Human beings would probably be known as pilosals rather than mammals if Carl Linnaeus had not been a proponent of breast-feeding. For social and political reasons, the famed taxonomist labeled the class of animals to which humans belong with a reference to their practice of suckling their young rather than to their evolutionarily older characteristic of having hair.
This is just one of the hundreds of surprising pieces of information that readers will glean from the far-reaching and fascinating How We Do It: The Evolution and Future of Human Reproduction, a new book by Robert Martin, a member of the University’s of Chicago’s Committee on Evolutionary Biology and curator of biological anthropology at the Field Museum. (more…)
Donors to biobanks – vast collections of human tissue samples that scientists hope will lead to new treatments for diseases – have a right to basic information about how their donations may be used, a Michigan State University ethicist argues in a new paper.
The idea behind biobanks is that a repository with hundreds of thousands of samples, each linked to medical records and other health information, can yield discoveries smaller data sets can’t match. Once samples are collected, researchers in many fields can use the data repeatedly. (more…)
Berkeley Lab and JBEI Researchers Develop a Biology-Friendly Robot Programming Language
Teaching a robot a new trick is a challenge. You can’t reward it with treats and it doesn’t respond to approval or disappointment in your voice. For researchers in the biological sciences, however, the future training of robots has been made much easier thanks to a new program called “PaR-PaR.”
Nathan Hillson, a biochemist at the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)’s Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI), led the development of PaR-PaR, which stands for Programming a Robot. PaR-PaR is a simple high-level, biology-friendly, robot-programming language that allows researchers to make better use of liquid-handling robots and thereby make possible experiments that otherwise might not have been considered. (more…)
COLUMBUS, Ohio – An Ohio State University graduate student’s study of the unprecedented reproductive practices among unisexual salamanders has earned the support of the national research crowd-funding initiative known as the SciFund Challenge.
Robert Denton, a Ph.D. student in the Department of Evolution, Ecology and Organismal Biology, is the only Ohio-based researcher among the 75 scientists selected for this year’s fundraising campaign, the second annual round of the SciFund Challenge. Participating scientists are spending the month of May soliciting financial support from anyone and everyone who is interested in their research.
Denton already has surpassed his initial goal of $1,600. With the additional support, he will be able to expand the scope of the research on whether these salamanders’ strange reproductive habits and resulting messy genetics actually give them a leg up on their competition in the wild. (more…)
*New Study Uses Reprogrammed Human Cells and Bioengineered Microthreads*
A team of scientists from Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) and CellThera, a private company located in WPI’s Life Sciences and Bioengineering Center, have regenerated functional muscle tissue in mice, opening the door for a new clinical therapy to treat people who suffer major muscle trauma.
The team used a novel protocol to coax mature human muscle cells into a stem cell-like state and grew those reprogrammed cells on biopolymer microthreads. The threads were placed in a wound created by surgically removing a large section of leg muscle from a mouse. Over time, the threads and cells restored near-normal function to the muscle, as reported in the paper “Restoration of Skeletal Muscle Defects with Adult Human Cells Delivered on Fibrin Microthreads”, published in the current issue of the journal Tissue Engineering. Surprisingly, the microthreads, which were used simply as a scaffold to support the reprogrammed human cells, actually seemed to accelerate the regeneration process by recruiting progenitor mouse muscle cells, suggesting that they alone could become a therapeutic tool for treating major muscle trauma. (more…)
California’s redwoods, one of the longest-living species on Earth, are going to be preserved and restored using ‘genetic cloning’ – the latest cutting-edge technology. Some of the redwoods are more than 2000 years old and the trees can grow as tall as 112 m. The tree diameter can vary from 3 to 5 m to up to 7 m at the base.
