Future Timeline

May 19, 2021

Open up Scott Roy's Twitter bio and you'll see a simple but revealing sentence: "The more I learn the more I'm confused." Now the rest of the scientific world can share in his confusion. The San Francisco State University associate professor of Biology's most recent research catalogues a strange and confounding system of genes in a tiny rodent that scientists have ignored for decades.

"This is basically the weirdest sex chromosome system known to science," Roy said. "Nobody ordered this." But he's serving it anyway.

The owner of those chromosomes is the creeping vole, a burrowing rodent native to the Pacific Northwest. Scientists have known since the '60s that the species had some odd genes: Their number of X and Y chromosomes (bundles of DNA that play a large role in determining sex) is off from what's expected in male and female mammals.

May 20, 2021

When scientists hunt for life, they often look for biosignatures, chemicals or phenomena that indicate the existence of present or past life. Yet it isn't necessarily the case that the signs of life on Earth are signs of life in other planetary environments. How do we find life in systems that do not resemble ours?

In groundbreaking new work, a team* led by Santa Fe Institute Professor Chris Kempes has developed a new ecological biosignature that could help scientists detect life in vastly different environments. Their work appears as part of a special issue of the Bulletin of Mathematical Biology collected in honor of renowned mathematical biologist James D. Murray.

The new research takes its starting point from the idea that stoichiometry, or chemical ratios, can serve as biosignatures. Since "living systems display strikingly consistent ratios in their chemical make-up," Kempes explains, "we can use stoichiometry to help us detect life." Yet, as SFI Science Board member and contributor, Simon Levin, explains, "the particular elemental ratios we see on Earth are the result of the particular conditions here, and a particular set of macromolecules like proteins and ribosomes, which have their own stoichiometry." How can these elemental ratios be generalized beyond the life that we observe on our own planet?

Virus Like Particles are mimics of the Nudaurelia capensis omega virus a model used to provide dynamic details about the process of viral maturation. Credit: Roger Castells-Graells

A critical process in the infection cycle of viruses has been revealed for the first time in dynamic detail using pioneering plant-based technology.

Evidence about the process of virus maturation revealed in the research could help us develop new methods for treating viral infections.

Maturation plays a critical role for all animal and bacterial viruses and is required to produce infectious virions or particles. Though the outlines of the process have been determined for many groups of viruses, detailed mechanistic studies have not been reported.

To provide the first detailed mechanistic study of maturation, Roger Castells-Graells, a rotation Ph.D. student working in Professor. George Lomonossoff's laboratory at the John Innes Centre infiltrated genetic material of the insect virus Nudaurelia capensis omega virus (NV) into dwarf tobacco plants N. benthamiana.

Nearly as light as air, these all-natural cellulose aerogels can be made sustainably, cheaply and with all natural materials. They're biointeractive too, so they can be used for therapeutics. Credit: Andrew Marais

A new low-cost and sustainable technique would boost the possibilities for hospitals and clinics to deliver therapeutics with aerogels, a foam-like material now found in such high-tech applications as insulation for spacesuits and breathable plasters.

With the help of an ordinary kitchen freezer, this newest form of aerogel was made from all natural ingredients, including plant cellulose and algae, says Jowan Rostami, a researcher in fiber technology at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm.

Rostami says that the aerogel's low density and favorable surface area make it ideal for a wide range of uses, including timed release of medication and wound dressing.

Months after recovering from mild cases of COVID-19, people still have immune cells in their body pumping out antibodies against the virus that causes COVID-19, according to a study from researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. Such cells could persist for a lifetime, churning out antibodies all the while.

The findings, published May 24 in the journal Nature, suggest that mild cases of COVID-19 leave those infected with lasting antibody protection and that repeated bouts of illness are likely to be uncommon.

Researchers at Lund University in Sweden have developed an algorithm that combines data from a simple blood test and brief memory tests, to predict with great accuracy who will develop Alzheimer's disease in the future. The findings are published in Nature Medicine.

Approximately 20-30% of patients with Alzheimer's disease are wrongly diagnosed within specialist healthcare, and diagnostic work-up is even more difficult in primary care. Accuracy can be significantly improved by measuring the proteins tau and beta-amyloid via a spinal fluid sample, or PET scan. However, those methods are expensive and only available at a relatively few specialized memory clinics worldwide. Early and accurate diagnosis of AD is becoming even more important, as new drugs that slow down the progression of the disease will hopefully soon become available.

Moderna will take mRNA flu and HIV vaccines into Phase 1 trials this year, as well as beginning a pivotal Phase 3 study for its cytomegalovirus (CMV) vaccine candidate.

A trial found a vaccine helps preserve some insulin-producing cells in type 1 diabetics with a specific gene variant

Results from a Phase 2 trial testing a novel type 1 diabetes vaccine have found the treatment is effective in a patient subgroup with a specific genetic variant. If validated in larger trials the new treatment could be helpful in around 50 percent of patients with type 1 diabetes.

For several years, researchers have known that one of the key indicators of type 1 diabetes is the presence of autoantibodies targeting a pancreatic protein called GAD65. In these diabetic patients the presence of these autoantibodies is often an early sign of disease and researchers have long hypothesized the possibility of disrupting this autoimmune mechanism as a way of helping prevent the destruction of insulin-producing cells.