Tan Rasab

Antibiotic resistance – the ability of harmful bacteria to survive treatment by antibiotics – is a  growing threat . It is making it harder to treat life-threatening infections, including  tuberculosis ,  MRSA , and  gonorrhoea  – and increasing the risks of even minor surgery.  In order to solve antibiotic resistance, one thing researchers first need to understand is how to stop resistance from happening to begin with.  A recent study  conducted at the University of Oxford has helped increase that understanding by showing bacteria can cleverly rearrange their genetics in order to evade the effects of an antibiotic. Bacteria have multiple ways of evolving resistance. They can mutate to prevent antibiotics from targeting them, which can be done by modifying the proteins within the cell where antibiotics act. They can also acquire genes that help them produce antibiotic-destroying molecules, called enzymes. https://elifesciences.org/articles/62474

Imagine there are arrows that are lethal when fired on your enemies yet harmless if they fall on your friends. It's easy to see how these would be an amazing advantage in warfare, if they were real. However, something just like these arrows does indeed exist, and they are used in warfare ... just on a different scale. These weapons are called tailocins, and the reality is almost stranger than fiction. "Tailocins are extremely strong protein nanomachines made by  bacteria ," explained Vivek Mutalik, a research scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) who studies tailocins and phages, the bacteria-infecting viruses that tailocins appear to be remnants of. "They look like phages but they don't have the capsid, which is the 'head' of the phage that contains the viral DNA and replication machinery. So, they're like a spring-powered needle that goes and sits on the  target cell , then appears to poke all the way through the  cell me...

A state-wide genomic sequencing infrastructure not only helps address COVID-19 today but is also a tool that enhances public health effectiveness in the long-term. Without sequencing data, public health authorities are blind to viral mutations that may reduce the efficacy of current response tools (for example, safety protocols, tests, vaccines, and clinical care) and are unable to take precise public health action. Sequencing is a powerful tool that enables public health authorities to improve precision, efficacy, and efficiency of public health response. Sequencing can be used for more efficient source identification of foodborne disease (for example, norovirus, E. coli, Salmonella, and Hepatitis A), ascertaining the origins of 'outlier' cases—those with no known connection to other cases—to contain further outbreaks (as was done in the latter phases of the 2014–16 Ebola outbreak in Guinea),6 and developing diagnostics and vaccines for novel viruses (as was the case w...

A new study by Stanford University biologists finds an explanation for the idea that physical characteristics such as skin pigmentation are "only skin deep." Using genetic modeling, the team has found that when two populations with distinct traits combine over generations, traits of individuals within the resulting "admixed" population come to reveal very little about individuals' ancestry. Their findings were published March 27 in a special edition of the  American Journal of Physical Anthropology  on race and racism. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ajpa.24261

Researchers have identified 76 overlapping genetic locations that determine the shapes of our faces and our brains. The genetic signals that influence face and brain shape are enriched by regions of the genome that regulate gene activity during embryogenesis. https://neurosciencenews.com/face-brain-shape-genetics-18174/

Finding may lead to new therapeutic strategy for disorders causing blindness "We believe these cells, called neural progenitor cells, are present in the optic nerve tissue at birth and remain for decades, helping to nourish the nerve fibers that form the optic nerve," said study leader Steven Bernstein, MD, PhD, Professor and Vice Chair of the Department of Ophthalmology and Visual Sciences at the University of Maryland School of Medicine. "Without these cells, the fibers may lose their resistance to stress, and begin to deteriorate, causing damage to the optic nerve, which may ultimately lead to glaucoma." https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2020/07/27/2001858117

The notion that spermatozoon moves like "a snake or an eel swimming in water" was coined by Antonie van Leeuwenhoek in 1678, who invented the commonly used compound microscope, and used his device to study his ejaculate. This, however, is an optical illusion; using a 3D microscope the researchers from the University of Bristol and Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México discovered that sperm actually roll—rather than snake—to swim forward.  "Sperm are very cheeky little creatures. Our new research using 3D microscopy shows that we have all been victims of a sperm deception," said Hermes Gadelha to  CNN , who is one of the study's authors and the head of Polymaths Laboratory at the University of Bristol. The scientists hope that this new discovery of sperm movement will have implications in fertility science.  https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/6/31/eaba5168.full