The Biotech Journal Club

A new methodology for predicting corrosion rates Most metal alloys are prone to corrosion, which costs hundreds of billions of dollars of damage annually in the U.S. alone. Accurately predicting corrosion rates is a long-standing goal of corrosion science, but these rates depend strongly on the specific operating environment. At the atomic scale,....

Diet, Gut Microbes, and Immunity How the inner dwellers of our gut affect our immunity

Repurposing a Familiar Drug for COVID-19 Disulfiram, a treatment for alcoholism, may cut severe SARS-CoV-2 infection

Rare case of woman's body ridding itself of HIV The patient's immune cells appear to have eliminated the virus without drugs or therapy.

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So-Called Junk DNA – Genetic “Dark Matter” – Is Actually Critical to Survival in Mammals Knocking out transposon promoter leads to pup death in mice; similar promoters found in many mammals. Nearly half of our DNA has been written off as junk, the discards of evolution: sidelined or broken genes, viruses that got stuck in our genome and were dismembered or silenced, none of it releva

Applications of Biotechnology Biotechnology is the branch of science that uses living cells to develop products that have multiple applications. This article looks at its various applications.

Potential Remnants of Original Dinosaur DNA Discovered in Exquisitely Preserved Dinosaur Cells Organic molecule remnants found in nuclei of 125-million-year-old dinosaur cells. A team of scientists from the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology (IVPP) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and from the Shandong Tianyu Museum of Nature (STM) has isolated exquisitely preserved

https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/929700

DNA Gives Clues to the Mystery of 'Skeleton' Lake | Genetics And Genomics While this research has provided some answers, it also raised many new questions. An image by Atish Waghwase/Harney et al Nat Comms 2019 shows the site | Genetics And Genomics

Metabolomics activity screening of T cell–induced colitis reveals anti-inflammatory metabolites Metabolites that are dysregulated in a mouse model of inflammatory bowel disease are identified and characterized.

A Clever 'Gene Silencing' Injection Has Been Approved For Treating High Cholesterol The United Kingdom's NHS has very recently approved a new cholesterol-lowering jab which will be offered to 300,000 people over the next three years.

New CRISPR-Based Technology To Genetically Control Disease-Spreading Mosquitoes CRISPR-based system developed to safely restrain mosquito vectors via sterilization. Leveraging advancements in CRISPR-based genetic engineering, researchers at the University of California San Diego have created a new system that restrains populations of mosquitoes that infect millions each year

A small protein helps flowers to complete their development correctly The flower clock!

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2021/04/vaccines-can-protect-against-many-coronaviruses-could-prevent-another-pandemic

Vaccines that can protect against many coronaviruses could prevent another pandemic Approaches include tailored nanoparticles, chimeric proteins, virus cocktails

What are mRNA vaccines and how useful will they be? Coronavirus vaccines being developed by Pfizer and Moderna could be the first mRNA vaccines to get approval. Here's how these vaccines work and how might they change the world

New DNA Technology Based on CRISPR Could Revolutionize Medical Diagnostics Scientists have repurposed the genetic modification technology CRISPR to identify antibodies in patient blood samples in a move that could inspire a new class of medical diagnostics in addition to a host of other applications. The technology involves customizable collections of proteins which are

Gene Therapy Delivery Idea: Adapt RNA Transfer Systems from Human Cells RNA-based gene therapy cargo could be packaged and addressed to specific cell types using a programmable system that uses proteins found in the human body.

Planting trees and replenishing forests are among the simplest and most appealing natural climate solutions, but the impact of trees on atmospheric temperature is more complex than meets the eye.

One question among scientists is whether reforesting mid-latitude locations such as North America or Europe could in fact make the planet hotter. Forests absorb large amounts of solar radiation as a result of having a low albedo, which is the measure of a surface's ability to reflect sunlight. In the tropics, low albedo is offset by the higher uptake of carbon dioxide by the dense, year-round vegetation. But in temperate climates, the concern is that the sun's trapped heat could counteract any cooling effect forests would provide by removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

But a new study from Princeton University researchers found that these concerns may be overlooking a crucial component—clouds. They report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that the denser cloud formations associated with forested areas mean that reforestation would likely be more effective at cooling Earth's atmosphere than previously thought.

"The main thing is that nobody has known whether planting trees at midlatitudes is good or bad because of the albedo problem," said corresponding author Amilcare Porporato, Princeton's Thomas J. Wu '94 Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering and the High Meadows Environmental Institute. "We show that if one considers that clouds tend to form more frequently over forested areas, then planting trees over large areas is advantageous and should be done for climate purposes."

As anyone who has felt a cloud pass over the sun on a hot day knows, daytime clouds have a cooling—albeit transient—effect on the Earth. In addition to directly blocking the sun, clouds have a high albedo, similar to ice and snow. Clouds, however, are notoriously difficult to study and have been largely discounted from many studies examining the effectiveness of natural climate change mitigation, including reforestation, Porporato said.

To consider reforestation in the context of cloud coverage, Porporato worked with lead author Sara Cerasoli, a Princeton graduate student in civil and environmental engineering, and Jun Ying, an assistant professor at Nanjing University of Information Science and Technology who previously was a postdoctoral fellow in Porporato's research group. Their work was supported by the Carbon Mitigation Initiative based in HMEI.

Porporato and Yin previously reported that climate models underestimate the cooling effect of the daily cloud cycle. They also reported last year that climate change could result in increased daily cloud coverage in arid regions such as the American Southwest that are currently ideal for solar power production.

For the latest study, Cerasoli, Porporato and Yin investigated the influence of vegetation on cloud formation in midlatitude regions by combining satellite data of cloud coverage from 2001-10 with models related to the interaction between plants and the atmosphere.

The researchers modelled interactions between different types of vegetation and the atmospheric boundary layer—which is the lowest layer of the atmosphere and interacts directly with the Earth's surface—to determine whether cloud formation is differentially affected by vegetation type. They focused on regions in the 30-45 degree latitudinal range, roughly from the subtropics to the hemiboreal zones such as the northern Midwestern United States. They considered the effects of both reforestation—restoring lost tree cover—and afforestation, which entails planting forests in areas that were previously treeless, though this may come with other environmental costs.

The team found that for mid-latitude regions, the cooling effect of clouds—in combination with that of carbon sequestration—outweighed the solar radiation that forested areas absorbed.

The models showed that clouds form more frequently over forested areas than over grasslands and other areas with short vegetation and that this enhanced cloud formation had a cooling effect on Earth's atmosphere. The researchers observed from the satellite data that clouds also tend to form earlier in the afternoon over forested areas, which results in a longer duration of cloud cover and more time for clouds to reflect solar radiation away from the Earth.

The findings could help develop policies for allocating land for reforestation and agriculture—wetter midlatitudinal areas such as the eastern United States or southeastern China are well-suited to reforestation and afforestation, but also are appealing for agriculture. One approach would be to pair midlatitudinal reforestation with the distribution of drought-tolerant crops for regions less suited to reforestation, the study authors reported.

However, the authors urged that we must be cautious when making the leap from science to policy. "We can't just consider climate change, but must also consider other factors, such as biodiversity and the fact that land is also needed for food production," Cerasoli said. "Future studies should continue to consider the role of clouds, but should focus on more specific regions and take their economies into account."

"The first thing is to not make things worse," Porporato added. "So many things are connected in the earth system. The nature of interactions between, for example, the water cycle and climate mean that if you change one thing, it's very difficult to predict how other parts of the system will be affected."

The paper, "Cloud cooling effects of afforestation and reforestation at midlatitudes," was published Aug. 9 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Source: https://phys.org/news/2021-08-forests-cool-planet-thought.html?utm_source=nwletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=weekly-nwletter

Planting forests may cool the planet more than thought Planting trees and replenishing forests are among the simplest and most appealing natural climate solutions, but the impact of trees on atmospheric temperature is more complex than meets the eye.

MIT Researchers Devised a Way To Program Memories Into Bacterial Cells by Rewriting Their DNA Technique for editing bacterial genomes can record interactions between cells, may offer a way to edit genes in the human microbiome. Biological engineers at MIT have devised a new way to efficiently edit bacterial genomes and program memories into bacterial cells by rewriting their DNA. Using th

Molecular basis for lipid recognition by the prostaglandin D2 receptor CRTH2 Many amphipathic lipids, including cannabinoids, lysophospholipids, prostanoids, and leukotrienes, bind to G protein–coupled receptors (GPCRs) through the lipid bilayer. How these lipid ligands get anchored to their receptors and enter ligand-binding pockets is largely elusive. Our results reveale...

Using Sunlight to Acquire Energy: A Genome of Photosynthetic Animals Decoded Genome analysis reveals chloroplast acquisition without gene transfer in photosynthetic sea slugs. Plants, algae, and some bacteria are able to perform photosynthesis, which is the process of transforming sunlight energy into sugar. Animals are generally unable to use this process to acquire ener

The genetic structure of SARS‐CoV‐2 is consistent with both natural or laboratory origin: Response to Tyshkovskiy and Panchin (10.1002/bies.202000325) All criticisms expressed by Tyshkovskiy and Panchin (10.1002/bies.202000325) on our paper (10.1002/bies.202000240) are either incorrect, as built on the false premise that we have suggested RaTG13 to...

Hopefully this will become a great success fighting against the hunger of the world.

Philippines approves Golden Rice for direct use as food and feed, or for processing December 18, Philippines - After rigorous biosafety assessment, Golden Rice “has been found to be as safe as conventional rice" by the Philippine Department of Agriculture-Bureau of Plant Industry.