The CRISPR Journal announces the publication of its February 2024 issue. The CRISPR Journal is devoted to publishing outstanding research in CRISPR biology, technology, and genome editing. Chief Editor is Professor Rodolphe Barrangou, PhD (North Carolina State University); Executive Editor is Dr. Kevin Davies. For full-text copies of articles or to arrange interviews with the editors, authors, or members of the editorial board, contact Kathryn Ryan at the Publisher. 1. Warrior spirit: An interview with sickle cell pioneer Victoria Gray,  The gene editing world and the sickle cell disease (SCD) ...

WHAT: Women who receive an mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccination or booster during pregnancy can provide their infants with strong protection against symptomatic COVID-19 infection for at least six months after birth, according to a study from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the National Institutes of Health. These findings, published in Pediatrics, reinforce the importance of receiving both a COVID-19 vaccine and booster during pregnancy to ensure that infants are born with robust protection that lasts until they are old enough to be vaccinated. COVID-19 is especially dangerous for newborns and young infants, and even healthy infants are vulnerable ...

Skywalker gibbon couples wake up each morning and sing to each other, their voices echoing across the forest canopy of their home. The primate’s endearing love song helped scientists confirm what was formerly a strong hunch: Myanmar has the largest population of endangered Skywalker gibbons on Earth. When Star Wars-loving scientists identified Skywalker gibbons as a distinct species in 2017, fewer than 200 individuals were known to exist, all in southwestern China. A study published today in the International Journal of Primatology is the first in the past century to confirm living Skywalker gibbons in ...

PITTSBURGH, Feb. 14, 2024 – It was a last-ditch effort. For years doctors had tried to keep a patient’s recurrent drug-resistant bacterial blood infection at bay, but it kept coming back and antibiotics were no longer working. The family agreed to try an experimental treatment that uses viruses to kill bacteria. The patient’s Enterococcus faecium bacterial strain, which had become zombie-like and was almost impossible to treat with currently available antibiotics, was tested against wastewater collected from across the country to find a virus – called a bacteriophage – that scientists theorized would specifically target the drug-resistant bacteria. It worked ...

ETRI’s researchers have developed an AI-powered e-sports analysis platform that provides real-time win rate prediction services by analyzing gameplay screens. This platform was notably applied to the highly popular League of Legends (LoL) during a recent international e-sports tournament, garnering positive feedback. Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI) has developed a technology that recognizes real-time game situations by analyzing play elements extracted from game videos and automatically generates highlights by identifying key play events in the game. Also, this e-sports service platform, based ...

Scientists at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) and the University of California, Davis have reached a new breakthrough in pancreatic cancer research—eight years in the making. It could help slow the disease’s deadly spread. In 2017, as a postdoc in CSHL’s Tuveson lab, Chang-il Hwang and collaborators from the Vakoc lab uncovered a protein essential for jumpstarting metastasis in pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC). Now an assistant professor at UC Davis, Hwang recently reunited with CSHL Professors David Tuveson and Christopher Vakoc. The trio once again set their sights on PDAC. The disease is known for its aggressiveness. ...

While pesticides protect crops from hungry animals, pesky insects, or even microbial infections, they also impact other vital organisms, including bees and earthworms. And today, research published in ACS’ Environmental Science & Technology Letters reveals that worms are affected by the relatively small amounts of chemicals that can leach out of pesticide-treated seeds. Exposure to nonlethal amounts of these insecticides and fungicides resulted in poor weight gain and mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) damage in the worms. Pesticide treatment can be introduced at several different ...

In humans, the length of pre-mRNA varies extensively (from 30 to 1,160,411 nucleotides by recent studies). The fundamental mechanism of splicing has been studied with model pre-mRNAs including 158- and 231-nt introns, for historical instance, that are spliced very efficiently in vitro and in vivo. Such an ideal pre-mRNA contains good splicing signal sequences, i.e., the 5′ splice site, the branch-site (BS) sequence, and the polypyrimidine tract (PPT) followed by the 3′ splice site that are recognized by U1 snRNP, U2 snRNP and U2AF2–U2AF1, respectively. Prof. Mayeda says, “Given the diverse lengths ...

Corals searching for food in the cold and dark waters of the deep sea are building higher and higher mountains to get closer to the source of their food. But in doing so, they may find themselves trapped when the climate changes. That is shown in the thesis that theoretical ecologist Anna van der Kaaden of NIOZ in Yerseke and the Copernicus Institute for Sustainable Development in Utrecht will defend on Feb. 20 at the University of Groningen. “When the water gets warmer, these creatures prefer to be deeper, but a coral doesn’t just walk down the mountain,” Van der Kaaden said. Deep and dark Unlike the famous, colorful tropical corals, cold-water corals live ...

Surgeons who routinely change surgical gloves and instruments are incurring similar costs to those using the same equipment, a new study has found. The economic evaluation funded by the UK’s National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) follows a clinical trial conducted at 80 hospitals in Benin, Ghana, India, Mexico, Nigeria, Rwanda, and South Africa which established that routine change of gloves and instruments reduces surgical site infections (SSIs) by 13%. The evaluation, published by the Lancet Global ...

Scientists have long thought of the fluid-filled sac around our lungs merely as a cushion from external damage. Turns out, it also houses potent virus-eating cells that rush into the lungs during flu infections. Not to be confused with phages, which are viruses that infect bacteria, these cells are macrophages, immune cells produced in the body.  “The name macrophage means ‘big eater.’ They gobble up bacteria, viruses, cancer cells, and dying cells. Really, anything that looks foreign, they take it up and destroy it,” said UC Riverside virologist Juliet Morrison, who led the discovery team. “We were surprised to find them in the lungs ...

USC, together with Leonard and his late wife Pamela Schaeffer, is launching a new institute with a $59 million gift from the Schaeffers to be anchored in Los Angeles and in the university’s new Capital Campus in Washington, D.C. The mission of the Leonard D. Schaeffer Institute for Public Policy & Government Service is to strengthen democracy by training generations of public leaders and advancing evidence-based research to shape policy that addresses the nation’s most pressing issues, USC President Carol Folt announced ...

  ANN ARBOR—Using social media data and artificial intelligence in a comprehensive national assessment, a new University of Michigan study reveals that nearly 15% of Americans deny that climate change is real. Scientists have long warned that a warming climate will cause communities around the globe to face increasing risks due to unprecedented levels of flooding, wildfires, heat stress, sea-level rise and more. Though the science is sound—even showing that human-induced, climate-related natural disasters are growing in frequency ...

Red nets are better at keeping away a common agricultural insect pest than typical black or white nets, according to a new study. Researchers experimented with the effect of red, white, black and combination-colored nets on deterring onion thrips from eating Kujo leeks, also called Welsh onions. In both lab and field tests, red nets were significantly better at deterring the insect than other colors. Also, in field tests, onion crops which were either partially or fully covered by red netting required 25-50% less insecticide than was needed for a totally uncovered field. Changing agricultural nets from black or white to red could help reduce pesticide ...

A new artificial intelligence (AI) tool that draws logical inferences about the function of unknown proteins promises to help scientists unravel the inner workings of the cell. Developed by KAUST bioinformatics researcher Maxat Kulmanov and colleagues, the tool outperforms existing analytical methods for forecasting protein functions and is even able to analyze proteins with no clear matches in existing datasets[1].   The model, termed DeepGO-SE, takes advantage of large language models similar to those ...

A research paper published today (14 February 2024) in Nature Cancer details new insights into the role of efferocytosis – the burying of dead cells – in pancreatic cancer that spreads to the liver. Liver metastasis occurs in 40–50% of people with pancreatic ductal adenosarcoma (PDAC), and there are currently no effective therapies to cure pancreatic cancer patients that have liver metastasis. Led by University of Liverpool’s Professor Michael Schmid and colleagues, this study found PDAC metastases to show high levels of immunosuppressive macrophages, a type of white blood ...

Fear and addiction exert significant influence within society. Managing them is often challenging, as they are driven by intricate neuronal circuits in our brains. Understanding the underlying molecular mechanisms is crucial to intervene when these processes malfunction. Pioneered by scientists at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (ISTA), the novel “Flash and Freeze-fracture” technique provides a unique glimpse into the respective brain region. The results were recently published in the journal PNAS. While looking for food, a bird encounters a fox. It gets away just in time, but the sight ...

In the dark and cold of the months-long polar night, food resources are limited. Some groups of marine organisms in the polar regions overcome this challenge by going into a metabolic resting state in winter, surviving on reserves accumulated during the short growth season. But others, such as several species of marine zooplankton, have evolved a different strategy: they shift from a specialized to an omnivorous diet during the polar night, profiting from a wide range of potentially less rewarding foods that are available throughout the year. Now, ...

Elche (Spain), January 22, 2024. Usually, show business depicts viruses, bacteria, and other microorganisms as one of the worst menaces to humankind. Entertainment movies influence the way audiences understand and perceive these topics. Yet, few films accurately portray the science of microbiology and its social implications. Movies and TV series often feature outbreaks of deadly diseases and the efforts of scientists and medical professionals to contain them. However, entertainment movies can also educate the public about the importance and the impact ...

The Korea Institute of Science and Technology (KIST) announced that Dr. Maesoon Im of the Brain Science Institute, together with Prof. Seung Ja Oh of Kyung Hee University and Prof. Kangwon Lee of Seoul National University, successfully incorporated anti-inflammatory drugs into a hydrogel to suppress inflammation in the retina and effectively deliver the drugs to the inflamed area. Age-related macular degeneration and retinitis pigmentosa are incurable eye diseases that cause blindness due to the gradual damage of photoreceptor cells, which convert light into biological signals in the retina, the light-sensitive tissue at the back of the eye. Age-related macular degeneration is a condition ...

For middle-aged women plagued by migraines, or hot flashes and night sweats, another worry may linger in the backs of their minds: whether these experiences have set them up for a heart attack, a stroke or another cardiovascular crisis. After all, past research suggesting such a link during and after menopause has gotten a lot of attention. But a pair of new studies in the journal Menopause suggest that most of them don’t need to worry as much, especially if they don’t have both migraines and long-term hot flashes and night sweats. Instead, they should focus on tackling the ...

CLEVELAND, Ohio (Feb 14, 2024)—Hot flashes and migraine (particularly with aura) have been shown to be individual risk factors for cardiovascular disease because of associated poorer heart disease riskfactor profiles. A new study, however, is the first to examine the joint influences of migraine and hot flashes/night sweats (vasomotor symptoms) independent of traditional heart disease risk factors and estrogen use. Research results are published online today in Menopause, the journal of The Menopause Society.   Specifically, ...

A course of acupuncture may curb the heightened risk of stroke associated with rheumatoid arthritis, finds a comparative study published in the open access journal BMJ Open.   The effects seem to be independent of sex, age, medication use, and co-existing conditions, the findings indicate, prompting the researchers to suggest that the procedure may reduce levels of pro-inflammatory proteins (cytokines) in the body that are linked to cardiovascular disease. The principal cause of death in people with rheumatoid arthritis is cardiovascular disease. And they are more likely to have a stroke than ...

The quality of evidence submitted to the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) for informing its decisions to recommend technologies for use in the NHS was poor in more than half of cases, reveals a 20-year analysis, published in the open access journal BMJ Open.   And the data quality submitted for health technology appraisals by manufacturers between 2000 and 2019 was consistently poor, with no improvement during that time, the analysis shows. NICE advises the NHS on the ...

A range of reproductive factors, including age when periods first start and an early menopause, are all linked to a heightened risk of COPD—the umbrella term for progressive lung conditions that cause breathing difficulties—finds research published online in the journal Thorax. Miscarriage, stillbirth, infertility, and having 3 or more children are also associated with a heightened risk of COPD, which includes emphysema and chronic bronchitis, the findings show. Recent evidence indicates substantial gender  differences in susceptibility ...