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Bacteria: the new sweepers of the seas

Scientists have devised a new technique to eliminate plastic from oceans: bioremediation.

It utilises biological mechanisms to eradicate hazardous pollutants and restore the ecosystem to its original condition.

In fact, some newly discovered bacteria seem to have evolved to deal with inorganic materials. Practically, they eat the plastic garbage floating in the oceans.

However, whether they're cleaning up our poisons or just passing them back up the food chain remains to be seen.

So, scientists aim to sample more ocean plastic and to isolate, culture and identify the microbes found on it. Then they can determine if and how they're digesting the plastic and discover what the by-products are.

Yumm…this circuit is very good

A research team of the Centre of Nano Science & Technology in Milan has developed electronic circuits which are applied to food or pills.

This technology will give us the possibility to have intelligent

foods or drugs.

There is a range of possible applications of eatable circuits. For instance, the circuits on foods will be able to talk with our fridges and give us notifications when they go bad or remember what to buy at the supermarket.

Medical pills with these will send data like when we take the drugs, how much

we take, in which clinical conditions we take them. These eatable circuits can also be useful to check the quality along the distribution chain, from the producer to the seller.

Mini brains produced in laboratories:
that’s why they are useful

A study conducted by University of California and Stanford University shows how during last year mini brains obtained in laboratories are able to grow up at the same time as human brains.

To create these mini brains, scientists have genetically reprogrammed adult cells into child ones and, through a set of molecules, have assimilated them into the one of the brain; after 20 months in a test tube the mini brains created can be used, in fact they are equipped with an “internal clock” which makes the brains develop at the same time as the human ones.

They are very useful, in fact they are models to use for the study of neurological diseases like schizophrenia, Alzheimer and Parkinson.

Creating blood vessels with 3D bioprinting

A joint research by the Institute of Biomedical Technologies of the Cnr of Milan and the National Institute of Molecular Genetics Foundation led to the development of a strategy to generate new blood vessels in living organisms, avoiding immune rejection.

For the first time, extracellular vesicles, microbubbles that line the interior of the vessels and carry proteins and nucleic acids, were used as a bioaditive for the generation of the hydrogel (bio-ink) used in the 3D bioprinting process. This allowed a rapid generation of blood vessels in the animals which were treated.

Tissue engineering, which aims to repair damaged tissues and organs, represents the new frontier in the biomedical field.

A chance for everyone

A monkey, called Grady, was born thanks to frozen testicles at Pittsburgh University Medical Center.

His birth makes it more concrete the possibility of one day becoming fathers for those children rendered sterile by cancer treatments. Infact, this treatments can damage a boy's undeveloped testes and make him sterile.

So, is there a possibility for a boy with cancer to secure his chance of becoming a father? So far there was more a hope than a concrete possibility: to take and cryopreserve the testicular tissue of children waiting for one day the research to find a way to return it to the rightful owner.

But now maybe, thanks to Grady’s birth, what were only hypotheses can become reality.

Zombie genes ignite in the brain after death

Researchers from the University of Illinois in Chicago have discovered that there are 'zombie' genes that turn on in the brain after death: they are real 'scavengers' that remain active in the hours immediately following death and are used to clean up the damage induced in the nervous system. In fact, the researchers observed that the expression of genes in 'fresh' brain tissues does not match the one found in post-mortem tissues, because of the increase in the activity of 'zombie' genes. The results will be used to reread all the researches, conducted so far, on post-mortem brain tissues and develop new therapies against neurological disorders like autism, schizophrenia and Alzheimer's.

The exoskeleton that could make anyone walk

A team of French researchers has managed to develop an exoskeleton controlled by the brain, which could make walk those who can not walk because of a paralysis or other complications.

After the experiments with Thibault, a man paralyzed from the shoulders down, the results were immediately positive and thanks to some devices, with the impulse of the brain, translated by an algorithm, Thibault managed to move the body and walk.

Unfortunately, the machine is not yet available because it must be tied to the ceiling with some cables, but this model provides a great starting point for the future as it is the first exoskeleton that has no brain-computer cables that are often invasive.

Lab-created heart valves

Creating heart valves that can grow with the person who receives them is a study done by university of Minnesota Twin Cities.

These new valves could prevent the need to replace them more times in children with hearth defects.

In this study Tranquillo, the senior researcher, used a hybrid of tissue engineering and regenerative medicine to create the growing heart valves, researchers combined the donor sheep skin cells in a gelatin-like material, called fibrin, then used special detergents to wash away the sheep cells from the tissue-like tubes, leaving behind a cell-free.

This means the tubes can be stored and implanted without requiring customized growth of the recipient’s cells.

A super-enzyme

A super-enzyme degrades plastic bottles six times as fast as before.

It derives from bacteria that naturally are able to digest plastic. Scientists believe that by mixing it with other enzymes it could allow us to recycle also mixed-fabric clothing.

Plastic has polluted the planet, and people are used to eating and breathing microplastics.

J. McGeehan, at the University of Portsmouth in UK, said that when they had linked the enzymes they had got a dramatic increase in activity.

They found that one mutant version worked 20% faster.

A £1m testing centre is being built in Portsmouth and researchers are making vital breakthroughs, thus maybe we will live in a world free from plastic.

Human body on a chip

Reproducing a human body on a chip is a project which Donald Ingber, a biomedical pioneer, and his Harvard University team undertook in 2011.

Since drugs interact with more than one organ, these researchers worked to realise a multiorgan system, which reproduces human body behaviours, through an instrument, called “Interrogator”, able to match vascular canals on chips.

“Interrogator” can bear up to eight different organs on a chip for about three weeks and those groups of organs faithfully represent what happens to a human body subjected to specific drugs.

Those multiorgan systems are alternatives to animal testing, although it is still the most preferable solution for scientists.

Intestinal bacteria that makes you run faster

In 2016 a team of researchers at Harvard University found that, at the end of a marathon, the intestinal microbiome of athletes was full of some bacteria which, transplanted into mice, improved their athletic performance. Lactic acid in athletes increases the growth of Veillonella, a bacterium which produces a compound that favors their physical performance. Through a natural enzymatic process encoded by the microbiome they demonstrated that the instillation of propionate is sufficient to reproduce the increased performance. The same results cannot be obtained in humans as in mice, though. The idea is to study new supplements that help athletes reduce recovery time after an effort.

A pest, the whitefly,

acquired a gene from one of the plants it feeds on

Charles Davis, a biologist, says that it is a nice example of how gene transfer confers evolutionary novelty among eukaryotes.

The scientists used the genome databases to look for the gene's evolutionary origins: it was passed to the insect's genome by the virus, and it was then fixed in the population.

Then the scientists used genetic engineering to make tomato plants express an RNA that interacted with the gene. The defensive gene was silenced when the insects ate these plants, and the insects died.

When a different insect without the gene was allowed to feed on the same tomato plants, dying, it suggested that researchers may be able to develop crops that are resistant to the whiteflies.

Hybrids first try: monkeys and pigs

A Chinese team of researchers succeeded in creating pigs with some monkeys’ cells. The animals looked like normal pigs, but some analysis revealed a little percentage of monkeys’ cells in many organs. Unfortunately only two hybrids out of the ten created were born alive but they lasted less than a week. The reason why they died is still a mystery but the scientists believe that it is not related to the fact of the animals being hybrid. The researches put some monkeys’ cells into pigs’ embryos and by doing so they succeeded in obtaining a hybrid. Despite the bad result the team is not falling apart and they are already working to create healthy animals with an higher percentage of monkeys’ cells.

Chlorophyll photosynthesis in cyborg bacteria

A group of scientists from Harvard University has created cyborg bacteria capable of generating energy and biomaterials with an efficient, simple and inexpensive process; the microorganisms treated to develop, an armature of nanocrystals on the surface, exploit light, water and CO2 not to gain oxygen and glucose, but acetic acid, a chemical compound to produce polymers and biofuels able to produce clean energy. The new hybrid organisms have produced acetic acid with an efficiency of 80%, four times higher than that of solar panels on the market, and over six times that of chlorophyll. The potential of this new system could be much greater than expected able to give a great help to renewable energy.