CRISPR-Cas13 targets proteins causing ALS, Huntington's disease in the mouse nervous system

Spinal cord astrocytes, the cells seen in this fluorescent microscope image, are involved in the progression of ALS. A new CRISPR-Cas13 system targeting mutant protein production in these cells improved outcomes for mice with ALS. 
Image courtesy of Thomas Gaj and Colin Lim

A single genetic mutation can have profound consequences, as demonstrated in neurodegenerative diseases such as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis or Huntington’s disease. A new study by University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign researchers used a targeted CRISPR technique in the central nervous systems of mice to turn off production of mutant proteins that can cause ALS and Huntington’s disease.

Rather than the popular DNA-editing CRISPR-Cas9 technique, the new approach uses CRISPR-Cas13, which can target mRNA – the messenger molecule that carries protein blueprints transcribed from DNA. The Illinois team developed Cas13 systems to target and cut RNAs that code for mutant proteins that trigger ALS and Huntington’s disease, effectively silencing the mutant genes without disturbing the cell’s DNA, said study leader Thomas Gaj, an Illinois professor of bioengineering. The team published its results in the journal Science Advances.

“Targeting RNA rather than DNA has some unique advantages, including the fact that, in theory, its effects within a cell can be reversed since RNAs are transient molecules,” said Colin Lim, a graduate student who helped lead the study. “Because Cas13 enzymes just target RNA, they also carry minimal risk for introducing any permanent off-target mutations to DNA.”

Researchers will use the world’s most accurate radiation detector in quantum computers

Physicists at Aalto University and VTT have developed a new detector for measuring energy quanta at unprecedented resolution.
Photo: Aalto University.

A radiation detector developed by Aalto University and VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland can also be used in ultralow-temperature freezers and terahertz cameras.

In September 2020, researchers at Aalto University and VTT revealed that they had developed a high-speed nano-scale radiation detector—a bolometer—fast enough to read the qubits in a quantum computer.

Now, Professor Mikko Möttönen’s team and their partners have acquired funding to refine the bolometer technology for use not only in quantum computers but also in ultralow-temperature (ULT) freezers and terahertz cameras. The funding is from the Future Makers Funding Program by Technology Industries Finland Centennial Foundation and by Jane and Aatos Erkko Foundation. This would be the first time ever that this bolometer is utilized for practical applications.

Möttönen explains that building a nano-scale bolometer was already a significant feat. ‘We wanted to develop the world’s best radiation detector. It took seven years for us to get it to function, and for three years we have been improving it,’ he says.

Scientists Find Previously Unknown Jumping Behavior in Insects

Images courtesy of Matt Bertone and Adrian Smith.

A team of researchers has discovered a jumping behavior that is entirely new to insect larvae, and there is evidence that it is occurring in a range of species – we just haven’t noticed it before.

The previously unrecorded behavior occurs in the larvae of a species of lined flat bark beetle (Laemophloeus biguttatus). Specifically, the larvae are able to spring into the air, with each larva curling itself into a loop as it leaps forward. What makes these leaps unique is how the larvae are able to pull it off.

“Jumping at all is exceedingly rare in the larvae of beetle species, and the mechanism they use to execute their leaps is – as far as we can tell – previously unrecorded in any insect larvae,” says Matt Bertone, corresponding author of a paper on the discovery and director of North Carolina State University’s Plant Disease and Insect Clinic.

While there are other insect species that are capable of making prodigious leaps, they rely on something called a “latch-mediated spring actuation mechanism.” This means that they essentially have two parts of their body latch onto each other while the insect exerts force, building up a significant amount of energy. The insect then unlatches the two parts, releasing all of that energy at once, allowing it to spring off the ground.

Native Fish Population Predicted to Rise After Major Expansion of Texas Port

Red drum fish
Image Source: University of Texas at Austin

Researchers have predicted that expanding the Aransas Pass — the marine pass between Mustang Island and Saint Joseph Island, offshore from the town of Aransas Pass, Texas — would increase the native red drum fish population.

From late summer through autumn, native red drum fish spawn off the Texas coast, where the current carries their larvae through the Aransas Pass into the safety of the bay. The fast-growing red drum can be found in shallow coastal waters (1-4 feet deep) along the edges of bays from Massachusetts to Mexico, where it is a popular sportfish important to many coastal economies, including the Texas Gulf Coast.

The Port of Corpus Christi intends to deepen the Aransas Pass to supply some of the biggest crude-carrying ships in the world. In response, UT Austin’s Oden Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences collaborated with the university’s Marine Science Institute to predict what effect deepening the pass could have on the copper scaled fish for which Redfish Bay was named.

Opponents to deepening the Aransas Pass fear an end to the prolific fishing and bird life that draws tourists to the area. The Marine Science Institute, which funded the research, chose red drum fish as the study’s focus because they have been researched by biologists extensively, and their spawning patterns and locations are well known. The new research, published in the Journal of Marine Science and Engineering, predicts that deepening the Aransas Pass would boost the number of red drum fish larvae that reach their nursery grounds by 0.5% based on the selected model parameters.

The Oden Institute’s Computational Hydraulics Group modeled the transport of red drum fish larvae through the Aransas Pass by plugging tides and meteorological conditions into a coastal circulation model, where red drum larvae ebb and flow as Lagrangian particles due to the circulation.

Device wraps around hot surfaces, turns wasted heat to electricity

A new flexible thermoelectric device can wrap around pipes and other hot surfaces and convert wasted heat into electricity. 
Credit: Pennsylvania State University

The energy systems that power our lives also produce wasted heat — like heat that radiates off hot water pipes in buildings and exhaust pipes on vehicles. A new flexible thermoelectric generator can wrap around pipes and other hot surfaces and convert wasted heat into electricity more efficiently than previously possible, according to scientists at Penn State and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory.

“A large amount of heat from the energy we consume is essentially being thrown away, often dispersed right into the atmosphere,” said Shashank Priya, associate vice president for research and professor of materials science and engineering at Penn State. “We haven’t had cost-effective ways with conformal shapes to trap and convert that heat to useable energy. This research opens that door.”

Penn State researchers have been working to improve the performance of thermoelectric generators — devices that can convert differences in temperature to electricity. When the devices are placed near a heat source, electrons moving from the hot side to the cold side produce an electric current, the scientists said.

In prior work, the team created rigid devices that were more efficient than commercial units in high-temperature applications. Now the team has developed a new manufacturing process to produce flexible devices that offer higher power output and efficiency, the scientists said.

Brain Activity Helps Explain Response to Alcohol

People who need to drink relatively high amounts of alcohol before feeling its effects, a genetically influenced risk factor for future heavy drinking and alcohol problems, may have differences in brain connectivity that impair their ability to interpret facial expressions and recognize their own intoxication, a new study suggests. The paper, in Alcoholism: Clinical & Experimental Research, is believed to be the first to demonstrate differences in brain connectivity between people with low and high responses to alcohol. Varying levels of responses to alcohol — for example, how many drinks a person consumes before feeling intoxicated — are known to be related to neurobiological processing. Low responders, who drink more alcohol before feeling affected by it, are at greater risk of alcohol use disorder (AUD) than high responders, who feel the effects of fewer drinks. 

Scientists using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) are exploring the possibility that low responders are less able to recognize certain modest sensory inputs because of atypical brain connectivity. Previous studies found that low responders are likely to require greater effort than high responders to identify facial emotions, a task that is key to social and emotional functioning. For the new study, researchers at the University of California San Diego showed pictures of happy, angry, and fearful faces to study participants undergoing brain scans. They examined connectivity between the amygdala, a structure involved in processing emotions and reward, and other brain regions, and whether differences between low and high responders were associated with problematic drinking later.

The study involved 108 college students aged 18–25. The students had taken an alcohol challenge and been identified as having either a low or high response to alcohol; none had developed an AUD before testing. They were organized into 54 pairs of low and high responders matched by sex, demographics, and substance use. Each participant underwent two fMRI sessions during which they observed pictures of faces, one after consuming alcohol, the other after a placebo beverage. The investigators measured the students’ accuracy at identifying facial expressions, compared amygdala activity, and used statistical analysis to look for associations between alcohol responses and problematic drinking five years later.

Surveys reveal new insights on masks, at-home test kits and misinformation

As the Biden administration moves to contain the latest ravaging wave of COVID-19 by providing Americans with 1 billion COVID-19 self-test kits and 400 million N95 masks for free, new survey data reveal how many are wearing masks, including which types, and how at-home COVID tests are likely leading to undercounts of those contracting the virus.

These data could shed light on how Americans might — or might not — use these forthcoming masks and tests in the fight to stop COVID-19. They also underscore how doctors and nurses see the misinformation spread via social media as the No. 1 source undermining decisions to get vaccines.

The national polls were conducted by the COVID States Project, a consortium of university researchers from Northwestern, Northeastern, Harvard and Rutgers universities.

James Druckman is the Payson S. Wild Professor of Political Science and associate director and fellow of Northwestern’s Institute for Policy Research, and one of the project researchers.

Druckman breaks down the top finding from each report.

Most see N95 masks as more protective, but only one in five wears one

Data collected between Dec. 22, 2021, and Jan. 10, 2022, from a total of more than 17,000 Americans on mask use finds that two-thirds (66%) have correctly understood that N95 masks provide more protection than cloth masks, yet only one in five reports wearing one.

Tug of sun, moon could be driving plate motions on ‘imbalanced’ Earth

A study led by geophysicist Anne M. Hofmeister in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis proposes that imbalanced forces and torques in the Earth-moon-sun system drive circulation of the whole mantle.

The new analysis provides an alternative to the hypothesis that the movement of tectonic plates is related to convection currents in the Earth’s mantle. Convection involves buoyant rise of heated fluids, which Hofmeister and her colleagues argue does not apply to solid rocks. They argue that force, not heat, moves large objects. The new research is published in a special paper of the Geological Society of America, as part of a forthcoming collection assembled in honor of geologist Warren B. Hamilton.

Earth’s internal workings are popularly modeled as dissipating heat generated by internal radioactivity and from leftover energy created during collisions when our planet formed. But even mantle convection proponents recognize that that amount of internal heat-energy is insufficient to drive large-scale tectonics. And there are other problems with using convection to explain observed plate motions.

Instead, Earth’s plates might be shifting because the sun exerts such a strong gravitational pull on the moon that it has caused the moon’s orbit around Earth to become elongated.

Mange Outbreak Decimated a Wild Vicuña Population in Argentina

A family of vicuñas prepares to rest for the night in Argentina's San Guillermo National Park before the 2014 mange outbreak that wiped out the local population.
Credit: Hebe del Valle Ferreyra

Mange has decimated the population of wild vicuñas and guanacos in an Argentinian national park that was created to conserve them, according to a study from the Administration of National Parks in Argentina and the University of California, Davis.

The findings, published today in the journal PLOS ONE, suggest domestic llamas introduced to the site may have been the source of the outbreak. Cascading consequences for local predator and scavenger species are expected.

A lone vicuña stands amid the grasslands in Argentina’s
San Guillermo National Park following a mange epidemic.
Credit: Hebe del Valle Ferreyra

Vicuñas and guanacos are species of wild camelids native to Argentina, Chile, Bolivia, Ecuador and Peru, where the vicuña is the national animal.

The study investigated the impacts and origins of the outbreak, which began in 2014 in San Guillermo National Park.

Between 2013 and the onset of the study in 2017, populations of guanaco and vicuña were down 95% and 98%, respectively. Nearly three-quarters more were lost between 2017-18 alone. By 2019, researchers could no longer find either animal during the study surveys.

“This part of Argentina used to be the Serengeti of the wild camelids,” said corresponding author Marcela Uhart, who directs the Karen C. Drayer Wildlife Health Center’s Latin America Program, within the UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine and its One Health Institute. “Now you go and it’s empty, and whoever is there is mangy. This disease is not novel. We know mange. It’s a common mite. But significant outbreaks are happening in several wildlife species around the world.”

Consistent asteroid showers rock previous thinking on Mars craters

New Curtin University research has confirmed the frequency of asteroid collisions that formed impact craters on Mars has been consistent over the past 600 million years.

The study, published in Earth and Planetary Science Letters, analyzed the formation of more than 500 large Martian craters using a crater detection algorithm previously developed at Curtin, which automatically counts the visible impact craters from a high-resolution image.

Despite previous studies suggesting spikes in the frequency of asteroid collisions, lead researcher Dr Anthony Lagain, from Curtin’s School of Earth and Planetary Sciences, said his research had found they did not vary much at all for many millions of years.

Dr Lagain said counting impact craters on a planetary surface was the only way to accurately date geological events, such as canyons, rivers and volcanoes, and to predict when, and how big, future collisions would be.

“On Earth, the erosion of plate tectonics erases the history of our planet. Studying planetary bodies of our Solar System that still conserve their early geological history, such as Mars, helps us to understand the evolution of our planet,” Dr Lagain said.

“The crater detection algorithm provides us with a thorough understanding of the formation of impact craters including their size and quantity, and the timing and frequency of the asteroid collisions that made them.”