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+20 +1
At Tiny Scales, a Giant Burst on Tree of Life
A new technique for finding and characterizing microbes has boosted the number of known bacteria by almost 50 percent, revealing a hidden world all around us. By Kevin Hartnett.
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+17 +1
New computer model could explain how simple molecules took first step toward life
Nearly four billion years ago, the earliest precursors of life on Earth emerged. First small, simple molecules, or monomers, banded together to form larger, more complex molecules, or polymers. Then those polymers developed a mechanism that allowed them to self-replicate and pass their structure on to future generations...
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+56 +1
Frankenvirus emerges from Siberia's frozen wasteland
Scientists said they will reanimate a 30,000-year-old giant virus unearthed in the frozen wastelands of Siberia, and warned climate change may awaken dangerous microscopic pathogens. Reporting this week in PNAS, the flagship journal of the US National Academy of Sciences, French researchers announced the discovery of Mollivirus sibericum, the fourth type of pre-historic virus found since 2003—and the second by this team.
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+20 +1
‘Protocells’ show ability to reproduce
Man-made balls of genetic material and membranes can pull off a decent impression of primitive cells.
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+37 +1
Ebola lingers in semen for nine months
Ebola persists in the semen of male survivors much longer than previously thought, a study shows. The report in the New England Journal of Medicine found two-thirds of men had Ebola in their semen up to six months after infection, and a quarter after nine. A separate study, in the same journal, reports Ebola being spread through sex with a survivor six months after their symptoms had started.
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+40 +1
How microbes live for centuries by shutting down
How a 500-year experiment to revive dormant microbes could reveal the secrets to cheating time.
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+42 +1
Ebola is now an STD
Months after a male Ebola survivor tested negative for the disease, he transmitted the deadly virus to a female partner through unprotected sex, a genetic analysis revealed. The Liberian woman, who became ill with the disease and died in March, is the first person known to contract the Ebola virus from sex, researchers reported this week in the New England Journal of Medicine.
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+29 +1
Cancer-fighting viruses win approval
An engineered herpesvirus that provokes an immune response against cancer has become the first treatment of its kind to be approved for use in the United States, paving the way for a long-awaited class of therapies. On 27 October, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved a genetically engineered virus called talimogene laherparepvec (T-VEC) to treat advanced melanoma. Four days earlier, advisers to the European Medicines Agency had endorsed the drug.
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+33 +1
So It Turns Out There's A Lot We Don't Know About Ebola
"If there's anything that this outbreak has taught me, it's that I'm often wrong," says Dr. Daniel Bausch. He's talking about Ebola. He's one of the world's leading experts on the virus — an infectious disease specialist at Tulane University and a senior consultant to the World Health Organization. And as he makes clear, he's still got a lot to learn.
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+39 +1
Vast, uncharted viral world discovered on human skin
Nearly 95% of the viral content that helps shape the microbiome is unknown.
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+37 +1
Gene editing saves girl dying from leukaemia in world first
For the first time ever, a person’s life has been saved by gene editing. One-year-old Layla was dying from leukaemia after all conventional treatments failed. “We didn’t want to give up on our daughter, though, so we asked the doctors to try anything,” her mother Lisa said in a statement released by Great Ormond Street Hospital in London, where Layla (pictured above) was treated.
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+42 +1
How the Western Diet Has Derailed Our Evolution
Burgers and fries have nearly killed our ancestral microbiome. By Moises Velasquez-Manoff.
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How the Western Diet Has Derailed Our Evolution
For the microbiologist Justin Sonnenburg, that career-defining moment—the discovery that changed the trajectory of his research, inspiring him to study how diet and native microbes shape our risk for disease—came from a village in the African hinterlands. A group of Italian microbiologists had compared the intestinal microbes of young villagers in Burkina Faso with those of children in Florence, Italy.
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+39 +1
Engineered bat virus stirs debate over risky research
Lab-made coronavirus related to SARS can infect human cells. By Declan Butler.
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+27 +1
Evidence of Polyethylene Biodegradation by Bacterial Strains from the Guts of Plastic-Eating Waxworms
Polyethylene (PE) has been considered nonbiodegradable for decades. Although the biodegradation of PE by bacterial cultures has been occasionally described, valid evidence of PE biodegradation has remained limited in the literature. We found that waxworms, or Indian mealmoths (the larvae of Plodia interpunctella), were capable of chewing and eating PE films... (2014)
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+18 +1
Can you be too clean?
We take long showers, change clothes every day and wash our hands regularly. Is this doing us more harm than good?
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+39 +1
We know the city where HIV first emerged
When HIV and AIDS appeared they seemed to come from nowhere, but genetics has told us when and where the virus first entered the human population
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+14 +1
The scientists whose garden unlocked the secret to good health
When Anne Biklé and David Montgomery fed soil with organic matter, they were astonished by the results. When Biklé was diagnosed with cancer, they had an idea…By Lucy Rock.
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Where to Draw the Line on Gene-Editing Technology
New techniques that could make germline genetic engineering unprecedentedly easy are forcing policymakers to confront the ethical implications of moving forward
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Tomorrow’s Heart Drugs Might Target Gut Microbes
If your cholesterol levels are high, your doctor might prescribe you a statin, a drug that blocks one of the enzymes involved in creating cholesterol. But in the future, she might also prescribe a second drug that technically doesn’t target your body at all. Instead, it would manipulate the microbes in your gut. Each of us is home to trillions of bacteria and other microbes—a teeming mass collectively known as the microbiome.
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