Just take an Aspirin :)

I don't have anyone in my family who suffers from this disease but I have volunteered for the Alzheimer's walk and that was an experience in itself.  My best friend's grandmother had Alzheimer's and those were very difficult times for her as well. I was surprised to read that an aspirin tablet could potentially contain an ingredient for improving the disease and even others.

 

The key ingredient in aspirin, salicylic acid, has been in the eyes of researchers from Boyce Thompson Institute and John Hopkins University for its ability to regulate the immune system of plants. Through their curiosity with the many benefits salicylic acid can offer for plants, they decided to check out humans.  They came upon an enzyme responsible for cell death in diseases like Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, and Huntington's. The enzyme, Glyceraldehyde 3-Phosphate Dehydrogenase (GAPDH), is a part of glucose metabolism and it enters the nucleus of neuron cells when it undergoes oxidative stress causing cell death. When neuron cells die, the disease worsens. Salicylic acid is able to bind to GAPDH and inhibit the enzyme from entering the nuclei which in-turn stops cell death. Even better, the researchers were able to find a plant based (Chinese licorice) and lab synthesized derivative of salicylic acid that is more potent than the one found in aspirin.

 

Further research was done and apparently salicylic acid can also bind to High Mobility Group Box 1 (HMGB1) which is involved in inflammation. Therefore, they are trying to see if salicylic acid can also help with diseases like "arthritis, lupus, sepsis, atherosclerosis and certain cancers".

 

It seems like salicylic acid has a promising future for the treatment of diseases that affect a lot of us and our family members. I still feel like more research needs to be done to ensure there are no weird or dangerous side effects from salicylic acid based treatments. Article

 

Walk to end Alzheimer's September 2013

RNA leads the way!

The CRISPR/Cas9 is a system that is used to inactivate or correct certain genes. The system has a downfall, however, because once it is turned on, it stays on and keeps editing genes. This is no bueno because it can cause editing of genes that are not supposed to be cut or corrected.

The original CRISPR/Cas9 system uses a guide RNA that matches the desired sequence and directs the Cas9 enzyme to the location on the gene where it will perform gene editing.

Researchers from at the University of California have developed a new method using “chemically modified RNA base-drugs” that are still able to direct the Cas9 enzyme to the gene for editing. What’s different is that this new RNA is able to activate and inactivate the Cas9 enzyme as needed (or wanted) by the researcher.

The modified RNA stops the Cas9 enzyme’s function when it runs out. Without the presence of the modified RNA, the Cas9 is unable to continue editing genes. Which is what they want! They are also trying a different method where a second modified guide RNA is incorporated and its main role is to shut off the first modified guide RNA. By shutting off the first guide RNA, the CRISPR/Cas9 system is also turned off. This is beneficial for understanding and potentially finding a solution to certain nervous system diseases that are affected by this mechanism.

Article

Lets turn it back on..

There are a lot of people in my family that have suffered from diabetes. Both of my dad's parents died because of the disease and some of my uncles have it as well as my dad. Therefore, my siblings and I are obviously at great risk of getting it. Scary huh?

Although we try our best to help our dad by having a healthy diet and controlling his sugar levels, it is a disease that cannot be reversed. It's hard to see him at such a young age carrying around a "lunch bag" full of pills, but this article gives me hope.

Glucokinase is the enzyme responsible for signaling the pancreas and liver to order the body to process glucose. This is the enzyme that is targeted by pharmaceuticals when creating drugs for diabetic patients. Most of the current drugs aim at activating the enzyme, but they only target one specific pathway.

Glucokinase needs to be turned on are activated in order for it to properly handle glucose in the body, however when somebody has diabetes, glucokinase is impaired and therefore the person develops the disease. Researchers at Florida State University have discovered a new pathway that can be used to potentially interrupt the deactivation of glucokinase. The enzyme has an allosteric site that can be altered due to its flexibility. The researchers have also used NMR to track and visualize the speed or rate of the enzyme and how it changes from the non-variant to the disease variant form. They hope to use the information to successfully activate the enzyme and test it for its ability to control the disease. The only con to this is that, overexpression can also be detrimental since it can cause hyperinsulinemia.

This can be great if they’re able to activate it to the point where it serves its purpose without causing something else.

 Article

Tomatoe, Tomato!

Genetically modified organisms are still very much talked about around the world. Some of us believe they are dangerous and wrong, while others feel they are a step into the future and beneficial. I had a class in my undergrad where we talked about GMOs and I was surprised to see that most of my classmates didn't really care. Food is food. We saw a video however, about places in Europe where people actually have the choice between GMO and regular food. The shelves are stacked and labeled so when you are shopping you can decide from what shelf you want to buy.


 In this article, researchers in the UK have introduced the gene AtMYB12 from the plant Arabidopsis thaliana into a tomato's genome. They used a tomato because it's genome has promoter regions that correspond to genes that code for several metabolic enzymes. The gene AtMYB12 from the Arabidopsis thaliana plant, is able to turn on metabolic pathways that help the tomato plant produce more flavanols and phenylpropanoids as it grows (nutrients!!). Apparenlty, the gene "increases the supply of aromatic amino acid precursors as well as ATP and reducing power".

So there is an accumulation of nutrients that are benericial for us in one "genetically modified" tomato. Also, the gene seems to be pretty versatile because it can be added to other fruits and they are currently working on adding it to vegetables. The researchers hope to have this approved for market, and hope this can make GMO foods have a better reputation and view from the public.

Article

Dangerous but lifesaving?

Wouldn't it be great to be able to stop the bleeding from a cut or wound in as little as six seconds without having to go to extremes? Well, the researchers at Rice University have developed just that (depending on what you consider to be extreme).

They have incorporated the enzyme batroxobin which comes from the venom of a South American pit viper into a hydrogel. This enzyme has been known to help with blood clotting since 1936, but the researchers wanted to find a way to make it useful; especially in the field of medicine. How it works is that the hydrogel is made up of "self-assembling nanofibers" that can be mixed with the enzyme and injected into the site of bleeding. The nanofibers and batroxobin come together and turn into some type of gel which automatically stops the bleeding. This was performed on lab mice in different combinations like the gel without the enzyme or the enzyme without the gel but the only effective combination was having both of them together.

The researchers have named their combination SB50 and hope to have it approved by FDA soon to start incorporating them into the medicine field. They believe this will be a great advantage for patients who need to take anti-coagulants or are using Heparin. Apparently, Heparin is a drug that can block the function of thrombin and this is no Bueno because thrombin is the enzyme that starts all of the reactions that lead to blood clotting. I guess I should add, for those animal lovers, that snakes are not being tortured or forced to donate their venom. The enzyme can be synthesized in a lab without the need of the snake. :)

This seems pretty cool to me and I hope the FDA approves it soon because this can save so many lives!

Article!

Say thank you to your Dad!

Coming from a Mexican family, it is common for the male to be upset with his wife for not giving him a son. However, we now know that the sperm is actually whom determines if the child is a boy or girl, so technically it is the father's fault he didn't get a son. According to this article, there may be more things fathers may be responsible for.

Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania have discovered that males who experience a lot of stress through their life can cause their children to have problems with stress as well. Apparently, the sperm of the stressed males have an increase in expression on nine microRNAs. They are not yet sure how these nine miRs have an effect on stress, but they performed three separate studies on mice to confirm that these nine were the ones responsible.

In their first study in 2013, they stressed mice by changing them from cage to cage or by having them smell the urine of a fox (which is their predator). These mice were then allowed to mate, and their offspring were observed in stressful settings. As they expected, the offspring could not cope with stress very well. The sperm of the stressed fathers was compared to the sperm of the mice who were not placed in stressful situations. This is where the researchers noticed the difference in levels of those nine miRs.

To have a better understanding and further confirm that the difference in levels was relevant, the researchers performed a second study. They isolated the nine miRs and microinjected them into mouse zygotes, the control groups were either injected with only one of those miRNAs or with a random, irrelevant miRNA. The zygotes were then injected into surrogate female mice for reproduction. When the offspring became adults, their response to stress was observed and they had the same results as the mice from the 2013 study. The study also showed low cortisone levels for the offspring that received the nine miRs (not sure how this is related).

So how are these nine miRNAs causing stressed mice to pass their problems with stress to their offspring? From what I understood, the miRNAs are targeting “stored maternal mRNA” during the short period of time that it takes the sperm and the egg to fuse and direct zygotic development. In a third study, they injected the nine miRs into new zygotes and controlled injections into other zygotes. The zygotes were incubated for 8 hours and the mRNA from each cell was amplified. The expression of mRNA in the miRs injected mice was lower than the controlled. The miRNAs seem to decide which mRNAs get translated, and in this case it relates to chromatin remodeling genes.

Their next step is to figure out if intervening in the stress of adult male mice may have a positive effect on their offspring. They will also look at the genes upstream of the chromatic remodeling genes to maybe find a way of stopping this trait from being passed on to their offspring. Article

Born This Way?

As an undergrad I learned there was many research being done on identical twins where one had developed a disease such as cancer while the other was perfectly healthy. Scientists were studying the twins DNA to understand why this happened, their conclusion was epigenetics.

Surprisingly, the scientists in this article are kind of doing the same thing. Researchers at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) presented an abstract for one of their current projects at the American Society of Human Genetics 2015 Annual Meeting in Baltimore. According to the article, the researchers have developed an algorithm that can identify the nine regions of the human genome that are most relevant to determining the sexual orientation of males. They are looking specifically at the epigenetics information and how methylation patterns affect these regions. Their study consisted of 37 pairs of twins where one was homosexual while the other was heterosexual, and 10 pairs of twins where both were homosexual (as their control). The algorithm is called FuzzyForest, and it found the 9 regions of the DNA that the researchers are now looking into. Their next step is to understand how methylation patterns play a role in the identified regions to result in differences of sexual orientation. Also, they want to test a general population of males to see how the algorithm works with them. From the twins study, their results were of 70% accuracy which doesn't seem very promising but maybe with more tests and research there may be a way of determining if sexual orientation is actually due to our genes.

The article can be found here Article, and the abstract here https://ep70.eventpilotadmin.com/web/page.php?page=IntHtml&project=ASHG15&id=150123267.