#nb181-variant

#nb181-variant

Dr. Bishop and Varmus showed that oncogenes - genes that cause cancer - are not foreign genes introduced into the body by viruses, as was widely believed at the time. Instead, normal versions of oncogenes are present in healthy cells, where they help regulate normal growth.

Using CRISPR-Cas9 and adeno-associated virus (AAV)-mediated homology-directed repair, we targeted CAR integration into the endogenous human TCR alpha locus (TRAC). TRAC-CAR T cells display dynamic CAR expression that delays exhaustion and improves tumour control in xenograft and immunocompetent models. This work has been critical for the development of allogeneic CAR T cell therapy, as it disrupts the TCR after transgene insertion—a necessary step to limit graft-versus-host disease.

When mitochondria are exposed to tissue or blood, they lose the electrical gradient across their outer membrane. Mitochondria that lack such a gradient are recognized by a cell's internal machinery as damaged and quickly destroyed. The vast majority of previous studies involved injecting 'naked' mitochondria directly into the bloodstream or tissue sites, but the approach isn't very efficient, so researchers often have to use 'ridiculous' doses of mitochondria.

It was another detail that the rest of the family apparently knew but had never told me; they thought I already knew. The biology mattered less to me than the secret. Dad had been adopted, it turned out. A classic affliction of the 1950s, in which young, unmarried couples were forced to give away their newborn babies.

The Y chromosome primarily carries genes that provide instructions for male sex differentiation and fertility. But it also carries some known to suppress tumor growth - a protective ability that is lost if those genes are damaged or destroyed.

The strategy could be fruitful: If unidentified DNA evidence can be connected to someone - even a distant relative - in a common genealogy database, it would give investigators more information and possibly lead to a suspect in Guthrie's kidnapping in Arizona. "It's a fantastic tool," said Ruth Ballard, a geneticist in California who specializes in DNA and has testified in hundreds of court cases. "If it's a good quality sample and they're able to get a profile, they could find a hit on that fairly quickly."

January 22, 2026 2 min read Add Us On GoogleAdd SciAm The National Institutes of Health's move to end support for research using fetal human tissue is clearly a political decision, not a scientific one, one expert says By Dan Vergano edited by Claire Cameron National Institutes of Health director Jay Bhattacharya speaks at the National Conservatism Conference in Washington, D.C., in 2025.

Biology is undergoing a transformation. After centuries of studying life as it evolves naturally, researchers are now using a combination of computation and genome engineering to intervene, generating new proteins and even whole bacteria from scratch. The use of artificial-intelligence tools to design biological components, an approach known as generative biology, is set to turbocharge this area of research. Just last year, scientists used AI-assisted design to produce artificial genes that can be expressed in mammalian cells.

Martschenko's argument is largely that genetic research and data have almost always been used thus far as a justification to further entrench extant social inequalities. But we know the solutions to many of the injustices in our world-trying to lift people out of poverty, for example-and we certainly don't need more genetic research to implement them. Trejo's point is largely that more information is generally better than less.

Before treatment began, participants underwent neuroimaging. Instead of relying on a single modality, the researchers fused structural connectivity (how regions are physically wired) with functional connectivity (how regions co-activate at rest). The goal was not to throw every possible feature at a black box, but to learn a constrained pattern-what the authors call structure-function "covariation"-that carries the most predictive signal for outcome. In other words, the model tries to find the smallest set of connections that meaningfully forecasts symptom change.

Scientists in the laboratory of Rendong Yang, PhD, associate professor of Urology, have developed a new large language model that can interpret transcriptomic data in cancer cell lines more accurately than conventional approaches, as detailed in a recent study published in Nature Communications. Long-read RNA sequencing technologies have transformed transcriptomics research by detecting complex RNA splicing and gene fusion events that have often been missed by conventional short-read RNA-sequencing methods.

Cats, along with dogs, are the animals that spend the most time with humans. They share spaces, routines, and even illnesses. They are exposed to almost all the same environmental stressors that induce tumors in people. However, unlike what happens with dogs, cancer research in felines is very limited. Now, a huge study published in Science, using hundreds of tumor samples, has obtained the most complete oncogenome of the domestic cat.

Mucopolysaccharidosis type II (MPS II), or Hunter syndrome, is a rare genetic disorder primarily affecting boys, caused by a deficiency in the enzyme needed to break down sugar molecules. This harmful buildup in cells and tissues impacts multiple body systems, causing frequent infections, organ enlargement and developmental disabilities. Management involves supportive care and enzyme replacement therapy, as there is currently no cure,

Generalist models "fail miserably" at the benchmarks used to measure how AI performs scientific tasks, Alex Zhavoronkov, Insilico's founder and CEO, told Fortune. " You test it five times at the same task, and you can see that it's so far from state of the art...It's basically worse than random. It's complete garbage." Far better are specialist AI models that are trained directly on chemistry or biology data.