Category Biology/Biotechnology

Even though the COVID-19 public health emergency classification will expire this spring, the lingering effects of the pandemic remain. A constant puzzle to solve since the first year of the pandemic has been “long COVID,” a condition in which those infected with the virus have symptoms that linger months or even years after they have cleared the initial infection.

“Long COVID is estimated to affect one out of every five people who get COVID,” says Brent Palmer, Ph.D., associate professor of allergy and clinical immunology at the University of Colorado School of Medicine. “It’s described as persistent symptoms that last longer than four weeks post-initial infection. Those symptoms can include chest pain, cough, shortness of breath, brain fog, and fatigue.”

The virus that lingers
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In a new study, researchers discovered an unknown mechanism of how cells ‘remember’ their identity when they divide – the cells’ so-called epigenetic memory. As time passes and we get older, many cells need to replenish themselves. They do so by dividing into new cells: Heart cells, skin cells and so on.

But when cells continue to divide and make new cells, they lose some of the information from their mother cell...

An evolutionary human foraging instinct, fueled by fructose production in the brain, may hold clues to the development and possible treatment of Alzheimer’s disease (AD), according to researchers at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus.

The study, published recently in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, offers a new way of looking at a fatal disease characterized by abnormal accumulations of proteins in the brain that slowly erode memory and cognition.

“We make the case that Alzheimer’s disease is driven by diet,” said the study’s lead author Richard Johnson, MD, professor at the University of Colorado School of Medicine specializing in renal disease and hypertension...

DNA can help to stimulate bone healing in a localised and targeted manner, for example after a complicated fracture or after severe tissue loss following surgery...