Feature Channels: Biotech

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In his new book, “What We Talk About When We Talk About Clone Club,” international expert on the ethics of human cloning, Gregory Pence, explores issues raised in the sci-fi show “Orphan Black” about human cloning, its ethics and impact on personal identity, genetic enhancement, and other mysterious science. Pence takes a lighthearted look at cloning in popular culture and explains when the show gets the science right and when it doesn’t.

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The endangered southern resident killer whales of Puget Sound could soon get their own personal health records following a meeting of wildlife health experts being held March 28-29 in Seattle.

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To see JBEI biochemist Ee-Been Goh in the lab, figuring out how to rewire bacteria to produce biofuels, one would never guess she was once so uninterested in school that she barely made it through junior high. Goh has been lead author on two publications on methyl ketones, one of the most promising biofuels at JBEI.

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The American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology will hold its annual meeting April 2 – 6 at the San Diego Convention Center. Below are the scientific symposia highlights.

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The American Association of Anatomists (AAA) is honored to announce its 2016 award winners. All awards will be presented during the Closing Awards Ceremony at AAA's 2016 annual meeting at Experimental Biology (EB) in San Diego, CA.

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A vital aspect of the structural characterization of biologic products is the identification of stability-indicating attributes and the development of well-characterized, robust methods for inclusion in the stability program.

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Farmers can use fewer resources to grow food.

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A method to rotate single particles, cells or organisms using acoustic waves in a microfluidic device will allow researchers to take three dimensional images with only a cell phone. Acoustic waves can move and position biological specimens along the x, y and z axes, but for the first time researchers at Penn State have used them to gently and safely rotate samples, a crucial capability in single-cell analysis, drug discovery and organism studies.

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Scientists at the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine have invented a “metastasis-on-a-chip” system believed to be one of the first laboratory models of cancer spreading from one 3D tissue to another. They hope the technology can one day be used to see how an individual patient’s tumor responds to potential treatments and to learn if and where the tumor is likely to spread.

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An engineering team at Washington University in St. Louis developed a cellular kill switch, a sensor that rewards hard working cells and eliminates their lazy counterparts. The high-tech engineering fix could help improve production of biofuels and pharmaceuticals.

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A team of Stanford Bio-X scientists developed the first technique for viewing cells and tissues in 3 dimensions under the skin -- the work could improve diagnosis and treatment for some forms of cancer and blindness.

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Wistar appoints new board member Cavan Redmond, accomplished biotech industry executive

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A team of investigators from Houston Methodist Research Institute may have transformed the treatment of metastatic triple negative breast cancer by creating the first drug to successfully eliminate lung metastases in mice. This landmark study appears today in Nature Biotechnology (early online edition).

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To draw lipids out of algae, scientists must starve the algae of nitrogen. Among the hundreds of proteins modulated by nitrogen starvation, the synthesis ROC40 was the most induced when the cells made the most oil. Such information is of great importance for the development of superior strains of algae for biofuel production.

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The American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology announced Tuesday that Lila M. Gierasch, a distinguished faculty member at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, will be the next editor in chief of the Journal of Biological Chemistry, the nonprofit’s peer-reviewed journal.

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Jianlin Cheng has been in the business of protein structure prediction since before coming to the University of Missouri College of Engineering in 2007. And thanks to new funding from the National Institutes of Health, he’s looking at ways to take his research even further. Cheng, an associate professor of computer science, and his co-PI — John Tanner, professor of biochemistry at MU — recently received a four-year, $1.3 million grant from NIH (project number 2R01GM093123-05A1) to continue their research on integrated prediction and validation of protein structures.

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A University of Wisconsin-Madison spinoff is screening blood samples in an effort to develop a biologically based method to diagnose autism. The company, Stemina Biomarker Discovery, specializes in detecting the byproducts of cellular activity and then applying high-powered statistics to detect patterns among thousands of metabolites.

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Biopsies are a gold standard for definitively diagnosing diseases like cancer. Usually, doctors can only take 2-D snapshots of the tissue, and they're limited in their ability to measure the protein levels that might better explain a diagnosis. But now, researchers have developed a new method to acquire 3-D atlases of tissue that provide much more information, incorporating both data on the tissue structure and its molecular profile. They report their results in Biomicrofluidics.

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Athletes, the elderly and others who suffer from injuries and arthritis can lose cartilage and experience a lot of pain. Researchers are now reporting, however, that they have found a way to produce cartilage tissue by 3-D bioprinting an ink containing human cells, and they have successfully tested it in an in vivo mouse model. The researchers present their work at the 251st National Meeting & Exposition of the American Chemical Society.

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The ongoing debate about breast cancer diagnostics has left many women confused — particularly over what age they should get mammograms and who needs treatment. An issue with current methods is that they often identify lumps but cannot conclusively pinpoint which ones are cancerous. So, researchers have developed a pill that could improve imaging, lighting up only cancerous tumors. They report their work at the 251st National Meeting & Exposition of the American Chemical Society.

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Drug therapies for many conditions end up treating the whole body even when only one part needs it. But this generalized approach can hurt healthy cells, causing nasty side effects. To send drugs to specific disease locations, researchers developed cellular “backpacks” that are designed to carry a therapeutic cargo only to inflamed disease sites. The researchers present their work at the 251st National Meeting & Exposition of the American Chemical Society.

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In an article published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Cornell scientists report that cancellous bone – the spongy foam-like type of bone found near joints and in the vertebrae that is involved in most osteoporosis-related fractures – displays unique material properties that allow it to recover shape after it breaks.

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Biomedical informatics, one of the world’s fastest-growing interdisciplinary fields, is the latest graduate degree program offered by the University of Chicago Graham School of Continuing Liberal and Professional Studies.

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The substance that provides energy to all the cells in our bodies, Adenosine triphosphate (ATP), may also be able to power the next generation of supercomputers.

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A bit of mystery has enshrouded the type of specialized mechanotransducers—force sensors—underlying the process of converting a mechanical force into a biological function—mechanotransduction—and how they’re able to sense a force and, subsequently, transduce to downstream biological functions. During the BPS 2016 annual meeting, Bailong Xiao will share a discovery made while exploring how newly identified mechanotransducers function at the molecular level.

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New treatments and diagnostics for Alzheimer’s and cancer dominate the 2016 research awards recently announced by the Minnesota Partnership for Biotechnology and Medical Genomics. The state-supported funding was distributed among seven research teams, based on competitive applications. Each team represents researchers from Mayo Clinic and the University of Minnesota.

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A team of national laboratory and university researchers led by the Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Argonne National Laboratory is growing large test plots of switchgrass crops with the farmer in mind. For the first time, researchers have mixed different genetic varieties of switchgrass on production-size plots, hypothesizing this could increase yield by extending the growing season, varying the size of the switchgrass plants to produce a fuller crop and potentially reducing the crop’s vulnerability to weather fluctuations. A seven-year study showed the switchgrass variety mixture was, most consistently, the highest yielding crop, as measured by the harvested dry weight from each plot.

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New research from the University of Southampton shows that copper can destroy MRSA spread by touching and fingertip contamination of surfaces.

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A squid has more in common with a spider than you may think. The razor-sharp 'teeth' that ring the suckers found on some squid tentacles are made up entirely of proteins remarkably similar -- and in some ways superior -- to the ones found in silks. Those proteins, called suckerins, give the teeth their strength and stretchiness, and could one day be used as the basis for biomaterials with many potential biomedical applications.

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In the February 18, 2016 issue of Science, researchers from UCSB and including a DOE JGI team report that anaerobic gut fungi perform as well as the best fungi engineered by industry in their ability to convert plant material into sugars that are easily transformed into fuel and other products.

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A new optogenetic technology developed at UMass Medical School, called optogenetic immunomodulation, is capable of turning on immune cells to attack melanoma tumors in mice. Using near-infrared light, UMMS researchers have shown they can selectively activate an immune response by controlling the flow of calcium ions into the cell. This breakthrough could lead to less invasive, and more controlled and selective, immunotherapies for cancer treatment.

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Database searches for DNA sequences that can take biologists and medical researchers days can now be completed in a matter of minutes, thanks to a new search method developed by computer scientists at Carnegie Mellon University.

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Using a sophisticated, custom-designed 3D printer, regenerative medicine scientists at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center have proved that it is feasible to print living tissue structures to replace injured or diseased tissue in patients.

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An assistant research specialist at the Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center (GLBRC) has designed a new strain of yeast that could improve the efficiency of making fuel from cellulosic biomass such as switchgrass. Both the yeast strain and the method of its design could help overcome a significant bottleneck in the biofuels pipeline — namely, that the powerful solvents so good at breaking down biomass also sometimes hinder the next critical step of the process, fermentation.

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Often the most difficult step in taking atomic-resolution images of biological molecules is getting them to form high-quality crystals needed for X-ray studies of their structure. Now researchers have shown they can get sharp images even with imperfect crystals using the world’s brightest X-ray source at the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory.

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Iowa State's Zengyi Shao and Jean-Philippe Tessonnier are combining the tools of biology and chemistry to create new biorenewable products. Their hybrid conversion technology is described in the journal Angewandte Chemie International Edition.

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Scientists have for the first time reengineered a building block of a geometric nanocompartment that occurs naturally in bacteria. The new design provides an entirely new functionality that greatly expands the potential for these compartments to serve as custom-made chemical factories.

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Researchers at Mayo Clinic have shown that senescent cells – cells that no longer divide and accumulate with age – negatively impact health and shorten lifespan by as much as 35 percent in normal mice. The results, which appear today in Nature, demonstrate that clearance of senescent cells delays tumor formation, preserves tissue and organ function, and extends lifespan without observed adverse effects.

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Caltech biologists have modified a harmless virus in such a way that it can successfully enter the adult mouse brain through the bloodstream and deliver genes to cells of the nervous system. The virus could help researchers map the intricacies of the brain and holds promise for the delivery of novel therapeutics to address diseases such as Alzheimer's and Huntington's. In addition, the screening approach the researchers developed to identify the virus could be used to make additional vectors capable of targeting cells in other organs.

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Researchers, including Carnegie Mellon University President Subra Suresh and collaborators Tony Jun Huang from the Pennsylvania State University and Ming Dao from MIT, have demonstrated that acoustic tweezers can be used to non-invasively move and manipulate single cells along three dimensions, providing a promising new method for 3-D bioprinting.

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A team of biologists and biomedical researchers at UC San Diego has developed a new method to determine if bacteria are susceptible to antibiotics within a few hours, an advance that could slow the appearance of drug resistance and allow doctors to more rapidly identify the appropriate treatment for patients with life threatening bacterial infections.

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The latest video in NIBIB's 60 Seconds of Science video series explains what tissue engineering is and how it works.

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Scientists have made a “vitamin mimic” – a molecule that looks and acts just like a natural vitamin to bacteria – that offers a new window into the inner workings of living microbes.

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Researchers at University of California, San Diego School of Medicine and collaborators developed GenomeSpace, a cloud-based, biologist-friendly platform that connects more than 20 bioinformatics software packages and resources for genomic data analysis. The team is now developing and crowdsourcing “recipes” — step-by-step workflows — to better enable non-programming researchers to interpret their genomic data. The work is described in a paper published January 18, 2016 in Nature Methods.

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Columbia Engineering Professor Elisa Konofagou won a $3.33 million DARPA grant to develop a new way to use focused ultrasound for stimulation of peripheral nerves that will ultimately be able to control organ function. The grant is part of DARPA’s new Electrical Prescriptions program aimed at developing novel technologies to improve physical and mental health using targeted stimulation of the peripheral nervous system to exploit the body’s natural ability to quickly and effectively heal itself.

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Researchers are looking beyond the usual suspects in the search for microbes that can efficiently break down inedible plant matter for conversion to biofuels. A new comparative study from the Oak Ridge National Laboratory-based center finds the natural abilities of unconventional bacteria could help boost the efficiency of cellulosic biofuel production.

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A research team from the National University of Singapore has developed a new lightweight and smart rehabilitation device called EsoGlove to help patients who have lost their hand functions due to injuries or nerve-related conditions to restore their hand movements.

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Research conducted by members of the Colorado School of Mines Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering demonstrates microscale biomedical devices shaped like wheels can be injected into the body and effectively “roll” to treat areas in need – such as arterial blockages.

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Simple consumer-grade equipment was used to study the combat flight behaviors of carpenter bees right at the researcher’s home.

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Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) visited Northwestern University's Chicago campus on Jan. 4 to announce the $32.08 billion in federal funding for the National Institutes of Health in fiscal year 2016 -- a 6.64 percent year-over-year increase.