13 dispatches
Let’s summarize the case for measles vaccination: Measles is deadly — prior to the measles vaccine, of the 500,000 cases/yr that were reported, 400-500 died and 48,000 were hospitalized. Measles clears immune memory, making people who recover more susceptible to infections afterwards — This phenomena is called “immune amnesia” and seems to be mediated by the measles virus...
The human heart is an incredibly sophisticated organ that, in addition to being one of the first organs developed while embryos develop, is quite difficult to understand at a cellular level (where are the cells, how do they first develop, etc.). Neil Chi’s group at UCSD (link to Nature paper) were able to use multiplex imaging of fluorescent-tagged RNA molecules to profile the...
Anyone who’s ever seen a NICU or statistics on the health outcomes for extremely premature babies understands how artificial womb technology could be incredibly impactful. At the same time, it poses some tricky ethical challenges: * How can you get informed, ethical consent to trial this? It’s nigh impossible to predict who will need a premature delivery.
One reason much of the modern produce we buy tastes so bland is because our agricultural system has bred modern varieties for ship-ability and the ability of produce to be picked by machine, rather than flavor. While this has expanded the access to produce (both geographically but also in terms of cost due to the ability to use automation), it’s meant that consumers often have...
Source: Paul Whitten For January I decided to blog a paper I heard about on the excellent Nature podcast about a deliciously simple and elegant experiment to test a very simple question: given how much time and effort boa constrictors (like the one on above, photo taken by Paul Whitten) need to kill prey by squeezing them to death, how do they know when to stop squeezing?...
This month’s paper (from open access journal PLoS ONE) is yet again about the impact on our health of the bacteria which have decided to call our bodies home. But, instead of the bacteria living in our gut, this month is about the bacteria which live on our skin. It’s been known that the bacteria that live on our skin help give us our particular odors.
Source: Healthy Soul November’s paper was published in Naturein 2006, and covers a topic I’ve become increasingly interested in: the impact of the bacteria that have colonized our bodies on our health (something I’ve blogged about here and here). The idea that our bodies are, in some ways, more bacteria than human (there are 10x more gut bacteria – or flora — than human cells...
I’m pretty late for paper of the month, so here we go “Omics” is the hot buzz-suffix in the life sciences for anything which uses the new sequencing/array technologies we now have available. You don’t study genes anymore, you study genomics. You don’t study proteins anymore – that’s so last century, you study proteomics now.
Source: Precision Nutrition The paper I will talk about this month is from April of this year and highlights the diversity of our “gut flora” (a pleasant way to describe the many bacteria which live in our digestive tract and help us digest the food we eat). Specifically, this paper highlights how a particular bacteria in the digestive tracts of some Japanese individuals has...
The paper I read is something that is very near and dear to my heart. As is commonly known, individuals of Asian ancestry are more likely to experience dizziness and flushed skin after drinking alcohol. This is due to the prevalence of a genetic defect in the Asian population which affects an enzyme called Aldehyde Dehydrogenase 2 (ALDH2).ALDH2 processes one of the by-products...
Most people know that viruses are notoriously tricky disease-causing pathogens to tackle. Unlike bacteria which are completely separate organisms, viruses are parasites which use a host cell’s own DNA-and-RNA-and-protein producing mechanisms to reproduce. As a result, most viruses are extremely small, as they need to find a way into a cell to hijack the cell’s machinery, and,...
This month, I read a paper (HT: my ex-college roommate Eric) by a group from Beth Israel about systemic inflammatory response syndrome (SIRS) following serious injury. SIRS, which is more commonly understood/found as sepsis, happens when the entire body is on high “immune alert.” In the case of sepsis, this is usually due to an infection of some sort.
The paper I read for this month brought up an interesting question I’ve always had but never really dug into: how do individual cells find things they can’t “see”? After all, there are lots of microbes out there who can’t always see where their next meal is coming from. How do they go about looking? A group of scientists at Princeton University took a stab at the problem by...