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Category: chemistry – Page 254

Lipids are abundant in the brain, where they are found not just in the cell membranes of neurons, whose properties they modulate, but also in the so-called myelin sheaths insulating axons — the brain’s ‘wiring.’ The brain is therefore a surprisingly ‘fat’ organ — in fact, it is nearly 60% fat, the study’s first author, Anna Tkachev from Skoltech, said.

Summary: Prozac reduced polyunsaturated fatty acid lipid concentrations in the brains of juvenile macaque monkeys.

Source: Skoltech

Skoltech researchers and their colleagues from Russia, Germany, and the U.S. have found Prozac to reduce lipid concentrations in juvenile macaques who received the antidepressant for two years, compared to a control group of untreated animals.

Continue reading “Prozac Changes Fat Composition of the Brain” | >

Circa 2014

Scientists in a lab used a powerful laser to re-create what might have been the original spark of life on Earth.

The researchers zapped clay and a chemical soup with the laser to simulate the energy of a speeding asteroid smashing into the planet. They ended up creating what can be considered crucial pieces of the building blocks of .

The findings do not prove that this is how life started on Earth about 4 billion years ago, and some scientists were unimpressed with the results. But the experiment does bolster the long-held theory.

Continue reading “Scientists re-create what may be life’s first spark” | >

If you think at all about liquid crystals, you probably think of display technology. However, researchers have worked out a way to use an ink-jet-like process to 3D print iridescent colors using a liquid crystal elastomer. The process can mimic iridescent coloring found in nature and may have applications in things as diverse as antitheft tags, art objects, or materials with very special optical properties.

For example, one item created by the team is an arrow that only appears totally green when viewed from a certain angle. The optical properties depend on the thickness of the material which, being crystalline, self-organizes. Controlling the speed of deposition changes the thickness of the material which allows the printer to tune its optical properties.

The ink doesn’t sound too exotic to create, although the chemicals in it are an alphabet soup of unpronounceable organic compounds. At least they appeared available if you know where to shop for exotic chemicals.

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Advancing the well-being of animals, people and the planet — aaron schacht — executive vice president, innovation, regulatory & business development, elanco.

Aaron Schacht is Executive Vice President: Innovation, Regulatory + Business Development at Elanco (https://www.elanco.com/), an American pharmaceutical company which produces medicines and vaccinations for pets and livestock, and which until 2,019 was a subsidiary of Eli Lilly and Company.

Prior to this, Mr. Schacht held a role of Global Brand Development Leader – Pain in Lilly Biomedicines. He was the global leader for product development and commercialization activities for Lilly’s novel CGRP neutralizing antibody – a new potential treatment for prevention of Migraine and Cluster Headache.

Continue reading “Aaron Schacht — EVP, Innovation, Regulatory + BD, Elanco — Well-Being Of Animals, People And Planet” | >

Since the early days of the COVID pandemic, scientists have aggressively pursued the secrets of the mechanisms that allow severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) to enter and infect healthy human cells.

Early in the pandemic, University of California San Diego’s Rommie Amaro, a computational biophysical chemist, helped develop a detailed visualization of the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein that efficiently latches onto our cell receptors.

Now, Amaro and her research colleagues from UC San Diego, University of Pittsburgh, University of Texas at Austin, Columbia University and University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee have discovered how glycans–molecules that make up a sugary residue around the edges of the spike protein–act as infection gateways.

Published August 19 in the journal Nature Chemistry, a research study led by Amaro, co-senior author Lillian Chong at the University of Pittsburgh, first author and UC San Diego graduate student Terra Sztain and co-first author and UC San Diego postdoctoral scholar Surl-Hee Ahn, describes the discovery of glycan “gates” that open to allow SARS-CoV-2 entry.

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I am pleased to announce that my lead-author review paper has been published in ACS Nano! If you are interested in learning about the convergence of synthetic biology and adenoviral gene therapy, I encourage you to check out my paper.

If you cannot access the full text, I have also posted a local copy at the following link: https://logancollinsblog.files.wordpress.com/2021/08/synthet…s-2021.pdf.

#ACS #ACSNano #SyntheticBiology #GeneTherapy #Biology #Biotech #Science #Biotechnology #Nanotechnology #Adenovirus #Engineering #Virology

Synthetic biology centers on the design and modular assembly of biological parts so as to construct artificial biological systems. Over the past decade, synthetic biology has blossomed into a highly productive field, yielding advances in diverse areas such as neuroscience, cell-based therapies, and chemical manufacturing. Similarly, the field of gene therapy has made enormous strides both in proof-of-concept studies and in the clinical setting. One viral vector of increasing interest for gene therapy is the adenovirus (Ad). A major part of the Ad’s increasing momentum comes from synthetic biology approaches to Ad engineering. Convergence of gene therapy and synthetic biology has enhanced Ad vectors by mitigating Ad toxicity in vivo, providing precise Ad tropisms, and incorporating genetic circuits to make smart therapies which adapt to environmental stimuli. Synthetic biology engineering of Ad vectors may lead to superior gene delivery and editing platforms which could find applications in a wide range of therapeutic contexts.

Continue reading “Synthetic Biology Approaches for Engineering Next-Generation Adenoviral Gene Therapies” | >

Investigators who previously developed a recipe for turning skin cells into primitive muscle-like cells that can be maintained indefinitely in the lab without losing the potential to become mature muscle have now uncovered how this recipe works and what molecular changes it triggers within cells. The research, which was led by scientists at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) and is published in Genes & Development, could allow clinicians to generate patient-matched muscle cells to help treat muscle injuries, aging-related muscle degeneration, or conditions such as muscular dystrophy.

It’s known that expression of a regulatory gene called MyoD is sufficient to directly convert into mature ; however, mature muscle do not divide and self-renew, and therefore they cannot be propagated for clinical purposes. “To address this shortcoming, we developed a system several years ago to convert skin cells into self-renewing muscle stem-like cells we coined induced myogenic progenitor cells, or iMPCs. Our system uses MyoD in combination with three chemicals we previously identified as facilitators of cell plasticity in other contexts,” explains senior author Konrad Hochedlinger, Ph.D., a principal investigator at the Center for Regenerative Medicine at MGH and a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School.

In this latest study, Hochedlinger and his colleagues uncovered the details behind how this combination converts skin cells into iMPCs. They found that while MyoD expression alone causes skin cells to take on the identity of mature muscle cells, adding the three chemicals causes the skin cells to instead acquire a more primitive stem cell–like state. Importantly, iMPCs are molecularly highly similar to muscle tissue stem cells, and muscle cells derived from iMPCs are more stable and mature than muscle cells produced with MyoD expression alone.

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Researchers from Skoltech, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, and Uppsala University have predicted the existence of antichiral ferromagnetism, a nontrivial property of some magnetic crystals that opens the door to a variety of new magnetic phenomena. The paper was published in the journal Physical Review B.

Chirality, or handedness, is an extremely important fundamental property of objects in many fields of physics, mathematics, chemistry and biology; a chiral object cannot be superimposed on its in any way. The simplest chiral objects are human hands, hence the term itself. The opposite of chiral is achiral: a circle or a square are simple achiral objects.

Chirality can be applied to much more complex entities; for instance, competing internal interactions in a can lead to the appearance of periodic magnetic textures in the structure that differ from their mirror images—this is called chiral ferromagnetic ordering. Chiral crystals are widely considered promising candidates for and processing device realization as information can be encoded via their nontrivial magnetic textures.

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