote. Yet throughout evolution sleep has remained universal and essential to all organisms with a nervous system, including invertebrates such as flies, worms, and even jellyfish.What is different between species is the amount of sleep required, the authors continued. Adult humans sleep approximately 78 h per day, whereas owl monkeys sleep for 17 h, and free-roaming wild elephants may sleep only 2 h. These diverse sleep requirements raise fundamental questions: what dictatesa species-specific sufficient amount of sleep, and what is the restorative neural process?

When we are awake, homeostatic sleep pressure (tiredness) builds up in the body. This pressure increases the longer we stay awake, and decreases during sleep, reaching a low after a full and good nights sleep. But what causes homeostatic pressure to increase to a point that we feel we must go to sleep, and what happens at night to reduce that pressure to such an extent that we are ready to start a new day, isnt clear. the cellular homeostatic mechanisms that drive sleep needs, as well as the identity of the homeostatic factors, are unclear, the researchers commented.

Studies have shown that during waking hours, DNA damage accumulates in neurons. Enriched wakefulness and neuronal activity induce DNA double-strand breaks (DSBs) in mice and flies, the team continued. This damage can be caused byvarious elements, includingUV light, neuronal activity, radiation, oxidative stress, and enzymatic errors.During sleep and waking hours, repair systems within each cell correct these DNA breaks. However, DNA damage in neurons continues to accumulate during wakefulness, and excessive DNA damage in the brain can reach dangerous levels that must be reduced.

A series of experiments by Appelbaum, together with postdoc researcher David Zada, PhD, and colleagues, sought to determine whether the buildup of DNA damage could be the driver for homeostatic pressure and the subsequent sleep state. The scientists turned first to zebrafish as a live vertebrate model that they could use to try to identify cellular sleep drivers and understand the role for sleep in restoring nuclear homeostasis, at the level of single neurons.

With their absolute transparency, nocturnal sleep, and a simple brain that is similar to humans, zebrafish are a perfect organism in which to study this phenomenon. The zebrafish is a well-established sleep model, and the structure and function of its brain, as well as the DNA damage and repair systems, are conserved with mammals, the scientists stated.

Using UV radiation, pharmacologic intervention and optogenetics, the researchers induced DNA damage in zebrafish to examine how it affects their sleep. Their results showed that as DNA damage was increased, the need for sleep also increased. The experiment suggested that at some point the accumulation of DNA damage reached a maximum threshold, and increased sleep (homeostatic) pressure to such an extent that the urge to sleep was triggered, and the fish went to sleep. The ensuing sleep facilitated DNA repair, which resulted in reduced DNA damage. Our causative experiments demonstrated that sleep increases the clustering of Rad52 and Ku80 repair proteins in neurons, which enables normalization of the levels of DNA damage.

Having determined that accumulated DNA damage is the force that drives the sleep process, the researchers then wanted to see whether they could determine the minimum time that zebrafish need to sleep in order to reduce sleep pressure and DNA damage. Similarly to humans, zebrafish are sensitive to light interruption, and so the dark period was gradually decreased during the night.

These results suggested that six hours of sleep per night is sufficient to reduce DNA damage in the zebrafish. And, astoundingly, after less than six hours of sleep, DNA damage was not adequately reduced, and the zebrafish continued to sleep even during daylight. There was a strong positive correlation (R = 0.76) between levels of neuronal DNA damage and total sleep time, suggesting that the amount of DNA damage can predict the total sleep time required for repair, the team further noted.

During waking hours (top) the buildup of DNA damage in neurons increases tiredness. Acting as an antenna the PARP1 protein (yellow helmets) senses and marks DNA breaks in cells, drives sleep, and recruits repair systems (green and blue helmets, bottom). During sleep, the DNA repair systems repair the breaks enabling a fresh new start to the day. In red is the soma (cell body), blue the nucleolus, and green (DNA damage sites). [David Zada, PhD]Another question is what is the mechanism in the brain that tells us we need to sleep in order to facilitate efficient DNA repair? Sleep promotes the activity of the DNA damage repair (DDR) signaling pathway, which includes DNA damage sensors, signal transducers, and effector proteins required for repair, the team noted. we reasoned that activation of a DDR protein might signal the organism to sleep in order to increase chromosome dynamics and enable the efficient assembly of repair proteins.

The researchers focused on a protein called PARP1, which is part of the DNA damage repair system, and responds to single- and double-stranded DNA breaks. PARP1 marks DNA damage sites in cells, and recruits all relevant systems to clear out DNA damage. PARP-1 is a DNA damage detector, which is recruited to DNA repair response, they noted.

In accordance with DNA damage, the team found that clustering of PARP1 in DNA break sites increased during wakefulness and decreased during sleep. Through genetic and pharmacological manipulation, the overexpression and knockdown (KD) of PARP1 revealed that increasing PARP1 promoted sleep, and also increased sleep-dependent repair. Conversely, inhibition of PARP1 blocked the signal for DNA damage repair. As a result, the fish werent fully aware that they were tired, didnt go to sleep, and no DNA damage repair occurred. Inhibition of Parp1 activity abolished DNA damage-induced sleep, chromosome dynamics, and repair, even under strong sleep pressure, the investigators stated.

To strengthen the findings in zebrafish, the investigators teamed up with Yuval Nir, PhD, at Tel Aviv University, to further test the role of PARP1 in regulating sleep, mice, using EEG. These results showed that as theyd seen with zebrafish, the inhibition of PARP1 activity in mice reduced the duration and quality of non-rapid eye movement (NREM) sleep. These results extend those of zebrafish larvae along three separate dimensions, by (1) establishing them in mammals and (2) in adult animals, and (3) by showing that Parp1 affects sleep depth, beyond its effects on sleep duration, the team stated.

In a previous study, Appelbaum and team used 3D time-lapse imaging to determine that sleep increases chromosome dynamics. Adding the current piece to the puzzle, PARP1 increases sleep and chromosome dynamics, which facilitates efficient repair of DNA damage accumulated during waking hours. The DNA maintenance process may not be efficient enough during waking hours in neurons, and therefore requires an offline sleep period with reduced input to the brain in order to occur. Appelbaum noted, PARP1 pathways are capable of signaling the brain that it needs to sleep in order for DNA repair to occur.

The authors concluded, Here, imaging of cellular and nuclear markers, coupled with behavioral monitoring of zebrafish, showed that neuronal DNA damage can be a driver for sleep that promotes DNA repair activity our findings that sleep regulates the neuronal balance between DNA damage and repair and consequently the health of the cell provide the basis for future work focusing on the causative link between sleep, aging, and neurodegenerative diseases.

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Study Unpicks What Drives the Need for Sleep at the Cellular Level - Genetic Engineering & Biotechnology News