Future Timeline

A chlamydia vaccine has triggered immune responses in an early trial, raising hopes that one day it might help curb the spread of the sexually transmitted infection (STI).

There is currently no vaccine for chlamydia, which is the most common bacterial STI in the United States, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

In the new trial results, published April 11 in the journal Lancet Infectious Diseases, the vaccine was found to be safe and it also prompted an antibody response.

"This is desperately needed," David Harvey, executive director of the National Coalition of STD Directors, told NBC News. "We have the highest STI rates in America since the 1950s and possibly beyond."

Chlamydia also remains one of the most common causes of infertility in women, Dr. Jay Varma, a professor of population health sciences at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York City, told NBC News. If left untreated, chlamydia can cause pelvic inflammatory disease, which makes it harder to get pregnant.

Tadasuke wrote: ↑Mon Apr 15, 2024 6:56 am Looking at how even this sub-forum is focused on all illness, except mental illness, I wonder everyday, if depression ...

(Current Biology) Tardigrades can survive remarkable doses of ionizing radiation, up to about 1,000 times the lethal dose for humans. How they do so is incompletely understood. We found that the tardigrade Hypsibius exemplaris suffers DNA damage upon gamma irradiation, but the damage is repaired. We show that this species has a specific and robust response to ionizing radiation: irradiation induces a rapid upregulation of many DNA repair genes. This upregulation is unexpectedly extreme—making some DNA repair transcripts among the most abundant transcripts in the animal. By expressing tardigrade genes in bacteria, we validate that increased expression of some repair genes can suffice to increase radiation tolerance. We show that at least one such gene is important in vivo for tardigrade radiation tolerance. We hypothesize that the tardigrades’ ability to sense ionizing radiation and massively upregulate specific DNA repair pathway genes may represent an evolved solution for maintaining DNA integrity.

And now, scientists have discovered that it’s happening again. A species of algae called Braarudosphaera bigelowii was found to have engulfed a cyanobacterium that lets them do something that algae, and plants in general, can’t normally do – "fixing" nitrogen straight from the air, and combining it with other elements to create more useful compounds.

Nitrogen is a key nutrient, and normally plants and algae get theirs through symbiotic relationships with bacteria that remain separate. At first it was thought that B. bigelowii had hooked up this kind of situation with a bacterium called UCYN-A, but on closer inspection, scientists discovered that the two have gotten far more intimate.

In one recent study, a team found that the size ratio between the algae and UCYN-A stays similar across different related species of the algae. Their growth appears to be controlled by the exchange of nutrients, leading to linked metabolisms.