Lifeboat Foundation

Canadian scientists have identified microscopic creatures that are so unlike anything seen before, they had to create an entirely new branch on the evolutionary tree of life to slot them in.

A new paper published this week in Nature offers the first genetic analysis of hemimastigotes—a rare and poorly understood group of single-celled microorganisms. Biologists have known about these wee beasties for well over a century, but only now can hemimastigotes be officially slotted into the evolutionary tree of life, a process more formally known as phylogeny. And by doing so, scientists have stumbled upon a completely new branch on the tree of life—one dating back billions of years.

Researchers from the Departments of Chemistry and Engineering Science at the University of Oxford have found a general way of predicting enzyme activity. Enzymes are the protein catalysts that perform most of the key functions in Biology. Published in Nature Chemical Biology, the researchers’ novel AI approach is based on the enzyme’s sequence, together with the screening of a defined ‘training set’ of substrates and the right chemical parameters to define them.

Scientists at the National Synchrotron Light Source II (NSLS-II)—a U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science User Facility at DOE’s Brookhaven National Laboratory—have used ultrabright x-rays to image single bacteria with higher spatial resolution than ever before. Their work, published in Scientific Reports, demonstrates an X-ray imaging technique, called X-ray fluorescence microscopy (XRF), as an effective approach to produce 3D images of small biological samples.

An interview with Drs. Leonid Gavrilov and Natalia Gavrilova on the demography of life extension.

Many people are concerned that vastly extended healthy lifespan might lead us to catastrophic overpopulation, and the best way to mitigate this fear is probably to talk to an experienced demographer. To learn more about this and other interesting questions related to life extension, we spoke to Drs. Leonid Gavrilov and Natalia Gavrilova, respectively Principal Investigator and Research Associate at the Center on Aging in Chicago University. Both of them have specialized in the biodemography of aging and longevity and possess nearly endless resumes.

Natalia and Leonid, your field of expertise is the biodemography of aging and longevity. What drew you to this field of research?

Continue reading “An Interview With Leonid Gavrilov And Natalia Gavrilova” »

Miniature devices for sensing biological molecules could be developed quicker thanks to a rapid prototyping method.

We all start out as a clump of identical cells. As these cells divide and multiply, they gradually take on distinct identities, acquiring the traits necessary to form, for instance, muscle tissue, bone, or nerves. A recent study from Rockefeller scientists offers new insight into how these cellular identities are cultivated over the course of development.

According to the study, published in eLife, cells retain a memory of the chemical signals to which they are exposed. And, the researchers show, embryos that fail to form these memories remain a clump of clones, never realizing their unique biological potential.

What is life?

That fundamental question fascinated Babette Babich, Ph.D., professor of philosophy, when she was an undergraduate student, so she majored in biology.

But the answer she was looking for was not to be found in the natural sciences. Instead, she discovered it in the dense texts of Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger, philosophers whose ideas about life fueled her desire to explore that critical question.

Continue reading “Philosophy Professor Sees ‘Plato’s Cave’ in Today’s Technologies” »

A new study by Calico found that our genes determine our lifespan much less than previously accepted and lifespan heritability is less than seven percent.

Although long life tends to run in families, genetics has far less influence on life span than previously thought, according to a new analysis of an aggregated set of family trees of more than 400 million people. The results suggest that the heritability of life span is well below past estimates, which failed to account for our tendency to select partners with similar traits to our own. The research, from Calico Life Sciences and Ancestry, was published in Genetics.

“We can potentially learn many things about the biology of aging from human genetics, but if the heritability of life span is low, it tempers our expectations about what types of things we can learn and how easy it will be,” says lead author Graham Ruby. “It helps contextualize the questions that scientists studying aging can effectively ask.”

Continue reading “Family tree of 400 million people shows genetics has limited influence on longevity” »

From conquering death to automatic insulin deliveries, we will be able to finetune our biology to a once-unthinkable degree.