Category Health/Medical

A team of researchers led by Feng Zhang at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard and the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT has uncovered the first programmable RNA-guided system in eukaryotes—organisms that include fungi, plants, and animals.

In a study published in Nature, the team describes how the system is based on a protein called Fanzor. They showed that Fanzor proteins use RNA as a guide to target DNA precisely, and that Fanzors can be reprogrammed to edit the genome of human cells...

Researchers at the Centre for Genomic Regulation (CRG) in Barcelona and the Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine in the Helmholtz Association in Berlin have revealed how cells accelerate changes to their identity, a process known as cell fate conversion.

The study, published today in the journal eLife, has implications for cancer research as the disease often arises from errors in cell fate decisions. The study could eventually lead to new methods of accelerating or manipulating the molecular mechanisms involved in the formation of cancer.

Central to the study is C/EBPα...

It could be the shopping trip that saves your life: supermarket trolleys are helping to diagnose atrial fibrillation which can then be treated to prevent disabling or fatal strokes. The research is presented today at ACNAP 2023, a scientific congress of the European Society of Cardiology (ESC).

“This study shows the potential of taking health checks to the masses without disrupting daily routines,” said study author Professor Ian Jones of Liverpool John Moores University, UK. “Over the course of two months, we identified 39 patients who were unaware that they had atrial fibrillation...

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...