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| 927 | 기술 |
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Bacteria use ancient war trick to outsmart viruses—and it could help us fight superbugs
"To develop effective phage therapies, we need to understand the natural immune systems bacteria use to resist viral attacks," says Rafael Pinilla-Redondo. "By characterizing defenses like Kongming—and the tricks phages used to bypass them—we can better design phage therapy strategies and improve their clinical success." Furthermore, the molecular machinery driving Kongming may also be harnessed for future biotechnological applications. The signaling molecule that specifically activates the system—dITP—has also been linked to human diseases, including cancer. Because Kongming's immune effector complex is highly specific to this molecule, it may inspire new tools in synthetic biology and diagnostics.
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| 926 | 기술 |
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Gene Therapy’s Goldilocks Problem—and How MIT’s Engineers Are Solving It
The MIT team, led by Katie Galloway, the W.M. Keck Career Development Professor of Biomedical Engineering and Chemical Engineering, tackled the issue by engineering a novel control circuit called ComMAND—Compact microRNA-mediated attenuator of noise and dosage. Their system acts like a smart regulator, ensuring that genes operate within a Goldilocks zone: not too little, not too much. At the heart of ComMAND is a clever use of an incoherent feedforward loop (IFFL), a natural biological pattern where a gene’s activation simultaneously triggers a built-in brake. In this case, the researchers engineered a microRNA strand to be embedded within the therapeutic gene itself. When the gene is turned on, it automatically produces both the desired protein and the microRNA that limits its overproduction—keeping expression levels tightly under control.
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| 925 | 기술 |
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First synthetic 'mini prion' shows how protein misfolding multiplies
Scientists at Northwestern University and University of California, Santa Barbara have created the first synthetic fragment of tau protein that acts like a prion. The "mini prion" folds and stacks into strands (or fibrils) of misfolded tau proteins, which then transmit their abnormally folded shape to other normal tau proteins. By studying a minimal synthetic version of the full-length human tau, scientists can better recreate the fibril structure containing misfolded tau proteins. This potentially could lead to targeted tools for diagnosis and therapy that are much needed for neurodegenerative diseases.
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| 924 | 기술 |
Pigs can regrow their adult teeth. What if humans could, too?
Pamela Yelick, AG89, a professor at Tufts University School of Dental Medicine, wants to be able to grow new, living teeth to replace those we've lost. In a paper published at the end of 2024 in Stem Cells Translational Medicine, Yelick and her colleagues showed that they could grow human-like teeth in pigs using a combination of human and pig tooth cells. The work is a significant step toward replacing dental implants with bioengineered living teeth. Yelick and her colleagues hope to follow the tooth development for a longer duration in future experiments. They are also investigating the signaling molecules that direct cell behavior, looking for ways to initiate tooth growth from within the jaw instead of needing to extract and culture cells separately in the lab.
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| 923 | 기술 |
Fully automated laboratory heads into orbit to test food production in space
Cranfield University spin-out company Frontier Space has sent a fully automated laboratory into orbit as part of a European Space Agency project to assess the viability of creating lab-grown food in microgravity. Frontier Space focuses on solutions for industrializing biotechnology in space. It is the creator of SpaceLab, a scalable, modular, autonomous lab-in-a-box designed to industrialize in-orbit manufacturing of high-value bioproducts. This particular mission doesn't involve the full SpaceLab, but instead uses what Frontier CEO Aqeel Shamsul describes as "an EGGS (Early Gen micro-Gravity Service) payload, which is a small device customized for this specific mission." If successful, this could be one of the building blocks that give astronauts the ability to manufacture the consumables they need rather than having them sent from Earth.
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| 922 | 기술 |
Tiny CRISPR tool opens door to faster, simpler plant genome editing
Collaborating with CRISPR-Cas9 co-inventor Jennifer Doudna and Jill Banfield at UC Berkeley, Steven Jacobsen, a distinguished professor of molecular, cell and developmental biology at UCLA, engineered the tobacco rattle virus to carry a compact CRISPR-like enzyme called ISYmu1 to target specific DNA sequences in the model mustard plant Arabidopsis thaliana. While plant viruses are a great delivery mechanism, conventional CRISPR systems are too large to be packaged into these viruses. We've overcome this size limitation by utilizing a CRISPR-like DNA-cutting enzyme that's small enough to fit inside the tobacco rattle virus.
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| 921 | 기술 |
Bespoke CRISPR Enzymes Generated By AI for a Safer Genetic Future
The genome editing revolution just got an upgrade. Scientists at Massachusetts General Hospital, part of the Mass General Brigham healthcare system, have developed a machine learning model called PAMmla that could reshape the way researchers design CRISPR-Cas9 enzymes for gene therapy. Published in Nature, their findings demonstrate how artificial intelligence can be used to predict, evaluate, and tailor the behavior of tens of millions of potential genome editors—an effort that could drastically reduce off-target effects and expand the therapeutic potential of CRISPR. “Our study is a first step in dramatically expanding our repertoire of effective and safe CRISPR-Cas9 enzymes,” said Ben Kleinstiver, PhD, corresponding author of the study and Kayden-Lambert MGH Research Scholar. “In our manuscript, we demonstrate the utility of these PAMmla-predicted enzymes to precisely edit disease-causing sequences in primary human cells and in mice.”
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| 920 | 기술 |
No more copy-pasting: DNA base editing allows for better Lactobacillus strains
A Kobe University team was able to edit the DNA of Lactobacillus strains directly without a template from other organisms. This technique is indistinguishable from natural variation and enabled the researchers to create a strain that doesn't produce diabetes-aggravating chemicals. To further showcase the capabilities of their approach, they focused on a gene that is involved in the production of a chemical that aggravates type 2 diabetes. By using Target-AID to mutate that gene, they engineered a Lactobacillus strain that could produce yogurt with less than a tenth of that chemical, making it safer to consume for people with type 2 diabetes. In their paper, the Kobe University team also showed that they could modify multiple genes at once and that they could even use their technique as a novel approach for basic research.
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| 919 | 기술 |
Scientists repurpose gene editing tool to help uncover hidden microbial diversity
Pioneering research led by the University of Bristol has repurposed a gene-editing tool to help shed light on the true biodiversity present in natural environments. The team of biologists overcame this issue by repurposing CRISPR—a revolutionary gene-editing tool—to gain a fuller picture, using it to extract long DNA "barcodes" that could more accurately identify the microbes present within a sample. Nikolaeva-Reynolds explained, "By capturing long DNA signatures that are unique to each type of microbe and reading these using DNA sequencing, we can provide a clearer picture of the communities present, giving biologists a more complete picture of these intricate microbial worlds."
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| 918 | 기술 |
Live imaging reveals how viruses spread through the gut microbiome
Researchers at the University of California, Irvine have developed a live-imaging system, Phollow, that tracks individual bacteriophages as they spread through the gut of zebrafish, showing that phages from different bacterial hosts vary in how they replicate, disseminate, and interact with host tissues. Phollow was applied in germ-free zebrafish colonized with engineered strains of E. coli and Plesiomonas, allowing visualization of phage behavior at single-virion resolution. Researchers constructed fluorescently tagged phages and introduced them into modified bacterial hosts referred to as Phollow virocells.
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