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Life and Earth Sciences

6000+ Phages with CRISPR: Index #76

ByadminNovember 29, 2022

An idyllic peace settles over my apartment. It’s the Sunday morning after Thanksgiving. My family is asleep, my cats lounge beneath sunbathed glass, and a gossamer thread of steam rises from my coffee mug. Life is good, writing is nice. Here’s to another year. P.S. Every

Life and Earth Sciences

Control Genes with Light: Index #75

ByadminNovember 21, 2022

Team USA is ranked 16th but won’t make it out of the group stages. My money’s on Brazil. A new preprint, posted to bioRxiv, reports that photosensitive proteins can be mutated to respond differently to variable levels of light. By introducing these modified proteins into

Life and Earth Sciences

Synthetic Biology in the Real World: Index #74

ByadminNovember 7, 2022

I’m out on vacation this week, so no newsletter next Monday. Thanks for reading! Bacteria are powerful, little machines. They’ve been engineered to detect environmental contaminants, spot inflammatory signals inside the body, and ‘sniff’ out certain cancers in mice. I’ve

Life and Earth Sciences

Five Gene Therapy Trials (The Medicine Issue): Index #73

ByadminOctober 31, 2022

iGEM judging is over, so it’s back to the grind. Particular congratulations to the high school team from Lambert, Georgia who walked away with a top prize. They blew me away with their breadth of knowledge and enthusiasm — bright futures ahead. A slew of Phase I trials were

Life and Earth Sciences

A New Family of CRISPR Proteins: Index #72

ByadminOctober 24, 2022

Newly unearthed CRISPR proteins, discovered in a little-known phylum of gram-negative bacteria called Armatimonadetes, have been dubbed Cas12l. The reason is simple: Scientists have already discovered Cas12a-k. But these new proteins are worth noting for a few reasons. Much

Life and Earth Sciences

Resurrecting Ancient Rubiscos: Index #71

ByadminOctober 17, 2022

Image courtesy of Luca Schulz. There’s a great paper about the evolutionary history of Rubisco out in Science this week. Ancient versions of the enzyme — which is about 2.4 billion years old and first arose in archaea — were ‘resurrected’ in the lab to study how it mutated

Life and Earth Sciences

DNA from Ancient Greek Soldiers: Index #70

ByadminOctober 11, 2022

The bookshelf behind my writing desk is overburdened with heavy tomes about classical Greece and Rome. It teeters with biographies of Caesar, Hannibal, Scipio Africanus, Cato, and Seneca. There are works by Pliny the Elder, Apuleius, Epicurus, and Gibbon. There are books

Life and Earth Sciences

Phage Therapy Saves Toddler’s Life: Index #69

ByadminOctober 3, 2022

This year marks the 100-year anniversary of phage therapies. How fitting, then, that a paper out this week tells the story of a toddler — a boy from Algeria — who suffered from a life-threatening, drug-resistant infection after receiving a liver transplant. In the days and

Life and Earth Sciences

Engineered AAVs Target Muscle: Index #68

ByadminSeptember 27, 2022

Biotechnology has an obsession with AAVs, or adeno-associated viruses. Nearly every gene therapy — whether it targets the eye or the brain — relies on AAVs. This industry-wide fixation is strange because these viral delivery capsids have many drawbacks, and our planet is

Philosophical studies

Life Hacks for Managing ADHD

ByadminSeptember 26, 2022

What is ADHD? Do you often face difficulty in concentrating on something, remembering information, following directions, organizing tasks, or finishing work on time? It’s normal to forget things from time to time or have trouble getting yourself organized. Most of us