Scientists say the pilot scheme aims to make sure donated kidneys are less likely to be rejected.
Trial to double match blood for kidney transplants
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Category Archives: Wellness Live
Trump Spokesperson Hilariously Self-Owns While Trying To Insult Joe Biden
A spokesperson for Donald Trump tried to attack President Joe Biden as someone who “can hardly speak,” but then struggled herself with a couple of words.
She repeated the non-word moments later.
“It also was extremely damn-en-ing to him politically as it showed what the American people see with their own eyes every single day, and that is Joe Biden can hardly speak,” she said.
Leavitt also referred to Attorney General Merrick Garland as “Merricka Garland.”
Former Justice Department officials have slammed Hur for what seemed more like a personal attack on the president than a report explaining the case.
On Tuesday, critics mocked Leavitt for stumbling over words herself as she claimed Biden “can hardly speak.”
President Biden Says Netanyahu Is Making A ‘Mistake’ In Gaza
President Joe Biden said in a new interview he does not agree with Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s ongoing attacks in Gaza, issuing some of his harshest critique of the country’s war with Hamas so far.
“I will tell you, I think what he’s doing is a mistake,” Biden said of his Israeli counterpart in an interview with Univision’s Enrique Acevedo that aired Tuesday. “I don’t agree with his approach.”
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The change in tone represents a dramatic shift in the US policy following Hamas’ October 7 attack in Israel that left 1,200 people dead. Israel’s assault in Gaza has since stretched more than six months, leaving at least 32,000 Palestinians dead.
The White House had resisted outright criticism of Netanyahu’s efforts while urging Israel and Hamas to reach a cease-fire agreement, despite the war’s growing civilian toll. But that support changed last week following the deaths of seven aid workers with World Central Kitchen, who were killed in an Israel air strike after delivering food in Gaza.
Biden has since warned Netanyahu that future US support will be contingent on the protection of civilians, calling the ongoing humanitarian crisis “unacceptable.”
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The president re-upped his calls for a cease-fire in the Univision interview, which was recorded last week just days after the aid workers were killed. Israel has taken responsibility for their deaths.
“I think it’s outrageous that those … vehicles were hit by drones and taken out on a highway where it wasn’t like it was along the shore, it wasn’t like there was a convoy moving there,” he said. “What I’m calling for is for the Israelis to just call for a cease-fire, allow for the next six, eight weeks total access to all food and medicine going into the country.”
The president added the US had spoken to countries in the region who were prepared to move in food and other humanitarian aid.
“And I think there’s no excuse to not provide for the medical and the food needs of those people,” Biden added. “It should be done now.”
Israel approved the opening of a border crossing in northern Gaza for the first time since October 7 following Biden’s call with Netanyahu.
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Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Hamas needed to accept a new cease-fire deal brokered by the U.S. that would include the release of hostages. But Hamas has yet to respond to the proposal, and U.S. officials have said the group’s public statements so far “have been less than encouraging.”
In the Univision interview, Biden also slammed his predecessor and 2024 Republican rival, former President Donald Trump, calling him the greatest threat to the nation. He pointed to Trump’s behaviour surrounding the January 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, which has resulted in a multi-pronged federal indictment.
“The idea that he would sit in the office … and watch for hours the attack on the capitol and the destruction and the mayhem and the people who were killed, the police officers who died, and call them political heroes? Call them patriots…” Biden said. “I can’t think of any other time in my lifetime that you’ve had somebody who’s had this kind of attitude.”
A microbial plastic factory for high-quality green plastic
Engineered bacteria can produce a plastic modifier that makes renewably sourced plastic more processable, more fracture resistant and highly biodegradable even in sea water. The Kobe University development provides a platform for the industrial-scale, tunable production of a material that holds great potential for turning the plastic industry green.
Plastic is a hallmark of our civilization. It is a family of highly formable (hence the name), versatile and durable materials, most of which are also persistent in nature and therefore a significant source of pollution. Moreover, many plastics are produced from crude oil, a non-renewable resource. Engineers and researchers worldwide are searching for alternatives, but none have been found that exhibit the same advantages as conventional plastics while avoiding their problems. One of the most promising alternatives is polylactic acid, which can be produced from plants, but it is brittle and does not degrade well.
To overcome these difficulties, Kobe University bioengineers around TAGUCHI Seiichi together with the biodegradable polymer manufacturing company Kaneka Corporation decided to mix polylactic acid with another bioplastic, called LAHB, which has a range of desirable properties, but most of all it is biodegradable and mixes well with polylactic acid. However, in order to produce LAHB, they needed to engineer a strain of bacteria that naturally produces a precursor, by systematically manipulating the organism’s genome through the addition of new genes and the deletion of interfering ones.
In the scientific journal ACS Sustainable Chemistry & Engineering, they now report that they could thus create a bacterial plastic factory that produces chains of LAHB in high amounts, using just glucose as feedstock. In addition, they also show that by modifying the genome, they could control the length of the LAHB chain and thus the properties of the resulting plastic. They were thus able to produce LAHB chains up to ten times longer than with conventional methods, which they call “ultra-high molecular weight LAHB.”
Most importantly, by adding LAHB of this unprecedented length to polylactic acid, they could create a material that exhibits all the properties the researchers had aimed for. The resulting highly transparent plastic is much better moldable and more shock resistant than pure polylactic acid, and also biodegrades in seawater within a week. Taguchi comments on this achievement, saying “By blending polylactic acid with LAHB, the multiple problems of polylactic acid can be overcome in one fell swoop, and the so modified material is expected to become an environmentally sustainable bioplastic that satisfies the conflicting needs of physical robustness and biodegradability.”
The Kobe University bioengineers, however, dream bigger. The strain of bacteria they used in this work is in principle able to use CO2 as a raw material. It should thus be possible to synthesize useful plastics directly from the greenhouse gas. Taguchi explains, “Through the synergy of multiple projects, we aim to realize a biomanufacturing technology that effectively links microbial production and material development.”
This research was commissioned by the New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization of Japan (grant JPNP20005) and funded by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology Japan (grant 19K22069) and the Japan Science and Technology Agency (grant JPMJTM19YC). It was conducted in collaboration with researchers from Kaneka Corporation and the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology.
‘Zombie’ drug found in cannabis THC vapes in UK
Cannabis vapes are being sold containing the dangerous animal tranquiliser xylazine, experts say.
The genomic architecture of inherited DNA variants
You have your mother’s eyes and your father’s smile, but genetics is much more than just what’s on the surface. In a study that spans more than a decade, researchers at Baylor College of Medicine have looked at generations of families in a specific population to reveal the role newly inherited DNA variants play on recessive disease traits, and in the process, they have created a population specific database revealing unique DNA information unseen in larger cohorts.
The findings, now published in Genetics in Medicine OPEN, revealed a correlation between occurrences of complex genetic disorders in those families with increased levels of consanguinity when compared to unaffected populations. Consanguinity is when both parents contribute similar genetic markers to an offspring, such as by sharing a common ancestor, and the genetic information from both the genome inherited from the father and that from the mother are identical.
“We observed that the areas on the chromosome known as ROH, regions of homozygosity, were longer in those individuals in which there was a higher degree of parental consanguinity when compared to those with less,” said Dr. Zeynep Coban-Akdemir, postdoctoral associate in molecular and human genetics at Baylor and currently assistant professor at UTHealth School of Public Health as well as co-lead author on the study. “We can see what is happening when consanguinity is at play and also when new genetic variations are introduced into the family unit of the clan or tribe representing more distant ancestors.”
Dr. Xiaofei Song, a former Baylor graduate student now working as an assistant professor at Moffitt Cancer Center, said, “We further applied a statistical method to systematically assess the impact of these genetic variations on disease. Our results indicate that the newly introduced genetic variations can better explain the clinical features observed in our patients.” Song also is co-lead author on the study.
“The published study contributes to the field of both rare disease and population genomics. From a trainee perspective, the article provides a valuable resource for comprehending fundamental concepts of human genetics and applying diverse computational methods to elucidate these concepts,” said Ph.D candidate Tugce Bozkurt-Yozgatli, with the Acibadem University in Istanbul, Turkey.
Coban-Akdemir, who worked in the Lupski Lab at Baylor where the research was conducted, says this is an important part of the findings because it reveals how genes act within different populations and clans to contribute to different recessive genetic disorders.
The population studied was a cohort of individuals originating from Turkey that is known to have different variations in genetic markers when compared to other populations from greater Europe. Researchers created and analyzed a database of variants derived from exome sequencing, a genomics assay providing a glimpse into genetic variation genomewide, of 773 unrelated volunteers who were affected with various suspected rare Mendelian disease traits, which are diseases caused by a mutation in a single gene and clearly passed down from one generation to the next in accordance with Gregor Mendel expectations. They were compared to another database created by the same researchers of 643 unaffected relatives.
Roughly half of the genetic variants in this Turkish group are not present in greater European control populations that are found in shared databases commonly used by genetic researchers.
“This group of Turkish individuals and families gives us insight into genetics that the average population doesn’t provide. What we found in this Turkish population is very unique. Not only is this group underrepresented in larger databases, but it shows us that they have an enriched genetic variation that is only seen within this population when compared to European populations,” Coban-Akdemir said.
Dr. Davut Pehlivan, assistant professor of pediatrics — neurology at Baylor, said on a single individual there are around 40 million Watson-Crick base pair variations within our DNA.
“The Human Genome Project opened the doors for researchers to investigate entire genomic DNA complement using next-generation sequencing technology. However, more struggles appeared with these advancements. For example, it is hard to pinpoint which variant is causing disease among 40 million variations of our DNA. Studying healthy populations helps us to eliminate many of these common variations from consideration. Thus, we studied both patients and their healthy relatives in the Turkish population.” Pehlivan said. “There are a lot of changes in the genome, and we don’t fully understand the meaning of all of those details, but the data from this population study will help all investigators around the world who are trying to interpret the results of other variants in the human genome DNA.”
Pehlivan described gathering the information and families wanting to participate in genomics research beginning in 2010, traveling long distances to rural areas where the patients were mostly located, a human interest story itself, to make sure the database and clinical information would show an accurate representation for these families.
“We discovered more than 200 genes that contributed to the existing body of disease gene associations. This will help us get closer to understanding, in this population and in others, what is causing these diseases and the human biological perturbation underlying a broad scope of diseases. Our studies will open new avenues of research in human biology and genome biology and eventually help to potentially bring nucleic acid treatments, something used to develop the COVID vaccine, to the patients and families” Pehlivan said.
“This team of researchers is not just helping the population that they studied, but their findings also can be applied to many populations. We all are very different individuals on this planet, yet our genes act very similarly, and we all share a common humanity. So, understanding how genetic disorders work helps us to support affected families across the globe,” said Dr. James R. Lupski, the Cullen Foundation Endowed Chair in Genetics and Genomics at Baylor.
In the past, Coban-Akdemir and Dr. Claudia M.B Carvalho, previously with Baylor and currently in her own laboratory at the Pacific Northwest Research Institute (PNRI) in Seattle who also contributed to this study, have worked on studying variants of genes to identify causes of diseases through production of truncated or altered proteins that take on a new or different function. Their work also focused on databases of populations with and without genetic disease. Their current work reflects the importance of diversity and inclusion as work continues to reveal causes of genetic diseases.
This work was supported in part by the U.S. National Human Genome Research Institute /National Heart Lung and Blood Institute grant number UM1HG006542 to the Baylor Hopkins Center for Mendelian Genomics (BHCMG), the U.S. National Human Genome Research Institute U01HG011758 to the Baylor College of Medicine for the Genomics Research to Elucidate the Genetics of Rare Disease consortium (BCM-GREGoR), the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke Q22 (NINDS) R35NS105078, and the National Human Genome Research Institute U54-HG003273. J.E.P. was supported by NHGRI K08 HG008986.
Beating back bitter taste in medicine
The bitter taste of certain drugs is a barrier to taking some medications as prescribed, especially for people who are particularly sensitive to bitter taste. Published in Clinical Therapeutics, a team from the Monell Chemical Senses Center found that the diabetes drug rosiglitazone could partially block the bitter taste of some especially bad-tasting medications. Rosiglitazone could be added in small doses to other medicines, to make them less bitter and taste better.
This result provided new information. “To our knowledge, there are no previous reports on the bitter-blocking effect of this diabetes drug,” said first author Ha Nguyen, PhD, Monell Postdoctoral Fellow.Rosiglitizone was identified as a potential bitter blocker using tests of human cells from taste tissue, a method of screening developed by Monell and DiscoveryBiomed, Inc., now Eurofins.
The team conducted taste-testing experiments on research participants in the United States and Poland, and they found that adding rosiglitazone to the medicines reduced bitterness for many, but not all, research participants.
“People differ, and we need to test many types of people from different parts of the world to make sure that efforts to reduce bitterness and make medicines easier to take work well for all people,” said senior author Danielle Reed, PhD, Monell Chief Science Officer.
These results suggest having more blockers to choose from will help entirely suppress the bitterness of many types of medicines for a wide range of populations and ancestries. Mixtures of several blockers may help attain a low-to-zero-bitterness standard for even the most bitter-tasting medicines.
“Although rosiglitazone was only partially effective as a bitter blocker in this study, modifying these drugs to improve potency, palatability, and efficacy may allow us to find a better version of this drug,” said Nguyen. “Rosiglitazone is valuable as a bitter blocker because it is potentially effective in most people and is part of a class of drugs already approved worldwide for treating diabetes.”
Next steps in this line of research include a similar study that measures bitter blocking in several hundred African and Asian immigrants to add to the diversity of participants’ ancestries with regard to bitter taste.
This work was supported by the National Institutes of Health (R42 DC017693), the Monell Chemical Senses Center’s Carol M. Christensen Postdoctoral Fellowship in Human Chemosensory Science Fund, and Monell Chemical Senses Center Institutional Funds.
‘Honeytrap’ MP William Wragg Gives Up The Tory Whip
The Tory MP at the centre of the Westminster honeytrap spear-phishing scandal has voluntarily given up the Tory whip.
William Wragg’s decision came a day after he resigned as a vice-chair of the 1922 Committee of Conservative backbenchers, as well as chairman of the Commons public administration and constitutional affairs committee.
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The 36-year-old last week admitted giving the phone numbers of other MPs to a person he met on the dating app Grindr.
Wragg said he had been “weak” after becoming concerned that the man had “compromising” material on him.
A statement from the Tory whips office tonight said: “Following Will Wragg’s decision to step back from his roles on the public accounts and 1922 committees, he has also notified the chief whip that he is voluntarily relinquishing the Conservative whip.”
Senior Tories initially stood by Wragg after the scandal broke, with chancellor Jeremy Hunt praising him for making a “courageous and fulsome apology”.
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But several Tory MPs have since broken ranks to tell of their anger at Wragg’s behaviour.
Andrea Jenkyns branded Wragg an “idiot” for “compromising security”, while Conor Burns said he was “reckless, selfish and thoughtless”.
Pat McFadden, Labour’s national campaign co-ordinator, said: “The fact it was left to William Wragg to resign is another indictment of Rishi Sunak’s weakness.
“His MPs were left yet again being sent out to defend a position that has collapsed.
“Rishi Sunak puts party management first every time – and he can’t even do that properly. It is no way to run a country.
“Britain deserves so much better than this endless Tory chaos.”
Wragg, who is standing down at the next election, told The Times last week: “I got chatting to a guy on an app and we exchanged pictures. We were meant to meet up for drinks, but then didn’t. Then he started asking for numbers of people. I was worried because he had stuff on me. He gave me a WhatsApp number, which doesn’t work now.
“I’ve hurt people by being weak. I was scared. I’m mortified. I’m so sorry that my weakness has caused other people hurt.”
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Those targeted by the phishing attack were sent unsolicited messages on WhatsApp from senders identifying themselves as “Charlie” or “Abi”.
Police and parliamentary authorities have also launched investigations into the scandal.
Nasal laser treatment rolled out after trial
The light-activated antimicrobial quickly kills bugs including viruses, bacteria, and fungi.
Measles outbreak declared as new cases confirmed
Four children in south-east Wales have the virus and are being treated, authorities say.
