Category Biology/Biotechnology

HDL cholesterol and risk of all-cause mortality in the general population. Based on 52 268 men and 64 240 women from the Copenhagen General Population Study and the Copenhagen City Heart Study combined. Hazard ratio (solid line) and 95% confidence interval (dashed lines) from age and study adjusted Cox regression using restricted cubic splines. The concentration of HDL cholesterol associated with lowest mortality was used as reference. The light blue area indicates the distribution of HDL cholesterol concentrations in men and women. CI, confidence interval; HDL, high-density lipoprotein.

HDL might not be as good as we think...

Protein secondary structure analysis of dried blood serum using infrared spectroscopy to identify markers for colitis screening. Journal of Biophotonics, 2017; e201700057 DOI: 10.1002/jbio.201700057

A fast, simple blood test for ulcerative colitis using infrared spectroscopy could provide a cheaper, less invasive alternative for screening compared to colonoscopy, which is now the predominant test, according to a study between the Department of Physics and Astronomy and the Institute for Biomedical Sciences at Georgia State University...

Artist’s rendering of bioreactor (left) loaded with bacteria decorated with cadmium sulfide, light-absorbing nanocrystals (middle) to convert light, water and carbon dioxide into useful chemicals (right). Credit: Kelsey K. Sakimoto

Photosynthesis provides energy for the vast majority of life on Earth. But chlorophyll, the green pigment that plants use to harvest sunlight, is relatively inefficient. To enable humans to capture more of the sun’s energy than natural photosynthesis can, scientists have taught bacteria to cover themselves in tiny, highly efficient solar panels to produce useful compounds. “Rather than rely on inefficient chlorophyll to harvest sunlight, I’ve taught bacteria how to grow and cover their bodies with tiny semiconductor nanocrystals,” says Kelsey K. Sakimoto, Ph.D....

This is a diagram of human-plant-microbe interactions mediated by plant hormones. Credit: Chanclud and Lacombe

A bowl of salad contains more than vitamins and minerals. Plant matter also includes remnants of the hormones plants produce to control how they grow, age, and manage water intake. Recently, scientists have reported that our GI microbes and cells may respond to these hormones and even produce similar molecules of their own “We know that gut microbiota are involved in human diseases, and that microbes can biosynthesize plant hormones that affect humans, so it makes sense to investigate animal-microbe interactions from the perspective of plants,” says Benoît Lacombe of France’s Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique.

For instance, gut microbes and dietary factors have been ti...