Brief description not available

Brief description not available

Researchers at the University of California, Davis have observed the effects that a plant hormone found naturally in fruits and vegetables has on a host’s immunity and recovery from malaria parasite infection.

Prof. Wenwan Zhong and colleagues from the University of California, Riverside have developed an Asymmetrical flow-field flow fractionation (AF4)- SELEX technology that is an improvement on SELEX. The main difference between AF4-SELEX and SELEX is that the untethered target would exist in its natural conformation, meaning that the target is more capable of catching aptamers functional under physiological conditions. Compared with current protein-based therapeutics, aptameric drugs are easier to be stored, handled, and modified to fit for medical applications; and can penetrate through biological barriers more easily, as well as possess much-reduced immunogenicity with low toxicity, presenting good promises for treatment of diseases like cancer.  Fig 1: The structural model of human DNMT1 (728-1600) -Apt. #9 complex proposed based on the proteolysis result.  

The eukaryotic ribosome is composed of 79 ribosomal protein – large (RPL) and ribosomal protein – small (RPS) subunit proteins that interweave with 4 highly structured RNAs (5S, 5.8S, 18S, and 28S rRNAs) to form the final translation-capable ribonucleoprotein. Thus, quantification of ribosome-associated RNA is highly similar to profiling of RNAs associated with other RNA binding proteins. We recently described the development of enhanced crosslinking and immunoprecipitation (eCLIP), a method to profile RNAs bound by an RNA binding protein of interest that showed thousand-fold improved recovery of protein-bound RNA [Van Nostrand et al 2016]. Van Nostrand EL, Pratt GA, Shishkin AA, Gelboin-Burkhart C, Fang MY, Sundararaman B, Blue SM, Nguyen TB, Surka C, Elkins K, et al: Robust transcriptome-wide discovery of RNA-binding protein binding sites with enhanced CLIP (eCLIP). Nat Methods 2016, 13:508-514. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27018577/

Mitochondrial cardiomyopathy occurs when cardiomyocytes possess defective mitochondrial DNA. There is no cure and current treatment involves providing patients various dietary supplements. A novel biotherapy in which healthy mitochondria are transplanted directly into cells can help pave the way for treating mitochondrial-related diseases.

A polarization-sensitive optical coherence tomography (PS-OCT) is a common approach to non-invasively imaging in biomedical applications. The inventors have come up with a new way of creating a PS-OCT that is cheaper and simpler.

Researchers at the Beckman Laser Institute have developed a non-invasive fiber optic probe capable of imaging and detecting cancerous tissue within the head and neck regions. The probe also helps to guide surgeons in effectively performing tumor removal.