Tag: science

Racing slime molds

new sport: racing slime molds

The first ever World Dicty Race will require cells to navigate a complex microfluidic maze to reach a pool of chemoattractant at the finish line. Diffusion of the chemoattractant will create a spatial gradient to guide cells along the shortest path to the finish line. The challenge is to engineer Dicty or HL60 cells to be both smart and fast!

Super Rice

GMO panic in 3.. 2.. 1..

It’s more important to uphold misguided principles than to feed the poor, so i’m fully expecting a drive to outlaw this somehow.

A strain of genetically modified rice has been developed to handle drought, salty soils and lack of fertilizer. The aim is to “climate-proof” rice farms in Asia and Africa so that they can grow the same variety each year, regardless of the conditions.

2022-05-04: Golden Rice

Golden Rice is just like our ordinary rice, but superior in the sense that it is enriched with beta-carotene, which the body converts into vitamin A as needed. The beta-carotene compound gives this grain its yellow-orange or golden color, hence its name. It is the first genetically engineered rice with nutritional benefit in the world, and the first in Asia to have been granted a biosafety permit for commercial propagation. The pilot-scale deployment of Golden Rice in the Philippines will open the door for the first direct community or public experience of Golden Rice in the world.

2022-07-21: 40% more yield

By giving a Chinese rice variety a second copy of one of its own genes, researchers have boosted its yield by 40%. The change helps the plant absorb more fertilizer, boosts photosynthesis, and accelerates flowering, all of which could contribute to larger harvests. Isotopic tracers revealed the plants with extra copies of OsDREB1C took up extra nitrogen through their roots and moved more of it to the shoots. The modified plants were also better equipped for photosynthesis; they had 33% more chloroplasts, the photosynthetic organelles within plant cells, in their leaves and 38% more RuBisCO, a key enzyme in photosynthesis.

2023-08-31: Adaptive immune systems for plants

Plants lack an adaptive immune system — a powerful system capable of detecting practically any foreign molecule — and instead rely on a more general immune system. Unfortunately, pathogens can rapidly evolve new ways to avoid detection, resulting in colossal crop loss. Using a rice plant as a model, scientists have bioengineered a hybrid molecule — by fusing components from an animal’s adaptive immune system with those of a plant’s innate immune system — that protects it from a pathogen. A proof-of-principle study modified a protein called Pik-1, one of the NLRs produced by a rice plant. The team replaced Pik-1’s ID region with an antibody fragment that binds to fluorescent proteins. Next, they exposed bioengineered and control (unaltered) plants to a pathogen (Potato virus X) that itself was genetically modified to express fluorescent proteins. The bioengineered plants showed significantly less fluorescence, suggesting that the NLR-antibody hybrid molecules produced by the plants successfully blocked the virus from replicating.

This technology could yield “made-to-order resistance genes” to protect crops against pathogens and pests.

Europe is scientifically illiterate

This explains a lot of the GMO / nuclear paranoia in Europe.

In 15 European nations, including Germany, France, and the United Kingdom, the scientific literacy rate was between 10 and 19% US scores very highly in Adult Science Literacy. The bad news is that global scientific literacy is shockingly low. Among the 34 nations tested in 2005, the SLR rose above 30% in only one nation, Sweden, whose SLR was 35%. For the United States, the good news is that in all of Miller’s results since the beginning of testing in 1988, the US scored above nearly all other nations. In the 2005 tests, for example, the US ranked second with an SLR of 28%.

The author of a 2009 study concluded that “the college and university general education requirement to take at least a year of science courses (fairly unique to US universities, where “breadth requirements” are emphasized) makes a major contribution to the civic scientific literacy of US citizens,” and that the surprisingly high US SLR is a result of the positive impact of these college-level science courses for non-science students.

To be clear, America is the only major country that requires college students to complete a full year of science. As a result, science literacy of US adults is higher than in other developed nations.

Iceland is sequenced

Researchers have sequenced the whole genomes of 2500 people from Iceland. They have genotyped ~120k Icelanders. They can impute whole genome sequence down to variants with less than 0.1% frequency.

On the plan to sequence all icelanders, to find patterns of disease.

In the trove of data, Decode found rare mutations that dramatically increase the risk for Alzheimer’s, gallstones, atrial fibrillation, and liver and thyroid diseases—mutations that appear to be the result of “knocked out” or missing pieces of DNA. Perhaps most intriguing is the detective work that lies ahead. Decode identified 1171 knocked out genes, present in nearly 8% of the 104K people studied. The next step is to work backward—in the opposite direction one normally goes in genetics research—and cross-reference these knockouts with medical records and phenotypical data and try to determine the impact of these mistakes in nature.