groups of customers coming together around shared genotypes and SNPs, comparing notes about their conditions or backgrounds and identifying areas for further scientific research on their own.
2008-05-28: fill out surveys to strengthen the links between your genetic makeup and open research questions. Sounds a lot more fun than “walking for the cure”. 2015-03-15: 23andme enters drugs. This should be very interesting. To date, they have SNPs from 800k people, and that could grow rapidly. I’d expect them to release new higher resolution kits and make them available at cost to their customers.
23andMe, the Google -backed personal genetics startup, will no longer just sell tests to consumers, or genetic data to pharmaceutical companies. This morning, it announced that it plans to start inventing medicines itself.
2015-06-18: 23andme has 1M customers now. I’m pleased to be among the first 0.2% 🙂 2019-07-16: 23andMe Chip Updates
100s of 23andMe customers tested on those earlier chips have pleaded with the company for some way to get access to its latest features, like the health reports and improved ancestry estimates. Many worried about whether their old data was accurate.
2023-06-01: Now they’re doing cancer drugs, but it’s not obvious why their SNPs matter all that much? It feels they need to rebase their approach on much more powerful technology like full genome sequencing. That said, I’ve yet to receive a benefit from my Nebula 30x DNA sequencing.
23ME’610 is designed to do something similar, by binding to a receptor called CD200R1, which was identified as a promising anti-cancer target by 23andMe scientists studying the 23andMe database. CD200R1 is a cell surface receptor protein that is mostly expressed on human immune cells, specifically cancer-fighting T cells and myeloid cells. Tumor cells can express CD200, the only known binding partner for CD200R1, and use this regulatory protein to turn off the activity of T cells. A drug that blocks the ability of CD200 to bind to CD200R1 may activate T cells and enhance their ability to kill cancer cells.
The breakthrough nanoradio consists of a single carbon-nanotube molecule that serves simultaneously as all the essential components of a radio — antenna, tunable band-pass filter, amplifier and demodulator. “I’m totally amazed that it works so well. Making individual components are good breakthroughs, but the holy grail was putting it all together. So we’re ecstatic that we were able to achieve that full integration.”
The radio opens the possibility of creating radio-controlled interfaces on the subcellular scale, which may have applications in the areas of medical and sensor technology.
a technique that could allow neurologists to draw a detailed wiring plan of the mammalian brain by inserting genes coding for fluorescent proteins into mice. Dubbed ‘Brainbow’, the system reveals individual neurons within the nervous system in up to 90 different colors.
By making it glow like a jellyfish. Coming to a brain near you, soon? 2007-12-31: Like a computer
If we look back over recent centuries we will see the brain described as a hydrodynamic machine, clockwork, and as a steam engine. When I was a child in the 1950’s I read that the human brain was a telephone switching network. Later it became a digital computer, and then a massively parallel digital computer. A few years ago someone put up their hand after a talk I had given at the University of Utah and asked a question I had been waiting for a couple of years: “Isn’t the human brain just like the world wide web?” The brain always seems to be one of the most advanced technologies that we humans currently have.
In neuroscience, too, Mr Hawkins is going his own way. Most neuroscientists are experimentalists, and focus on a small part of the brain. Mr Hawkins, by contrast, is interested in the big picture of how the brain works. In essence, his theory holds that the brain processes information using pattern-recognition “nodes” arranged hierarchically, much like the organogram of a large company. Over time, nodes at each level in the hierarchy identify and learn frequently observed patterns. When a known pattern triggers a node, it sends a signal to the next level up in the hierarchy. As multiple signals move up the hierarchy, nodes at higher levels learn to identify and predict more complex patterns. Predictions are passed down the hierarchy so that mismatches between predicted and observed patterns can be recognized.
You’ve probably seen the “connectome” map of the major networks between different functional areas of the human brain. Cool graphic. But this is just an average. It raises a lot of questions: How does this map relate to your brain? Do these connections persist over a period of months or more? Or do they vary with different conditions (happy or sad mood, etc.)? And what if you’re a schizophrenic, alcoholic, meditator, or videogamer, etc., how does your connectome look?
These questions obsessed Stanford psychologist Russell Poldrack, leading to his “MyConnectome project.” In the noble DIY tradition of Marie Curie, Jonas Salk, and Albert Hoffman, he started off his day by climbing into an MRI machine and scanning his brain for 10 minutes Tuesdays and Thursdays every week for a year and a half — making his brain the most studied in the world.
He also fasted and drew blood on Tuesdays for testing with metabolomics (chemical fingerprints in biological fluids) and genomics (gene tests, performed by 23andMe). The results — the most complete study of the brain’s network connections over time — are published in open-access Nature Communications.
These topological players provide a strong mathematical framework for measuring the activity of a neural network, and the process a brain undergoes when exposed to stimuli. The framework works without parameters (for example there is no measurement of distance between neurons in the model) and one can study the local structure by considering cliques, or how they bind together to form a global structure with cavities. By continuing to study the topological properties of these emerging and disappearing structures alongside neuroscientists we could come closer to understanding our own brains!
Unity 3D game-engine lies at the heart of Glass Brain, data visualization of real-time brain function. Neuroscape’s unique multidisciplinary approach involves the development of custom-designed, closed-loop systems that integrate recent technological advances in software (e.g., 3D video game engines, multimodal recording and brain computer interface algorithms) with the latest innovations in hardware (e.g., virtual reality, motion capture, GPU computing, wearable physiological recordings, and transcranial brain stimulation). Building effective closed-loop technologies necessitates collaborative development teams of experienced designers, programmers, multimedia engineers, UI experts, and artist/musicians, working closely with our Core scientists to generate engaging interactive experiences complete with adaptivity, rewards, art, music, and story.
Janelia researchers released a wiring diagram of the fly brain that contains 25k neurons and the 20m connections between them. The so-called “connectome” corresponds to the fly’s hemibrain, a region that’s 250 micrometers across—the size of a dust mite. It’s ~33% of the total fly brain, and contains many of the critical regions responsible for memory, navigation, and learning.
By analyzing the connectome of just a small part of the fly brain — the central complex, which plays an important role in navigation — Dr. Jayaraman and his colleagues identified 10s of new neuron types and pinpointed neural circuits that appear to help flies make their way through the world. The work could ultimately help provide insight into how all kinds of animal brains, including our own, process a flood of sensory information and translate it into appropriate action. “Being able to trace that activity through that circuit — from sensory back to motor through this complex intermediate circuit — is really amazing. The connectome showed us a lot more than we thought it was going to.”
Connectomics is making important progress even where it can’t yet be large scale and where only partial connectomes exist. Neuroscientists uncovered 10s of new neuron types and circuits that seem to aid in fly navigation. The work was hailed as a major milestone in revealing how flies incorporate sensory information and translate it into action. The successes of connectomics can be bittersweet. For many years, a central criticism of connectomics has been that it is insufficient to explain how the brain functions. Despite having had a map of the brain of C. elegans for decades, scientists still struggle to draw meaningful conclusions about its neural functions. To Lichtman, parsing the seemingly limitless interconnectivity of more complex brains is a challenge that tests the limits of human and artificial intelligence.
In the last decade or so, advances in computer processing power have allowed researchers to transform ultrasound technology. Instead of emitting individual beams, these newer ultrasound systems send out a series of plane waves—an array of ultrasound beams that together form a plane—that hit their target at different angles. The resulting images are composites that are multiple orders of magnitude sharper than conventional ultrasound, MRI, or CT scans, without the trade-offs faced by other imaging methods. MRI machines, for example, demand hugely powerful and expensive magnets to improve their resolution. The new forms of ultrasound can also work 100x faster than conventional ultrasound tools, which is especially useful during medical emergencies, when time is of the essence. Such speeds allow ultrasound to track seizures as they happen.
Ultrasound imaging could read brain activity, revealing how a person wants to move their hand to the left, and that data could be fed into a computer that controls a robotic arm. X-rays that map the exact geometry of a skull can guide a model of exactly how the skull distorts ultrasound waves. And that model can be used to correct ultrasound images so they appear undistorted, as though there weren’t any skull there at all.
Scientists have generated the first complete connectome of a complex animal — the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster. The map shows all 3016 neurons and 548k synapses tightly packed in a young Drosophila’s brain, which is smaller than a poppy seed. “Now we have a reference brain. We can look at what happens to connectivity in models of Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases and of any degenerative disease.”
Until now, scientists had mapped the connectomes of only the worms Caenorhabditis elegans and Platynereis dumerilii, and the larva of the sea squirt Ciona intestinalis. Drosophila was an ideal model for connectome studies, because scientists have already sequenced its genome, and the larvae have transparent bodies. Fruit flies also exhibit sophisticated behaviors — including learning, navigating landscapes, processing smells and weighing the risks and benefits of an action.
A voxel of the new images measures 5 microns, 64m times smaller than a clinical MRI voxel. New insights from mouse imaging will in turn lead to a better understanding of conditions in humans, such as how the brain changes with age, diet, or even with neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s.
We provide insights into the underlying mechanisms by focusing on song production in 2 contexts in Drosophila melanogaster: near versus far from a female. Using quantitative behaviour, modelling, broad-range optogenetics, circuit manipulations and neural recordings, we found that simple song (of primarily the pulse mode) is driven by low-level or brief activation of pC2 brain neurons, which drive a pair of pIP10 brain-to-VNC descending neurons. To generate complex bouts, stronger, longer-duration pC2 neuron activity simultaneously drives pIP10 and recruits P1a neurons to functionally disinhibit core circuitry in the VNC, allowing pIP10 descending signals to produce rapid alternations of pulse and sine song. Song alternations are facilitated by combination of mutual inhibition and rebound excitability in pulse-driving and sine-driving neurons of the VNC, allowing for sine song production without the need for excitatory drive. Here, the sensory context, encoded ultimately by acute P1a neural activity, determines which song repertoire (simple pulse or complex) is accessible to descending commands, effectively implementing context dependence via two operational modes of a single circuit.
Each of these projects is important in its own right, but as they progress — some have been going more than 10 years — there is a need for better communication between them. Several of the projects are using similar or identical technologies. It makes sense for the teams to liaise more closely, at the very least to begin a discussion on how to establish shared data standards, which they have not yet done.
Guinness has certified the project as the world’s most powerful distributed computing system. Folding@home topped 1 petaflop last month. By comparison, the well-known SETI@home project has topped out at 265 teraflops.
Folding@Home, thanks to the playstation, is now at 1 Petaflops
Androgen receptor is out of control, causing a cancerous tumor! You have to design another protein to block it and stop the cancer. Your protein needs to fit tightly up against androgen receptor. Find the side chain that plugs the hole!
Blind, accurate structure prediction for small RNAs, relying solely on the minimization of free energy, seems feasible. Once this challenge is met, modeling efforts become tantalizing possibilities for large ribozymes and protein/RNA complexes.
with your help, we now have a number of brand new designed enzymes that speed up the chemical reactions they were designed to catalyze by more than 50000 fold!
While it seems next to impossible to believe that we’ll be able to maintain flights back and forth between Earth and the ISS in a post-oil economy, it is nonetheless quite fascinating to think that, someday, depressed teenagers in suburban Arizona might pop space-made antidepressants, affecting hormonal moods through the use of literally extra-terrestrial substances; or musicians in small apartments in Prague might swallow attention deficit drugs crystallized in microgravity, writing the world’s most intricate symphonies in response; or perhaps even illegal new hallucinogens will be developed in windowless, symmetrical rooms hovering 400 km above the Earth’s surface, and they’ll be taken by Rem Koolhaas-reading students at SCI-Arc who then draw up plans for self-healing tentacular cities, under the influence of space.
Either way, imagine that as your summer job! Up in space, wearing a hermetically sealed white suit, growing proteins.
Gregor J. Rothfuss 