Researchers at the Barcelona Institute of Science and Technology’s Center for Genomic Regulation (CRG) and Pulmobiotics Ltd. have used one bacterium to fight another. In mouse models, the team used engineered Mycoplasma pneumoniae to treat Pseudomonas aeruginosa, the chief culprit in ventilator-associated pneumonia (VAP).
Pulmobiotics Ltd., which was founded in 2019, is developing cell therapy for lung diseases, including lung cancer. But unlike other cell therapies for cancer, this one is based not on harnessing T cells but on engineering bacteria. The team has engineered Mycoplasma pneumoniae to deliver various therapeutic proteins to the lung, depending on the therapeutic indication.
“Short-lived organisms represent a fundamentally different evolutionary strategy, and the idiosyncrasies influencing their aging may not apply to longer-lived models, including humans,” researchers from Harvard Medical School wrote in the Jan. 11, 2023, issue of Science Advances.
In their paper, the authors reported insights into the genomics of longevity that took advantage of an unusual animal model: rockfish.
A psychiatric disorder rarely comes alone. More than half of all individuals who meet the diagnostic criteria for any psychiatric disorder are diagnosed with more than one condition. That high degree of comorbidity is often viewed as a consequence of the heterogeneity of psychiatric disorders – and as evidence that psychiatric diagnoses poorly reflect the underlying brain biology. Data published in Nature Human Behaviour on Jan. 12, 2023, has identified another likely contributor to the high degree of overlap between different psychiatric disorders.
Blood vessels supplying adipose tissue in females and males differed in their biological characteristics and gene expression programs, researchers at York University in Toronto, Canada, have demonstrated. The findings, which will appear in the Jan. 20, 2023, print issue of Iscience after earlier publication online, give new insights into sex differences in metabolic health.
Fat tissue can be detrimental to health, but the relationship between fat, BMI and health is increasingly acknowledged as being highly complex. One factor that affects the relationship between fat and health is how well adipose tissue is vascularized. Any new tissue that forms in the body needs to be vascularized to ensure its blood supply, and fat is no exception.
Researchers at the University of Cape Town have compared the T-cell responses of individuals who were infected with Mycobacterium tuberculosis but were able to control the infection to those who developed active disease. The researchers wrote that the shared antigens in controllers “can be considered as high-priority targets for future vaccine development.” Their results were published online in Nature Medicine on Jan. 5, 2023. In their experiments, the team first sequenced the CDR3β region of the T-cell repertoire in a total of 166 individuals with M. tuberculosis infection who progressed to either TB or controlled infection.
Unlike amphibians, mammals do not regenerate appendages. Except when they do. “If you amputate one of the branches off of the antler [of a reindeer], it will also regenerate,” Jeff Biernaskie told BioWorld. Even without amputation, the antlers of both male and female reindeer regenerate annually, including their skin. That regeneration is “the only large mammal model of true skin regeneration,” he said.
CRISPR, or clustered regularly interspaced palindromic repeats, is transforming biomedical research, and making rapid inroads into the clinic, with its ability to easily target specific DNA and RNA sequences. CRISPR itself is made of RNA. It recognizes target sequences and delivers CRISPR-associated (Cas) proteins, nucleases that cut the target sequence. In two papers published online in Nature on Jan. 4, 2023, researchers have demonstrated that a recently discovered type of Cas protein, Cas12a2, can degrade double-stranded DNA when its associated CRISPR guide RNA recognizes its target sequence.
One of the snarkier ways to describe psychology – and unfortunately, not a completely incorrect one – is as the study of behavior in white rats and college sophomores. For a long time, biomedical research suffered a parallel problem: of white mice and white men. Things are slowly improving as far as diversity in clinical research is concerned, and there are a number of species other than mice that are widely used because they are well-suited to study certain processes.
Metabolic health is at an odd juncture. With the advent of glucagon-like peptide (GLP-1) agonists, pharmacologically induced weight loss has matured into a viable therapeutic option at long last. And research into the drug class is continuing apace.
