Yeast 2.0 Susan Young Rojahn
MIT Technology Review.com,
03/2014
Newspaper Article
The report of the first artificial, designer yeast chromosome suggests ways for researchers to produce new chemicals in the microbes or potentially make their biological production more efficient. ......other researchers continued to assemble those blocks into longer stretches of the chromosome, and eventually the largest chunks were delivered into yeast cells, which took over the last assembly steps to create the whole, artificial chromosome. ...the work is an important step forward for synthetic biology and a milestone in an international effort to build a completely synthetic yeast genome, project Sc2.0 (from the scientific name for baker’s yeast, Saccharomyces cerevisiae).
By combining these disparate types of data, the new company hopes to make inroads into the enigmatic process of aging and the many diseases, including cancer and heart disease, that are strongly ...associated with it. ...despite decades of research on aging and age-related diseases, there are no treatments to slow aging, and diseases like cancer, heart disease, and Alzheimer’s continue to plague patients. While genome sequencing can provide information about inherited risk of disease and some hints of the likelihood that a person will have a long life, metabolic data provides information on how environment, diet, and other features of an individual’s life affect health.
Reported by the team in Advanced Materials, the tissue is the first made through 3-D printing to include potentially functional blood vessels embedded among multiple, patterned cell types. Two other ...inks contained the gelatin material and either mouse or human skin cells. After chilling the patch of printed tissue, the researchers applied a light vacuum to remove the special ink, leaving behind empty channels within the structure.
In a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine on Wednesday, researchers report that they can use genome editing to re-create the rare mutations responsible for protecting about 1 ...percent of the population from the virus in infected patients. Four weeks after the infusion, six of the 12 patients in the study temporarily stopped taking their antiretroviral drugs so the researchers could assess the effect of the genome-editing treatment on the amount of the virus in the patients’ bodies. Patients who carry one broken copy of the CCR5 progress to AIDS more slowly than those who don’t, says Bruce Levine, a cell and gene therapy researcher at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine and coauthor on the study. Because all of the cells in that best-responder patient already carried one disrupted copy of CCR5, the modification by the zinc finger nuclease led to T cells with no functional copies of the gene.
Later this year CarePredict, a startup based in Davie, Florida, will begin shipping its first batch of wearable tracking systems intended to help relatives and other caretakers monitor the activity ...of older adults for early signs of serious health concerns. In addition to the wrist-worn activity tracker, the new system includes four peel-and-stick beacons that detect whether someone is in the kitchen, bathroom, bedroom, or living room. The beacons send tracker data to a hub also installed in the home, which then uploads the data to the Internet for analysis and storage.
When such screening tests flag a pregnancy as having Down syndrome, there’s only a four percent chance the fetus actually does have the chromosome abnormality, says Diana Bianchi, executive director ...of the Mother Infant Research Institute at Tufts Medical Center. ...in the NEJM study, Bianchi and collaborators at Illumina (which funded the work) report that the blood-based DNA test can detect Down syndrome in any kind of pregnancy, not just high risk. Compared to the biochemical and ultrasound screening methods, the DNA test did a better job at correctly predicting chromosome problems in fetuses in the general population: a positive screening result for Down syndrome was correct 46% of the time.
Researchers can then add a patient’s DNA to the droplets, and reactions that duplicate the DNA occur inside them. Because the droplets are so tiny, only very small amounts of reagent are required, ...which helps make the process much cheaper than other methods. After amplifying the DNA in a sample, researchers can either sequence the genes using standard equipment or look for the presence of cancer genes using a machine made by RainDance itself. What makes RainDance’s test unique is that only a tiny amount of tumor DNA is needed. Besides requiring less DNA, the technology makes it possible to sequence samples that have been treated with chemical fixatives for preservation—a standard practice, says Roopom Banerjee, RainDance’s CEO and a former clinical scientist at the Dana Farber Cancer institute in Boston.
...up to 30 percent of the time in U.S. clinics, that test is inconclusive. Because cancer can’t be ruled out, typically the next step is to remove the thyroid. Since 2011, Lakshman has been using ...Veracyte’s gene test to assess the risk of cancer in patients whose initial thyroid screen was inconclusive. A health economics study by Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine researchers found that if the test were used universally in the U.S. for patients whose needle assay was inconclusive, then approximately $122 million in medical costs would be saved each year, primarily because of the significant reduction in surgeries. Since its debut, the U.S. national insurance program Medicare as well as insurance companies Aetna, Cigna, Humana, and United Healthcare have decided to cover the costs of Veracyte’s test.
Last summer, Wells, who works with another New Jersey-based fertility clinic, called Reprogenetics, announced the birth of the first child whose chromosome content had been checked using ...next-generation sequencing during IVF embryo selection (see “Baby Born After Genome Analyzed in IVF Test”). ...if both parents carry a copy of the mutation responsible for cystic fibrosis, they have a one in four chance of passing the disease on to their child. Reprogenetics is testing whether an embryo’s particular mitochondrial genome, the discrete genetic sequence found in the energy-producing structures of cells, has an effect on the procedure’s success.
