Around the world in health this week

March 05, 2017 01:45 am | Updated 01:45 am IST

Advances in optogenetics

A team of Graz scientists led by Andreas Winkler from the Institute of Biochemistry at TU Graz, Austria, has set a milestone in the future development of novel red light- regulated optogenetic tools for targeted cell stimulation. The results of the research have been published in the open access journal, Science Advances . The research contributes to better understanding the modularity of naturally occurring protein domains and being able to develop new optogenetic tools. Diverse combinations of different sensor modules are found in nature, such as red-light sensors, blue-light sensors and pH sensors — sometimes with identical and sometimes different effectors. From this, the researchers conclude that there are molecular similarities in signal transduction.

Ask the right question

The fractured political climate in the United States might be made worse by how we approach difficult problems, researchers have said in the journal Science . They suggest that rather than asking citizens “What do you want?” questions should be asked in a deliberative frame: “What should we do?”

“Even this small shift in how we ask questions can have profound effects,” says Prof. Michael Neblo, lead author of the paper and associate professor of political science at the Ohio State University, U.S. “Using this deliberative frame is not a cure-all for the problems of our political culture, but it can help nurture a healthier democracy.”

The first gene-edited meal?

In what Swedish plant scientist Stefan Jansson declares “may be” a historic event, he cultivated, grew, and ate a plant that had its genome edited with CRISPR-Cas9. CRISPR (Clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats)-Cas9 is a complicated name for an easy, but targeted, way of changing the genes of an organism. The decisive discovery was published in 2012 by researchers at Umeå University, Sweden, and the “Swiss army knife of genetic engineering” has been predicted to change the world. Umeå University, where Prof. Jansson is based, says his meal was a pasta dish that included 300 grams of cabbage he grew from seeds that had been genetically modified with CRISPR-Cas9. The revolutionary technology vastly simplifies the editing of genes, and has triggered many debates about whether its plant products should be considered a genetically modified organism (GMO) and subject to regulation. — Jon Cohen, ScienceMag

New evidence of human evolution

Two partial archaic human skulls, from the Lingjing site, Xuchang, central China, provide a new window into the biology and populations patterns of the immediate predecessors of modern humans in eastern Eurasia. Securely dated to about 100,000 years ago, the Xuchang fossils present a mosaic of features. With late archaic (and early modern) humans across the Old World, they share a large brain size and lightly built cranial vaults with modest brow ridges. With earlier (Middle Pleistocene) eastern Eurasian humans, they share a low and broad braincase, one that rounds onto the inferior skull. With western Eurasian Neandertals, they share two distinct features — the configuration of their semicircular canals and the detailed arrangement of the rear of the skull. The features of these fossils reinforce a pattern of regional population continuity in eastern Eurasia, combined with shared long-term trends in human biology and populational connections across Eurasia. They reinforce the unity and dynamic nature of human evolution leading up to modern human emergence.

A progeria-on-a-chip model

Hutchinson-Gilford progeria syndrome (HGPS) is an extremely rare genetic condition that causes premature and accelerated aging. Recently, researchers have been able to generate induced pluripotent stem cells from patients with HGPS to better understand the mechanisms of aging and look for new treatments. HGPS primarily affects vascular cells, which undergo biomechanical strains in blood vessels. However, the impact of these biomechanical strains on aging and vascular diseases has been challenging to study in the lab as most models fail to mimic the biomechanics that cells experience in the body. Using a new progeria-on-a-chip model, investigators from Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Boston, Massachusetts, U.S., have developed a way to recapitulate blood vessel dynamics to better understand vascular disease and aging.

“Vascular diseases and aging are intimately linked yet rarely studied in an integrated approach,” the authors write.

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