Category Biology/Biotechnology

The biological roots of autism continue to perplex researchers, despite a growing body of studies looking at an increasing array of genetic, cellular and microbial data. Recently, scientists have homed in on a new and promising area of focus: the microbiome. This collection of microbes that inhabit the human gut has been shown to play a role in autism, but the mechanics of this link have remained awash in ambiguity.

Taking a fresh computational approach to the problem, a study published today, June 26, in Nature Neuroscience sheds new light on the relationship between the microbiome and autism...

One of the big reasons that cancer is difficult to treat is that patients respond to treatments differently, and these differences can rarely be anticipated. In most cases, determining whether and how a patient will respond to any given therapy requires administering it to the patient and then waiting and watching. That is a lot of pressure for researchers and physicians and a lot of risk for cancer patients, and added expense.

If a patient’s response were predictable, optimal thera...

Probiotics can help maintain a healthy gut microbiome or restore populations of “good bacteria” after a heavy course of antibiotics. But now, they could also be used as an effective treatment strategy for certain intestinal diseases, such as Crohn’s disease. Researchers reporting in ACS Central Science have developed a microgel delivery system for probiotics that keeps “good” bacteria safe while actively clearing out “bad” ones. In mice, the system treated intestinal inflammation without side effects.

In the digestive system, there’s a delicate balance of bacterial populations...

Teaching machine learning tools to detect specific objects in a specific image and discount others is a “game-changer” that could lead to advancements in cancer detection, according to leading researchers from the University of Surrey.

Surrey is set to present its unique sketch-based object detection tool at this year’s Computer Vision, Pattern, and Recognition Conference (CVPR). The tool allows the user to sketch an object, which the AI will use as a basis to search within an image to find something that matches the sketch — while discounting more general options.

Professor Yi-Zhe Song, leads this research at the University of Surrey’s Institute for People-Centred AI. He commented:

“An artist’s sketch is full of individual cues that words cannot convey concisely, reiterating...