Category Archives: Transhuman News

GC8 Exhaust, STI Genome Muffler
MY00 GC8 WRX with 3inch TBE, UEL Headers, Catless Uppipe and STI Genome Muffler with the restrictor removed.

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GC8 Exhaust, STI Genome Muffler - Video

PUBLIC RELEASE DATE:

8-May-2014

Contact: Jim Dublin jdublin@dublinandassociates.com 210-227-0221 Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory

SAN ANTONIO, May 8, 2014 A new method for isolating and genome sequencing an individual malaria parasite cell has been developed by Texas Biomed researchers and their colleagues. This advance will allow scientists to improve their ability to identify the multiple types of malaria parasites infecting patients and lead to ways to best design drugs and vaccines to tackle this major global killer. Malaria remains the world's deadliest parasitic disease, killing 655,000 people in 2010.

Malaria parasite infections are complex and often contain multiple different parasite genotypes and even different parasite species. So when researchers take a blood sample from a malaria infected patient, and look at the parasite DNA within they end up with a complex mixture that is difficult to interpret.

"This has really limited our understanding of malaria parasite biology" says Ian Cheeseman, Ph.D., who led this project. "It's like trying to understand human genetics by making DNA from everyone in a village at once. The data is all jumbled up what we really want is information from individuals."

To achieve a better understanding of malaria parasites single celled organisms that infect red blood cells Cheeseman and colleague Shalini Nair, developed a novel method for isolating an individual parasite cell and sequencing its genome. These "single cell genomics" approaches have been adopted in cancer research to identify how tumors evolve during the progression of a disease but it has been difficult to adapt them to other organisms.

"One of the real challenges was learning how to cope with the tiny amounts of DNA involved. In a single cell we have a thousand million millionth of a gram of DNA. It took a lot of effort before we developed a method where we simply didn't lose this," said Nair, the first author on the work.

Their method is set to change how researchers think about infections. "One of the major surprises we found when we started looking at individual parasites instead of whole infections was the level of variation in drug resistance genes. The patterns we saw suggested that different parasites within a single malaria infection would react very differently to drug treatment" said Nair. "We're now able to look at malaria infections with incredible detail. This will help us understand how to best design drugs and vaccines to tackle this major global killer," Cheeseman added.

A paper describing this work, funded by the Texas Biomedical Forum, National Institutes of Health, a Cowles Postdoctoral Training Fellowship and the Wellcome Trust, was published online May 8 in the journal Genome Research. The work was led by Texas Biomed's Cheeseman with collaborators at the University of Texas Health Science Center San Antonio, Case Western Reserve University, the Cleveland Clinic Lerner Research Institute, the Shoklo Malaria Research Unit, Thailand, and the Malawi-Liverpool-Wellcome Trust Clinical Research Programme, Malawi. The other Texas Biomed author on is Tim Anderson, Ph.D.

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Single cell genome sequencing of malaria parasites

May 8, 2014

Image Caption: The velvet spiders genome has now been mapped. This image shows a group of social velvet spiders jointly killing their prey. Credit: Peter Gammelby, Aarhus University.

Anne-Mette Siem, Aarhus University

For the first time ever, a group of Danish and Chinese researchers has sequenced the genome of the spider. This knowledge provides a much more qualified basis for studying features of the spider. It also shows that humans share certain genomic similarities with spiders.

The fact that the eight-legged creepy spider in some ways resembles humans is one of the surprising conclusions after researchers at Aarhus University and the Beijing Genomics Institute (BGI) succeeded in sequencing its genome.

However, it is more a discovery on an awesome scale. The sequencing has far greater significance for our future understanding of the spiders special properties

In brief, weve acquired a tool for everyone interested in spiders, say Kristian W. Sanggaard and Jesper S. Bechsgaard, Aarhus University. Together with Xiaodong Fang, BGI, they are the first authors of the study, which has been published in Nature Communications. By describing the spider genome, the researchers have roughly speaking drawn up its genetic map. This map can be used in future to navigate to and delve into different areas of the spiders functions which will now be easier to describe.

What is a spider?

The researchers worked with two types of spiders, representing two of the three main groups in the spider family. One of these is a small velvet spider and the other is a tarantula.

The researchers succeeded in sequencing the velvet spiders genome, while there are still some unsolved gaps in the genetic map of the tarantula.

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Spider Genome Sequenced For The First Time

PUBLIC RELEASE DATE:

9-May-2014

Contact: David Gilbert degilbert@lbl.gov 925-927-2541 DOE/Joint Genome Institute

Despite its name, the Dead Sea does support life, and not just in the sense of helping visitors float in its waters. Algae, bacteria, and fungi make up the limited number of species that can tolerate the extremely salty environment at the lowest point on Earth.

Some organisms thrive in salty environments by lying dormant when salt concentrations are very high. Other organisms need salt to grow. To learn which survival strategy the filamentous fungus Eurotium rubrum uses, a team of researchers led by Eviatar Nevo from the University of Haifa in Israel, Igor Grigoriev of the U.S. Department of Energy Joint Genome Institute (DOE JGI), and Gerhard Rambold, University of Bayreuth, Germany and their colleagues studied its genome. They described their findings in the May 9, 2014 issue of Nature Communications.

"Understanding the long-term adaptation of cells and organisms to high salinity is of great importance in a world with increasing desertification and salinity," the team wrote. "The observed functional and structural adaptations provide new insight into the mechanisms that help organisms to survive under such extreme environmental conditions, but also point to new targets like the biotechnological improvement of salt tolerance in crops." In principle this discovery could revolutionize saline agriculture worldwide by laying the groundwork of understanding necessary to appropriately using salt resistance genes and gene networks in crops to enable them to grow in desert and saline environments.

The DOE JGI team first sequenced, assembled and annotated the 26.2-million base genome of E. rubrum. The team found that the genome contained just over 10,000 predicted genes. They also found that the E. rubrum proteins had higher aspartic and glutamic acid amino acid levels than expected. When the team compared E. rubrum's gene families against those in two other halophilic species (Wallemia ichthyophaga and Hortaea werneckii), they found that high acidic residues were common in all three species, a general trait all salt-tolerant microbes share.

To learn more about the fungus' tolerance for salt, Tami Kis Papo at the University of Haifa grew samples in liquid and solid media at salinities from zero up to 90 percent of Dead Sea water. The researchers found that it had viable spores when grown in 70 percent diluted Dead Sea water, conditions equivalent to an algal bloom in the Dead Sea 20 years ago. A study conducted by Alfons R. Weig at the University of Bayreuth of E. rubrum's transcriptome, that small fraction of the genome that encodes the RNA molecules in order to carry out instructions to build and maintain cells, showed that in high salinity conditions, the fungal cells need to keep cell membrane transport under tight control. "This clearly indicates that the fungus tries to cope 'actively' with its extreme environment and does not simply fall into dormancy," the team noted, "as might be expected by the greatly reduced growth rates."

In addition to contributing to a better understanding of salt tolerance mechanisms for agriculture, this work may also have applicability to the DOE's interests in developing new strategies to improve biofuels production. For instance, the DOE JGI and its partners are sourcing microbial and fungal enzymes for more effective biomass pretreatment with ionic liquids, environmentally benign organic salts often used as green chemistry substitutes for volatile organic solvents.

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Salt needed: Tolerance lessons from a dead sea fungus