Scientific data in various fields of human endeavor. Interesting user friendly presentation of articles in sciences both recent and in the distant past
Oregon researchers have created the first genetically modified monkey. ANDi, a playful, coffee-colored rhesus monkey born on October 2nd 2000, has been engineered to carry a gene from another species. The work demonstrates that a foreign gene can be delivered and inserted into a primate chromosome. The researchers anticipate that gene insertions in the monkey will lead to primate models of human diseases—like Alzheimer’s, diabetes, heart disease and obesity—that will offer a more robust testing ground for new drugs, gene therapy and modified stem cells.
ANDi (DNA inserted spelled backward)
is the first transgenic monkey.
“Our ultimate goal is to produce human disease models. Primates show human pathology better than mice, which, in many cases, are the only systems we have for modeling human diseases,” says Anthony Chan, of the Oregon Regional Primate Research Center, in Beaverton. The report is published in this week’s issue of Science.
Chan’s goal was to show that a foreign gene can be inserted into a monkey’s chromosome and produce a functional protein. The GFP gene was chosen because the protein it produces emits a fluorescent green glow that can easily be seen through a microscope. Eventually scientists want to insert human disease genes and study disease progression in monkeys, says Chan.
Tissue samples taken from ANDi’s cheek, hair, umbilical cord and placenta confirm that the cells contain the GFP gene and corresponding mRNA; the molecule that bridges the gap between DNA and protein. However, when the tissue was examined under the microscope, no green protein could be seen.
“Maybe the quantity of protein is too small to be seen or maybe the mRNA is not being translated,” says Chan.
The team will continue to monitor ANDi for GFP;
Some transgenic animals do not produce any foreign protein until after the first year.
(LEFT)Virus particles carrying the GFP gene are injected into the unfertilized egg. The gene (white) is released from the virus and incorporated into the chromosome. (RIGHT)About 6 hours after introducing the virus scientists artificially fertilize the egg by injecting a sperm from a male rhesus. The fertilized egg then begins to grow and divide. Two to three days later when the egg has divided twice and become a four-celled embryo it is implanted into a surrogate mother. Courtesy Oregon Regional Primate Research Cente
VIEW THE LINK BELOW FOR MORE
Introducing ANDi: The first geneticallymodifiedmonkey
Oregon researchers have created the first geneticallymodifiedmonkey. ANDi, a playful, coffee-colored rhesus monkey born on October 2nd 2000, … www.genomenewsnetwork.org/articles/01_01/ANDi.shtml
Sourced and published by Henry Sapiecha 29th May 2009
At last, a robot that is powered by food – but watch out, this gastrobot’s ideal food is flesh!
According to this week’s New Scientist, a researcher at the University of South Florida has developed a 12-wheeled monster called Chew Chew, with a microbial fuel cell stomach that uses E. coli bacteria to break down food and convert chemical energy into electricity.
“Turning food into electricity isn’t unique,” says Wilkinson. “What I’ve done is make it small enough to fit into a robot”.
The microbes produce enzymes that break down carbohydrates, releasing electrons which are harnessed to charge a battery by a reduction and oxidation reaction.
Wilkinson says this is analogous to blood supply and respiration in a mammal – but delivering electrons instead of oxygen.
Gastrobot consists of three 1-metre long wheeled wagons complete with pumps for redox solution, battery bank, oesophagus, ultrasonic eyes, mouth, DC motor and E.coli powered stomach.
Unfortunately, the microbial fuel cell doesn’t produce enough power to actually move Chew Chew. Instead, the electricity is used to charge the batteries and only when these are fully charged does can the robot move. When the batteries are drained, the cycle must then be repeated.
According to New Scientist, early applications for gastrobots are likely to include mowing lawns – grazing on grass clippings for fuel.
The ideal fuel in terms of energy gain is meat, says inventor Stuart Wilkinson, but at the moment Chew Chew lives on sugar cubes.
Catching meat would require the robot to produce more energy and besides Wilkinson isn’t so sure it’s good to give gastrobots a taste for meat.
Conversion to eat carion flesh or decaying corpses is another option.
“Otherwise they’ll notice there’s an awful lot of humans running around and try to eat them,” he warns.
The terrorism alert caused chaos at Heathrow Airport last week. But could new security technology prevent a repeat performance? (Image: Reuters/Toby Melville)
News Analysis No matter how sophisticated airport security technology becomes, it will probably never remove the need for sniffer dogs and bag searches, experts say.
The alleged foiled terrorist plot that affected flights between the UK and US last week has led to calls for newer, smarter security technology.
Devices on the horizon include insect-based sensors, wallpaper that sniffs out explosives as you walk past and smart closed-circuit TV that can pick a suspect out from a crowd or tell if you’ve left a bomb under a seat.
But Martin Cebis, whose company will present its all-in-one chemical sensing and surveillance system at an international military technology conference in the US next week, says would-be terrorists will probably always be one step ahead of technology.
“Ultimately you’re dealing with human ingenuity [and] you’re fighting a moving target and need to be able to adapt,” says Cebis, chief executive officer of Western Australia’s Embedded Technologies.
“I think you’ll still need searching and those kinds of things to occur.”
Cebis is also among a number of speakers who will brief security advisors and researchers in Canberra on the latest developments today.
Chemical sensing
One of the emerging areas of security, particularly in light of the alleged plot to carry liquid explosives onto planes, is in chemical sensing.
Associate Professor Adam McCluskey of the University of Newcastle is an Australian researcher developing chemical sensors based on drug design technology.
The sensors are can be “screen printed” onto fabrics, paper, plastics and even wallpaper.
“It’s basically a synthetic antibody,” he says.
“We’re applying drug design technology to generate polymeric scaffolds that specifically recognise the shape and electronics of the targeted molecule.”
The technique has been used to identify cocaine and heroin and is being developed to pick up chemicals like TNT and triacetone triperoxide, the chemical used in last year’s London Underground bombings.
“Instead of metal detectors we would have a bank of these sensors sucking the vapours off as you walk through,” he says.
He says while sniffer dogs will still be able to go places electronic noses can’t, sensing technology will be better able to detect specific substances.
Dr Michael Borgas, is an atmospheric scientist at CSIRO, which is developing an electronic nose to detect chemicals.
He says the future of airport chemical sensing lies in miniaturised devices.
Researchers at CSIRO are also looking to insects like fruit flies for inspiration.
“If you can understand how insects sense and act upon various volatile chemicals you’d hopefully be able to mimic that with electronic devices,” he says.
“What you want is a hand-held device that can suck in tiny bits of air and detect the molecules that are in that air. In airports you’d just stick it in a [passenger's] bag.”
Smart surveillance
Cebis says it will take more than high-tech chemical sensors, no matter how sensitive and discriminating they are.
“It’s fine to have sensors all over the place but you’ve got to be able to make intelligent decisions,” he says.
“The research challenge is to make cheap, sensitive, ubiquitous sensors coupled with smart surveillance technology.”
Cebis says closed-circuit TV will eventually be replaced by “smart” digital video technology that uses biometric identification and motion recognition to hone in on specific individuals and behaviour.
“They look at a scene and if there’s no motion they don’t film anything,” he says.
“Or a person may wander into a scene, deposit something and then move away. The fact that something was moving and now isn’t [will be picked up].”
Ting Shan of National ICT Australia (NICTA) will outline advances in face recognition technology at a security technology conference in Canberra next week.
Shan says new face recognition algorithms have been developed by NICTA and University of Queensland that aren’t befuddled by lighting, expression or angle of the face.
“It can synthesise a realistic frontal face image,” he says.
Impact of a new security environment
Borgas says while the events in the UK have highlighted advances in security technology, he doubts they will be implemented overnight.
McCluskey hopes it will give governments an impetus to provide the research and development funds to allow some of the more promising ideas to bear fruit.
“Sometimes it takes an event of this nature to provide a significantly high profile and the government willing to take a chance on the technology,” he says.
Cebis say all the technology in the world will never completely replace the most humble of checks.
“But whether they need to be as intrusive and time consuming as they currently are depends on the technology,” he says.
Sourced and published by Henry Sapiecha 13th May 2009
The researchers believe the discovery will deepen our understanding of these now extinct species (Source: Laboratoire géosciences Rennes)
<!–
if (typeof showPhotos == ‘function’) showPhotos(’2421383-mediarss.xml’);
–>
Scientists have discovered a menagerie of perfectly intact marine microorganisms trapped in tree resin at least 100 million years ago, according to a new study.
The unexpected find in the Charente region of southwestern France pushes back by at least 20 million years the period when a type of single-cell algae called diatoms are known to have appeared on earth, say the study’s authors.
But the finding creates a mystery: how did sea creatures wind up trapped in a glob of resinated amber that oozes out of trees?
The most likely scenario, the scientists conclude, is that the forest producing the amber was very near the coast, and that the tiny organisms, which also included primitive plankton, were either carried inland by strong winds or flood waters during a storm.
“This discovery will deepen our understanding of these lost marine species as well as providing precious data about the coastal environment of western France during the Cretaceous Period,” which spanned from 145 to 65 million years ago, say researchers.
It also challenges certain theories about the evolution of these organisms, and vindicates the research of molecular geneticists, says study co-author and National History Museum scientist Jean-Paul Saint Martin.
Using “molecular clocks,” biochemists move backward in time to figure out at what point in the evolutionary process certain plant and animal species split off into different branches.
“We had no record of these microorganisms over a period of 20 million years. These fossils have filled that void in the most extraordinary manner,” Saint Martin says.
Sourced and published by Henry Sapiecha 13th May 2009
Seagrass was the perfect habitat for an upright-swimming seahorse, which could camouflage itself in the vertical blades (Source: Robert Harcourt)
<!–
if (typeof showPhotos == ‘function’) showPhotos(’2562131-mediarss.xml’);
–>
Seahorses evolved their upright posture some 25 million years ago, thanks in part to an expansion of vertical seagrass habitat, Australian researchers have found.
Seahorses are unique fish with a horse-shaped head and a habit of swimming upright.
Beheregaray says it has been hard for scientists to work out when exactly seahorses evolved to swim upright.
This is because there are only two known fossils of seahorses – the oldest dating back to 13 million years – and no link between these and horizontally-swimming fish had been found.
“When you look back in time, you don’t see intermediate seahorse-like fish,” says Beheregaray.
But, he says, there are fish alive today that look like horizontally-swimming seahorses and these could provide clues as to when seahorses evolved to be upright.
Pygmy pipehorses
Beheregaray and Teske compared the DNA of seahorses and other species from the same family to find out which was the closest living relative to seahorses.
“The pygmy pipehorses are by far the most seahorse-like fish on earth. They do look like the seahorses, but they swim horizontally,” says Beheregaray.
He and Teske used molecular dating techniques, which relies on the accumulation of differences in the DNA between the two species to work out when they diverged.
The researchers used the two existing fossil seahorses to calibrate the rate of evolution of DNA in their molecular clock.
And they discovered that the last common ancestor of seahorses and pygmy pipehorses lived around 25 to 28 million years ago.
Seagrass habitat
Beheregaray says at the time that seahorses arose during the Oligocene epoch coincided with the formation of vast areas of shallow water and expansion of seagrass in Australasia – where Teske has previously showed seahorses first evolved.
Seagrass was the perfect habitat for an upright-swimming seahorse, which could camouflage itself in the vertical seagrass blades, he says.
The horizontal-swimming pygmy pipehorses, by contrast, thrived in large algae on reefs and didn’t have the need to evolve the upright posture.
“The two groups split in a period when there were conditions favouring that split,” says Beheregaray.
“It’s like us. We started walking upright when we moved to the savannahs. On the other hand, the seahorses invaded the new vast areas of seagrass.”
Sourced and published by Henry Sapiecha 13th May 2009
The trilobites grouped together to molt, much like modern-day horseshoe crabs (Source: Geological Society of America)
The discovery of giant trilobites in northern Portugal reveals the once ubiquitous marine creature mated en masse and used its numbers for protection, say European researchers.
The new find, published in the current issue of the journal Geology describes giants that grew to 90 centimetres in length, the largest ever found.
Trilobites once roamed the sea floor, but were wiped out in the Permian-Triassic extinction, 250 million years ago.
These marine arthropods, typically less than 8 centimetres long, are distant relatives of modern-day lobsters and spiders.
The researchers, led by Dr Juan Carlos Gutiérrez-Marco from the El Instituto de Geología Económica in Madrid, Spain, discovered trilobites from 15 genera in 465-million year old rocks in Arouca Geopark in northern Portugal.
They found a complete specimen 70 centimetres in length and others whose tail remnants indicated they grew to up to 90 centimetres long.
Most of the trilobite species they collected have been found elsewhere in Western Europe, but never before of such giant size.
Their size was probably an adaption to the polar waters where they dwelt, say the researchers.
“Metabolism of invertebrates is slower in cold water, so it takes longer to reach adulthood and they also tend to live longer. Also if you are bigger you are better able to deter a predator attack,” sasy co-author Dr Diego García-Bellido, also of the El Instituto de Geología Económica.
Molt together, mate together
The researchers found clusters of trilobites with up to 1000 individuals, indicating they grouped together to molt, much like modern-day horseshoe crabs.
The researchers assume that like horseshoe crabs, the trilobites may have also mated en masse. The hormones that instigate molting are related to those that induce sexual reproduction, says García-Bellido.
Several trilobites in the deposit were also found in burrows and under the shells of larger organisms, where they may have hidden after molting as their soft bodies made them more vulnerable to predators.
The trilobites are believed to have died when the stagnant seawater became oxygen-depleted, which also helped their preservation as fossils, the researchers say.
Spectacular find
Palaeontologist Dr John Paterson from the University of New England in Armidale, describes the find as “spectacular”.
“It’s really exceptional in that you rarely find trilobite fossils complete,” he says. “Mostly you find a piece of the head or the tail, so to find them in congregations where there are many complete individuals is astounding.”
Paterson says his own research in the Flinders Ranges in South Australia has shown that trilobites grouped together during the Cambrian era about 520 million years ago, when the diversity of life really kicked off.
“You’ve got a better chance of survival if you are [molting] in a group as you’ve got less chance of being picked off yourself.
Sourced and published by Henry Sapiecha 13th May 2009
MINNEAPOLIS (UPI) — U.S. scientists say they’ve developed a technique for modifying plant genes that could help provide sustainable food, fuel and fibre supplies.
Researchers at the University of Minnesota and Massachusetts General Hospital said their genome engineering tool can make a model crop plant herbicide-resistant without significant changes to its DNA.
“It’s still a (genetically modified organism), but the modification was subtle,” said Professor Daniel Voytas, lead author of the study and director of the university’s Center for Genome Engineering. “We made a slight change in the sequence of the plant’s own DNA rather than adding foreign DNA.”
Voytas said the technique has the potential to help scientists modify plants to produce food, fuel and fiber sustainably, while minimizing concerns about genetically modified organisms.
The scientists said they created a customized enzyme called a zinc finger nuclease to change single genes in tobacco plant cells. The altered cells were then cultured to produce mature plants that survived exposure to herbicides.
“This is the first real advance in technology to genetically modify plants since foreign DNA was introduced into plant chromosomes in the early 1980s,” Voytas said. “It could become a revolutionary tool for manipulating plant, animal and human genomes.”
The research was published online by the journal Nature.
Copyright 2009 by United Press International
Sourced and published by Henry Sapiecha 11th May 2009
WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. (UPI) — A U.S. researcher says he has developed a test that suggests fish can feel pain and they react to it much as do humans.
Purdue University Assistant Professor Joseph Garner and Janicke Nordgreen, a doctoral student in the Norwegian School of Veterinary Science, attached small foil heaters to goldfish and slowly increased the temperature.
Half of the fish were injected with morphine, and the others received saline. The researchers believed those with the morphine would be able to withstand higher temperatures before reacting if they actually felt pain. However, both groups of fish showed a response at about the same temperature.
But later observed in their home tanks, the researchers noticed fish from each group were exhibiting different behaviors.
“The fish given the morphine acted like they always had: swimming and being fish,” Garner said. “The fish that had gotten saline — even though they responded the same in the test — later acted different, though. They acted with defensive behaviors, indicating wariness, or fear and anxiety.”
Nordgreen said those behavioral differences showed fish can feel both reflexive and cognitive pain.
The scientists said their findings could raise questions about slaughter methods and standards of care could be revisited to ensure fish are being treated humanely.
A paper detailing the finding appears in the early online issue of the journal Applied Animal Behavior Science.
Copyright 2009 by United Press International
Sourced and published by Henry Sapiecha 3rd May 2009
STATE COLLEGE, Pa. (UPI) — With swine flu being reported in the United States, one might wonder whether weather has any part in spreading the flu — and the answer is maybe
The main way swine flu is transmitted is through contact with an infected person or contact with a pig that is infected. In people, it’s thought to spread mainly from person to person through coughing or sneezing.
As to the question of the role weather conditions play in the outbreak, accuweather.com said the warmer weather means more people are gathering for events and, therefore, they can come into contact with infected people who potentially remain contagious for up to seven days following illness onset.
An infected person who sneezes or coughs without covering their mouth can theoretically allow a dispersion of the virus in crowded, public locations, thereby expanding the outbreak.
And accuweather.com noted the warmer spring weather also means more vacations and more people traveling. That means some of the cases might be related to people traveling into Mexico, the outbreak’s epicenter.
Accuweather.com Senior Meteorologist Henry Margusity urges travelers to check the CDC Web site for information on restrictions due to the swine flu.
Copyright 2009 by United Press International
Sourced and published by Henry Sapiecha 30th April 2009
SEATTLE (UPI) — U.S. researchers say combining nanoparticles with a scorpion venom compound can cut the spread of cancerous brain tumor cells by 98 percent.
The University of Washington said the nanoparticles more than double the effectiveness of chlorotoxin, a small peptide isolated from scorpion venom.
“People talk about the treatment being more effective with nanoparticles but they don’t know how much, maybe 5 percent or 10 percent,” Miqin Zhang, professor of materials science and engineering, said Friday in a release. “This was quite a surprise to us.”
The findings are published in the journal Small.
Researchers said adding nanoparticles can improve a therapy by increasing the length of time the combination lasts in the body. Nanoparticles also boost effectiveness of treatment compounds because therapeutic molecules tend to clump around each nanoparticle, the report said.
Copyright 2009 by United Press International
Sourced and published by Henry Sapiecha 22nd April 2009
