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Category: biotech/medical – Page 2,492

DNA as an Electromagnetic Fractal Cavity Resonator: Its Universal Sensing and Fractal Antenna Behavior

We report that 3D-A-DNA structure behaves as a fractal antenna, which can interact with the electromagnetic fields over a wide range of frequencies. Using the lattice details of human DNA, we have modeled radiation of DNA as a helical antenna. The DNA structure resonates with the electromagnetic waves at 34 GHz, with a positive gain of 1.7 dBi. We have also analyzed the role of three different lattice symmetries of DNA and the possibility of soliton-based energy transmission along the structure.

CRISPR technology is revolutionizing the improvement of tomato and other fruit crops

Fruits are major sources of essential nutrients and serve as staple foods in some areas of the world. The increasing human population and changes in climate experienced worldwide make it urgent to the production of fruit crops with high yield and enhanced adaptation to the environment, for which conventional breeding is unlikely to meet the demand. Fortunately, clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeat (CRISPR) technology paves the way toward a new horizon for fruit crop improvement and consequently revolutionizes plant breeding. In this review, the mechanism and optimization of the CRISPR system and its application to fruit crops, including resistance to biotic and abiotic stresses, fruit quality improvement, and domestication are highlighted. Controversies and future perspectives are discussed as well.

Scientists Develop New Laser That Can Find and Destroy Cancer Cells in the Blood

Cancer cells can spread to other parts of the body through the blood. And now, researchers have developed a new kind of laser that can find and zap those tumor cells from the outside of the skin.

Though it may still be a ways away from becoming a commercial diagnostic tool, the laser is up to 1,000 times more sensitive than current methods used to detect tumor cells in blood, the researchers reported June 12 in the journal Science Translational Medicine.

To test for cancer spread, doctors typically take blood samples, but often the tests fail to find tumor cells even if they are present in a single sample, especially if the patient has an early form of cancer, said senior author Vladimir Zharov, director of the nanomedicine center at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences.

Bioinformation Within the Biofield: Beyond Bioelectromagnetics

This review article extends previous scientific definitions of the biofield (endogenous energy fields of the body) to include nonclassical and quantum energy fields. The biofield is defined further in terms of its functional property to act as a resonance target for external forms of energy used as treatment modalities in energy medicine. The functional role of the biofield in the body’s innate self-healing mechanisms is hypothesized, based on the concept of bioinformation which, mediated by consciousness, functions globally at the quantum level to supply coherence, phase, spin, and pattern information to regulate and heal all physiologic processes. This model is used to explain a wide variety of anomalies reported in the scientific literature, which can not be explained by traditional biophysics and bioelectromagnetics.

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Slug Saves Satellite Cells from Senescence

In a new study, researchers have found that the zinc-finger transcription factor Slug is responsible for repressing p16Ink4a, a compound that promotes senescence in human tissue. The researchers suggest that Slug is worth exploring as a treatment for sarcopenia [1].

Satellite cells

Satellite cells are specialized stem cells that form new muscle cells when the muscle is injured [2]. Populations of satellite stem cells remain quiescent in normal muscle tissue, only becoming activated through physical damage of some sort. This allows the tissue to heal properly, restoring function and allowing for natural regeneration. However, in both humans and mice, old age leads to increased p16Ink4a, which causes defects in this regeneration [1].

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Superbug gene that resists “last resort” antibiotics detected in US for the first time

Antibiotics were one of the most important scientific developments of the 20th century, helping to easily control bacterial infections and make previously life-threatening procedures and illnesses safe. But inversely, they might also be one of the biggest medical issues of the 21st century, as bacteria evolve resistances to our best drugs. Now, a bacterial gene that grants resistance to “last resort” antibiotics has been detected in a patient in the US, for the first time.

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Gut microbes eat our medication

The first time Vayu Maini Rekdal manipulated microbes, he made a decent sourdough bread. At the time, young Maini Rekdal, and most people who head to the kitchen to whip up a salad dressing, pop popcorn, ferment vegetables, or caramelize onions, did not consider the crucial chemical reactions behind these concoctions.

Even more crucial are the reactions that happen after the plates are clean. When a slice of sourdough travels through the digestive system, the trillions of microbes that live in our gut help the body break down that bread to absorb the nutrients. Since the human body cannot digest certain substances — all-important fiber, for example — microbes step up to perform chemistry no human can.

“But this kind of microbial metabolism can also be detrimental,” said Maini Rekdal, a graduate student in the lab of Professor Emily Balskus and first-author on their new study published in Science. According to Maini Rekdal, gut microbes can chew up medications, too, often with hazardous side effects. “Maybe the drug is not going to reach its target in the body, maybe it’s going to be toxic all of a sudden, maybe it’s going to be less helpful,” Maini Rekdal said.

In their study, Balskus, Maini Rekdal, and their collaborators at the University of California San Francisco, describe one of the first concrete examples of how the microbiome can interfere with a drug’s intended path through the body. Focusing on levodopa (L-dopa), the primary treatment for Parkinson’s disease, they identified which bacteria are responsible for degrading the drug and how to stop this microbial interference.

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Biofield Science: Current Physics Perspectives

An intriguing experimental result, known as “the phantom leaf effect,” if fully verified, may be an example of some or even all of these biofield processes. In these experiments, coronal discharge or the Kirlian photographic effect reveals a field effect in the morphological form of an intact living leaf even after part of the leaf is severed. This suggests an analogy to the subjective experience of a phantom limb reported by patients after the limb has been amputated. There might be a persisting biofield that represents the amputatedlimb. First described by Adamenko and reported by Tiller and by Ostrander and Schroeder, more recent validating experiments have been performed with detection methods of greater precision; these are summarized in Hubacher. In his most recent publication, Hubacher performed the experiment with highest definition photographic samples using the largest number of samples to date. Of 137 leaves severed and imaged, 96 (70%) demonstrated clear phantoms.

This article briefly reviews the biofield hypothesis and its scientific literature. Evidence for the existence of the biofield now exists, and current theoretical foundations are now being developed. A review of the biofield and related topics from the perspective of physical science is needed to identify a common body of knowledge and evaluate possible underlying principles of origin of the biofield. The properties of such a field could be based on electromagnetic fields, coherent states, biophotons, quantum and quantum-like processes, and ultimately the quantum vacuum. Given this evidence, we intend to inquire and discuss how the existence of the biofield challenges reductionist approaches and presents its own challenges regarding the origin and source of the biofield, the specific evidence for its existence, its relation to biology, and last but not least, how it may inform an integrated understanding of consciousness and the living universe.

Key Words: Biofield, quantum mechanics, physics.

Conventional biology is based on molecular processes—ie, biochemical interactions that ultimately reduce to macromolecules such as DNA and RNA. Even organismal biology, which concerns itself with addressing organisms as wholes, still relies on the reductionist approach of understanding the whole by analyzing how the parts fit together. These approaches, although very successful in specific scientific and medical applications, fail to address phenomena that by their nature are holistic—ie, they may need to be explained from a whole organism context, crossing boundaries of scale, and thereby including quantum and conventional fields, mind, and relationship to environment. It seems that biology, despite the great successes it has achieved and the multitude of applications in theory as well as in practice, has still not undergone the types of revolutions that shook physics over the last 100 years.

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