COVID-19 in 2021

In less than a second, a small sensor used in brain chemistry research can detect the key molecules that provide the genetic instructions for life, RNA and DNA, a new study from American University shows. The AU researchers believe the sensor is a useful tool for scientists engaged in clinical research to measure DNA metabolism, and that the sensor could be a quick way for lab clinicians to distinguish 'healthy' from 'sick' samples and determine if a pathogen is fungal, bacterial, or viral, before conducting further analysis. To explore whether the sensors could detect RNA and DNA, ...

The Pazyryk carpet is the world's oldest example of a knotted-pile carpet and is kept at the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia. The carpet, which was made out of new wool at around 400 BC, is one of the most exciting examples of central Asian craftsmanship from the Iron Age. Ever since the carpet was discovered in 1947 by Russian archaeologists in a kurgan tomb in the Altai mountains, experts in traditional dyeing techniques have been puzzled by the vivid red, yellow and blue colours of the carpet, which lay buried in extreme conditions for almost two thousand five hundred years. Red fibres ...

You didn't need a Ph.D. to contribute to research into wildlife abundance and behavior in North Carolina, thanks to a large-scale citizen science project led by North Carolina State University researchers. Through the project, called North Carolina Candid Critters, researchers trained 580 volunteers to take candid animal photos with heat sensitive cameras, and then share their photos through a website called eMammal. In an article on the project in the journal Citizen Science: Theory and Practice, researchers reported on the successes and challenges of the effort, which gathered more than 2.2 million wildlife photos across three years, and increased the number of verified mammal records that were available in the state by a factor of five. "The power of this is that you can get ...

What The Article Says: This Viewpoint proposes ways to maximize vaccine efficacy and allocation given the rise of coronavirus variants and authorization of a Johnson & Johnson vaccine, including reserving the latter for younger healthier populations, boosting it with a single-dose messenger RNA (mRNA) vaccination and single mRNA immunization of people with prior documented SARS-CoV-2 infection. Authors: John P. Moore, Ph.D., of Weill Cornell Medicine in New York, is the corresponding author. To access the embargoed study: Visit our For The Media website at this link https://media.jamanetwork.com/ (doi:10.1001/jama.2021.3465) Editor's Note: The article includes an Editor's Note. Please see the article for additional information, including other authors, author ...

Many cognitive neurodevelopmental disorders are a result of too many or too few copies of certain genes or chromosomes. To date, no treatment options exist for this class of disorders. MECP2 duplication syndrome (MDS) is one such disorder that primarily affects boys and results from a duplication spanning the methyl-CpG binding protein 2 (MECP2) locus located on the X chromosome. A preclinical study published from the laboratory of Dr. Huda Zoghbi, professor at Baylor College of Medicine and director of the Jan and Dan Duncan Neurological Research Institute at Texas Children's Hospital, provides experimental evidence that supports the use of antisense oligonucleotides as ...

BOSTON - New treatments for Alzheimer's disease are desperately needed, but numerous clinical trials of investigational drugs have failed to generate promising options. Now a team at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) and Harvard Medical School (HMS) has developed an artificial intelligence-based method to screen currently available medications as possible treatments for Alzheimer's disease. The method could represent a rapid and inexpensive way to repurpose existing therapies into new treatments for this progressive, debilitating neurodegenerative condition. ...

Hearing the words "new species discovered" may conjure images of deep caves, uncharted rainforests, or hidden oases in the desert. But the reality is that thousands of new species are discovered each year by enterprising scientists all over the world. Many of these new species do come from exotic locations, but more surprisingly, many come from just down the road, including the newest member of the Hokie Nation, the millipede Nannaria hokie. The newest Hokie -- which has about 60 more legs than the HokieBird ­-- was discovered living under rocks by the Duck Pond behind the Grove on Virginia Tech's Blacksburg campus. Since then, the critter has been found at the area commonly referred to as stadium ...

New research at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis indicates that three new, fast-spreading variants of the virus that cause COVID-19 can evade antibodies that work against the original form of the virus that sparked the pandemic. With few exceptions, whether such antibodies were produced in response to vaccination or natural infection, or were purified antibodies intended for use as drugs, the researchers found more antibody is needed to neutralize the new variants. The findings, from laboratory-based experiments and published March 4 in Nature Medicine, suggest that COVID-19 drugs and vaccines developed thus far may become less effective ...

Texas A&M University College of Medicine ressearchers have recently discovered that cytisine -- a smoking cessation drug commonly used in Europe -- reduces the loss of dopamine neurons in females. These findings provide potential evidence for the use of the drug to treat Parkinson's disease or stop its progression in women. Sara Zarate and Gauri Pandey, graduate students from the lab of Rahul Srinivasan, assistant professor in the Department of Neuroscience & Experimental Therapeutics, are co-first authors of the research. Their findings are published in the Journal of Neurochemistry. There ...

Plants, fungi, and bacteria produce natural products that function, among other things, as defenses that are deployed against predators and competitors. In medicine, these compounds are used for antibiotics, cancer drugs, and cholesterol reducers. The team working with associate professor Dr. Robin Teufel and Dr. Britta Frensch of the Institute of Biology II of the Faculty of Biology of the University of Freiburg was able, together with researchers from the ETH Zürich in Switzerland, to shed light on the key role of three enzymes that are involved in synthesizing a class of natural products. The researchers are publishing their findings in the latest edition of "Nature Communications." Actinobacteria produce many natural products, such as those that are ...