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Category: bioengineering

A team of scientists from Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (NTU Singapore) has developed an artificial ‘worm gut’ to break down plastics, offering hope for a nature-inspired method to tackle the global plastic pollution problem.

By feeding worms with plastics and cultivating microbes found in their guts, researchers from NTU’s School of Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE) and Singapore Centre for Environmental Life Sciences Engineering (SCELSE) have demonstrated a new method to accelerate plastic biodegradation.

Previous studies have shown that Zophobas atratus worms – the larvae of the darkling beetle commonly sold as pet food and known as ‘superworms’ for their nutritional value – can survive on a diet of plastic because its gut contains bacteria capable of breaking down common types of plastic. However, their use in plastics processing has been impractical due to the slow rate of feeding and worm maintenance.

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Imagine being able to speed up evolution – hypothetically – to learn which genes might have a harmful or beneficial effect on human health. Imagine, further, being able to rapidly generate new genetic sequences that could help cure disease or solve environmental challenges.

Now, scientists have developed a generative AI tool that can predict the form and function of proteins coded in the DNA of all domains of life, identify molecules that could be useful for bioengineering and medicine, and allow labs to run dozens of other standard experiments with a virtual query – in minutes or hours instead of years (or millennia).

Trained on a dataset that includes all known living species – and a few extinct ones – Evo 2 can predict the form and function of proteins in the DNA of all domains of life.

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Humans have been selectively breeding cats and dogs for thousands of years to make more desirable pets. A new startup called the Los Angeles Project aims to speed up that process with genetic engineering to make glow-in-the-dark rabbits, hypoallergenic cats and dogs, and possibly, one day, actual unicorns.

The Los Angeles Project is the brainchild of biohacker Josie Zayner, who in 2017 publicly injected herself with the gene-editing tool Crispr during a conference in San Francisco and livestreamed it. “I want to help humans genetically modify themselves,” she said at the time. She’s also given herself a fecal transplant and a DIY Covid vaccine and is the founder and CEO of The Odin, a company that sells home genetic-engineering kits.

Now, Zayner wants to create the next generation of pets. “I think, as a human species, it’s kind of our moral prerogative to level up animals,” she says.

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“Our findings suggest that senescent cells maintain their large size through improved adhesion to the extracellular matrix via AP2A1 and integrin β1 movement along enlarged stress fibers,” Chantachotikul said.

The link between AP2A1 and senescent cells, the researchers said, means the protein has the potential to be used as a marker for cellular aging.

The team also believes that the findings may offer a new target for future treatments of age-related diseases.

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Health, vitality and longevity through bioengineering — kevin caldwell — CEO, ossium health.

Kevin Caldwell is CEO, Co-Founder & President of Ossium Health (https://ossiumhealth.com/), a commercial stage bioengineering company that leverages its proprietary organ donor bone marrow banking platform to develop stem cell therapies for patients with life-threatening hematologic conditions, organ transplant rejection, and musculoskeletal defects.

Mr. Caldwell built Ossium from a small startup into the clinical stage bioengineering company it is today, setting the company’s mission to improve human health through bioengineering and designed its platform-based model for cellular therapeutics development. He has led the company’s successful pursuit, negotiation, and execution of more than 50 business relationships, including 5 successful fundraisings and dozens of supply partnerships, clinical partnerships, and commercial contracts with biopharmaceutical companies.

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Cells have surface receptors called integrins that bind to repetitive domains present on the extracellular matrix (ECM) surrounding the cells, allowing them to grow and spread. A new study from the Department of Bioengineering (BE), Indian Institute of Science (IISc) and collaborators shows that tweaking the spacing between these binding domains on the ECM can boost the efficiency of ultrasound treatment applied to kill cancer cells.

“In a normal tissue, the spacing on the ECM is around 50–70 nanometers (nm), but in the , severe choking occurs due to excessive ECM secretion, which may reduce the binding spacing to below 50 nm,” explains Ajay Tijore, Assistant Professor in BE and corresponding author of a related study published in Nano Letters. “We found more being killed when the binding spacing is increased to around 50–70 nm.”

Low-frequency ultrasound waves (39 kHz) can disrupt the and trigger cell death in cancer cells. It is a relatively low-cost and non-invasive approach. Unlike normal cells, cancer cells do not have repair mechanisms that help them withstand the exerted by ultrasound waves.

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Mammoth Biosciences researchers have developed NanoCas, an ultracompact CRISPR nuclease, demonstrating its ability to perform gene editing in non-liver tissues, including skeletal muscle, using a single adeno-associated virus (AAV) vector. Experiments in non-human primates (NHPs) resulted in editing efficiencies exceeding 30% in muscle tissues.

CRISPR gene editing has revolutionized genetics, but delivery challenges have restricted its clinical applications primarily to ex vivo and liver-directed therapies. Conventional CRISPR nucleases, including Cas9 and Cas12a, exceed the packaging limits of a single AAV vector, necessitating dual-AAV strategies that reduce efficiency.

Smaller CRISPR systems such as Cas12i and CasX have been identified, but they remain too large or exhibit low editing efficiency. Existing compact systems like Cas14 and IscB have not demonstrated robust efficacy in large animal models.

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Northwestern Medicine scientists have discovered new details about how the human genome produces instructions for creating proteins and cells, the building blocks of life, according to a pioneering new study published in Science Advances.

While it’s understood that genes function as a set of instructions for creating RNA, and thus proteins and cells, the fundamental process by which this occurs has not been well-studied due to technological limitations, said Vadim Backman, Ph.D., the Sachs Family Professor of Biomedical Engineering and Medicine, who was senior author of the study.

“It is still not fully understood how, despite having the same set of genes, cells turn into neurons, bones, skin, heart, or roughly 200 other kinds of cells, and then exhibit stable cellular behavior over a human lifespan which can last for more than a century—or why aging degrades this process,” said Backman, who directs the Center for Physical Genomics and Engineering at Northwestern. “This has been a long-standing open question in biology.”

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A team of Chinese scientists has used targeted gene editing to develop rice that produces coenzyme Q10 (CoQ10), a vital compound for human health.

Led by Prof. Chen Xiaoya from the CAS Center for Excellence in Molecular Plant Sciences/Shanghai Chenshan Research Center and Prof. Gao Caixia from the Institute of Genetics and Developmental Biology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), the researchers used targeted gene editing to modify just five amino acids of the Coq1 rice enzyme, creating new rice varieties capable of synthesizing CoQ10.

The study is published in Cell.

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