Humans and baker’s yeast, Saccharomyces cerevisiae, last shared an ancestor 1 ga BP. Despite the evolutionary gulf, human genes can substitute for 47% of the genes essential for yeast survival
Tag: biotech
Converting blood to neural cells
Now we can take easy to obtain blood samples, and make the main cell types of neurological systems in a dish that is specialized for each patient. Until now, no one’s had the ability and required technology to actually test different drugs to find something that targets the peripheral nervous system, and not the central nervous system, in a patient-specific manner
Electrical angiogenesis
The pulses stimulated angiogenesis — the process by which new blood vessels form — increasing blood flow to the damaged area and resulting in wounds healing significantly faster.
Bioethics will kill us all
We have ideological biases that say, “we shouldn’t be meddling with nature” In China, 95% of an audience would say, “Obviously you should make babies genetically healthier, happier, and brighter!” There’s a big cultural difference
As of 2021-07-01, things are even worse:
Probably the biggest mistake was not intentionally infecting vaccinated volunteers. This could be done in 1 month, vs 6.5 months for the ecological trials that the entire world did out of misguided PR ethics. (2.5 is probably more realistic given signups, approvals, and big pharma’s slow data analysis and reporting. That’s still 100K of lives.)
1DaySooner wrote a letter. The world’s foremost consequentialist signed. The world’s foremost deontologist signed. 2 of the most prominent bioethicists in the world signed. 15 Nobelists signed. 10s of philosophers who otherwise agree on extremely little signed. But they’re unethical.
Rarely do I so strongly feel the boot of others on my neck, and humanity’s neck.
The one distinctively courageous thing about the UK – the human challenge trials which got 40K volunteers – actually eventually started!.. In January 2021, with n=90.
20-Year-Old Rum in 6 Days
Our trick was to develop a system that breaks the wood polymers apart in the same proportion as classical aging. Then force the esterification
this is the synthetic diamonds of spirits
Microbial genome engineering
this looks like a very interesting talk:
Dr. Wang will discuss advances in microbial genome engineering that enable rapid reprogramming of bacteria in the gut and the skin. This enables novel probiotics to fight diseases and future augmentation of human physiological function
Craig Venter Keynote
He discusses various projects for artificial chromosomes and cells.
He describes work to rewrite the pig genome to increase the supply of transplant organs 100 times.
He describes developing a better biotech toolbox.
He describes converting digital information into biology.
They are working on antimicrobial phage genome engineering.
They are working to decode the brain using genomics and better brain structure analysis.
Working to correct genetic errors in stem cells.
Automated synthesis
Towards a much more automated organic chemistry, a series of articles by Derek Lowe.
MIDA complexes have an unusual property: they stick to silica, even when eluted with MeOH/ether. But THF moves them right off. This trick allows something very useful indeed. It’s a universal catch-and-release for organic intermediates. And that, as the paper shows, opens the door to a lot of automated synthesis. The idea, the hope, is that if the field does become modular and mechanized, that it frees us up to do things that we couldn’t do before. Think about biomolecules: if peptides and oligonucleotides still had to be synthesized as if they were huge natural products, by human-wave-attack teams of day-and-night grad students, how far do you think biology would have gotten by now? Synthesizing such things was Nobel-worthy at first, then worth a PhD all by themselves, but now it’s a routine part of everyday work. Organic synthesis is heading down the exact same road
End of synthesis? You must be joking. This is not even close. As I tried (ineffectively) to make clear yesterday, I don’t think that this particular paper is The End. But it’s the first thing I’ve seen that makes me think that there is an end to a lot of traditional organic chemistry.
No software is yet producing “Whoa, look at that” syntheses. But let’s be honest: most humans aren’t, either. The upper reaches of organic synthesis can still produce such things – and the upper stratum of organic chemists can still produce new and starting routes even to less complex molecules. But seeing machine-generated synthesis coming along in its present form just serves to point out that it’s not so much that the machines are encroaching onto human territory, so much as pointing out that some of the human work has gradually become more mechanical.
ML drug discovery
I remember years ago, donating your spare CPU was all the rage. There was an offshoot called Foldit that allowed to short-circuit this with human spatial sense. I wonder what an updated version that takes these deep learning results into account would look like: Would humans just get asked for the most fiendishly hard problems? Or is this another area where we should concede?
Vastly better X-ray crystallography
Free-electron lasers provide femtosecond X-ray pulses with a peak brilliance 10 billion times higher than any previously available X-ray source. such pulses could outrun key damage processes and allow structure determination without the need for crystallization and would be sufficient to image HIV, influenza and herpes, and further improvements may soon allow researchers to tackle the study of single proteins
it would be a huge improvement if you don’t need to grow crystals.
Gregor J. Rothfuss 