Virology News

A brand-new engineering approach to generate "designer" biological robots using human lung cells is underway in Carnegie Mellon University's Ren lab. Referred to as AggreBots, these microscale living robots may one day be able to traverse through the body's complex environments to deliver desired therapeutic or mechanical interventions, once greater control is achieved over their motility patterns. In new research published in Science Advances, the group provides a novel tissue engineering platform capable of achieving customizable motility in AggreBots by actively controlling their structural parameters.

UC Riverside researchers have discovered a piece that was missing in previous descriptions of the way Earth recycles its carbon. As a result, they believe that global warming can overcorrect into an ice age.

For decades, scientists have known that bacteria can exchange genetic material, in a process called horizontal gene transfer. This allows bacteria to rapidly evolve new traits, such as antibiotic resistance. A new study, led by Professor Indraneel Mittra at the Advanced Center for Treatment, Research & Education in Cancer, Mumbai, shows that this process may also happen in mammals—through fragments of DNA known as cell-free chromatin particles.

A research team has developed an approach to significantly reduce the risk of cancer recurrence and metastasis after surgery, by targeting both bulk cancer cells and the elusive cancer stem cells (CSCs) responsible for relapse.

What is the meaning of life? Even the best of us couldn't hope to answer that question in a Universe Today article. But there are those who would try to "constrain" it, at least in terms of physics. A new paper from Pankaj Mehta of Boston University of Jané Kondev of Brandeis that was recently posted to the arXiv preprint server looks at how the fundamental constants of physics might be applied to life as we know it—and even life as we don't know it yet. Their idea doesn't necessarily give the answer to the ultimate question, but it does tie two seemingly disparate fields nicely together.

Barley is one of the world's oldest cultivated plants, farmed for more than 10,000 years. Scientists have long believed it was domesticated in just one location. An international research team led by the IPK Leibniz Institute has revealed that modern barley has a "mosaic origin," meaning it stems from several wild populations across the Fertile Crescent. The paper is published in the journal Nature.

Until Homo floresiensis was discovered, scientists assumed that the evolution of the human lineage was defined by bigger and bigger brains. Via a process called encephalization, human brains evolved to be relatively more massive than would be expected based on corresponding body size.

Missions to the moon and Mars pose nutritional challenges for astronauts. Now, a new paper on space-grown food poses nutritional challenges for astronauts, but volunteers from NASA's Open Science Data Repository Analysis Working Groups (OSDR-AWG) are working together to analyze data on astronaut health.

The consortium running the European Space Agency's (ESA) Euclid mission has published the most extensive simulation of the cosmos to date. The modeling was based on algorithms developed by UZH professor Joachim Stadel.

Tiny bioreactors, called nanocultures, are opening up new possibilities for microbiome research, especially in harsh and dynamic environments.

You might think that glass has no business acting as a replacement for bone, but it turns out the two materials have many similarities. For a new study published in ACS Nano, researchers developed a 3D printable bio-active glass that served as an effective bone replacement material. In rabbits, it sustained bone cell growth better than regular glass and a commercially available bone substitute.

Researchers have found antibiotic-resistant bacterial clones in wild birds at a rehabilitation center. The identified Escherichia coli clones have been found in community- and hospital-acquired human infections worldwide, and they were present in the intestinal tracts of a vulture and an owl.

In a major advance for infectious disease treatment, researchers from Monash University and The Alfred have developed a bespoke phage therapy product that uses bacterial viruses, known as "bacteriophages," to combat a highly problematic, antimicrobial-resistant bacteria.

Research led by a physicist at the University of California, Riverside, shows how viruses form protective shells (capsids) around their genomes, a process that—while messy and complex—consistently results in highly symmetrical icosahedral structures.

A genomic analysis of over 1,200 people from across South Africa reveals how colonial-era European, Indigenous Khoe-San peoples, and enslaved people contributed to the modern-day gene pool in South Africa.