Category Health/Medical

This is an antibody-stained cross section of a mouse retina. Credit: Andrei Tkachenko/Columbia University Medical Center

Vision researchers have discovered a gene that causes myopia, but only in people who spend a lot of time in childhood reading or doing other ‘nearwork.’ Using a database of approximately 14,000 people, the researchers found that those with a certain variant of the gene – called APLP2 – were 5X more likely to develop myopia in their teens if they had read an hour or more each day in their childhood. Those who carried the APLP2 risk variant but spent less time reading had no additional risk of developing myopia.

This is the first known evidence of gene-environment interaction in myopia,” says Andrei Tkatchenko, MD, PhD, of CUMC...

Reconstituting epithelial microtissues with programmed size, shape, composition, spatial heterogeneity and embedding ECM Credit: http://www.nature.com/nmeth/journal/vaop/ncurrent/images/nmeth.3553-F3.jpg

A technique to build organoids of human tissues using a process that turns human cells into a biological equivalent of LEGO bricks has been developed. These mini-tissues in a dish can be used to study how particular structural features of tissue affect normal growth or go awry in cancer. They could be used for therapeutic drug screening and to help teach researchers how to grow whole human organs.

Called DNA Programmed Assembly of Cells (DPAC), thousands of custom-designed organoids, eg models of human mammary glands containing several hundred cells each, can be built in a matter of hours...

This GIF (slightly sped up) shows the honeycomb mesh of cells being compressed by contracting heart cells growing along the scaffold (Image: Boyang Zhang).

Engineers at the University of Toronto just made assembling functional heart tissue as easy as fastening your shoes. The team has created a biocompatible scaffold that allows sheets of beating heart cells to snap together just like Velcro™. “One of the main advantages is the ease of use,” says Professor Milica Radisic (ChemE, IBBME). “We can build larger tissue structures immediately before they are needed, and disassemble them just as easily. I don’t know of any other technique that gives this ability.”

Growing heart muscle cells in the lab is nothing new...

A/Prof Amy Millen’ team found women who are deficient in vitamin D and have a specific high-risk genotype are 6.7X more likely to develop AMD than women with sufficient vitamin D status and no high risk genotype.
“This is not a study that can, alone, prove a causal association, but it does suggest that if you’re at high genetic risk for AMD, having a sufficient vitamin D status might help reduce your risk.”

Macular degeneration is characterized by the deterioration of the macula, a small part of the central retina where the eye’s photoreceptors (rods and cones) are most highly concentrated...