Live Intracellular Imaging with New, Conditionally Active Immunofluorescence Probe

Figure 1
Schematic (a) and mechanism (c) of p53 Intra Q-body. (b) p53-dependent fluorescence signal and (d) microscopy images. (a) The double labelled fluorescent dye in the antigen fragment-based Q-body is de-quenched on binding with the target antigen, thus displaying fluorescent signaling for visualizing the intracellular target. (b) p53 peptide concentration-dependent variation in fluorescence signal intensity. (c) Q-body displays a high fluorescent signal on binding with the target in cells expressing p53, as compared to the 'p53' negative human cells. (d) Confocal microscopy images of HCT116 p53 and SK-BR-3. Cells which do not express p53, i.e., HCT116 p53(-/-) exhibit no TAMRA-based fluorescence while others (including images stained with Hoechst dye for illuminating nucleus and under bright-field to show the cells) display significant fluorescence.
Source/Credit: Tokyo Institute of Technology

Furthering the visualization of intracellular dynamics for therapeutic applications, a Tokyo Tech research team has now demonstrated precise imaging of endogenous proteins in live cells using an antigen-binding fragment (Fab)-based Quenchbody (Q-body). The Q-body probe shows antigen-dependent response and a switchable (on-off) fluorescent signaling, enabling the visualization and sorting of cells expressing p53, a tumor suppressor biomarker protein.

Recent advances in imaging technology have made it possible to visualize intracellular dynamics, which offers a better understanding of several key biological principles for accelerating therapeutic development. Fluorescent labeling is one such technique that is used to identify intracellular proteins, their dynamics, and dysfunction. Both internal as well as external probes with fluorescent dyes are used for this purpose, although external probes can better visualize intracellular proteins as compared to the internal probes. However, their application is limited by non-specific binding to intracellular components, resulting in a low target specific signaling and higher background noise.

Simulation helps in the search for the origin of cosmic radiation

The colorful lines show how cosmic radiation is deflected in magnetic fields. The white straight lines represent a large-scale magnetic field. In addition, small-scale magnetic fields not shown here act on the orbits of the particles (colorful lines).
Credit: RUB, Dr. Lukas Merten

The cosmic radiation seems to be all around us. That is exactly what makes it difficult to find their sources. It would be helpful if you could trace your way back through space. A new program helps with this.

An international research team has developed a computer program that can be used to simulate the transport of cosmic radiation through space. The scientists hope to be able to solve the puzzle about the sources of cosmic radiation. So far it is unknown which celestial objects emit the high-energy radiation that patterns the earth from space. In order to be able to explain experimental data, theoretical models are required; the new computer simulation can deliver this. A team of researchers from the Ruhr University Bochum (RUB) describes the software in the journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics, published online on September 12, 2022.

Like a uniformly illuminated sky during the day

Since their discovery of 100 years, researchers have been trying to decipher where the cosmic radiation comes from. The problem: viewed from Earth, it looks like heaven by day with the naked eye: it is illuminated almost everywhere where you look. Because the light of the sun is scattered in the earth's atmosphere and is distributed evenly over the entire sky. Cosmic radiation is also scattered on its way to earth - through interactions with cosmic magnetic fields. Only a uniformly illuminated picture can be seen from the earth; the origin of the radiation remains hidden.

Ural Scientists Develop Technology to Correct Genetic Defects

According to Mikhail Bolkov, a regulatory framework is also needed for genetic intervention therapy. Photo credit: Ilya Safarov

Scientists at the Institute of Immunology and Physiology of the Ural Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences and UrFU develop methods for genetic diagnosis and therapy of diseases caused by primary immunodeficiency. This is a congenital malfunction of one or more parts of the immune system that predisposes to the development of frequent, prolonged, hard-to-treat diseases, not only infectious but also autoimmune, autoinflammatory and oncological diseases. For example, systemic lupus erythematosus, various vasculitis, chronic pneumonia, and even hair loss.

Today, primary immunodeficiencies are treated with replacement therapy and hematopoietic stem cell transplantation. However, the treatment of such diseases promises to become more effective by replacing genetic defects in human DNA. Mikhail Bolkov, a Senior Researcher at the Department of Immunochemistry of Ural Federal University and the Institute of Immunology and Physiology of the Ural Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, spoke about this on the air of Radio "Komsomolskaya Pravda".

Slowing of continental plate movement, controlled timing of Earth’s largest volcanic events

Fagradalsfjal volcanic eruption in Iceland.
Photo credit: Tanya Grypachevskaya on Unsplash

Scientists have shed new light on the timing and likely cause of major volcanic events that occurred millions of years ago and caused such climatic and biological upheaval that they drove some of the most devastating extinction events in Earth’s history.

Surprisingly the new research, published today in leading international journal Science Advances, suggests a slowing of continental plate movement was the critical event that enabled magma to rise to the Earth’s surface and deliver the devastating knock-on impacts.

Earth’s history has been marked by major volcanic events, called Large Igneous Provinces (LIPs) – the largest of which have caused major increases in atmospheric carbon emissions that warmed Earth’s climate, drove unprecedented changes to ecosystems, and resulted in mass extinctions on land and in the oceans.

Using chemical data from ancient mudstone deposits obtained from a 1.5 km-deep borehole in Wales, an international team led by scientists from Trinity College Dublin’s School of Natural Sciences was able to link two key events from around 183 million years ago (the Toarcian period).

First JWST images of Orion Nebula released

The inner region of the Orion Nebula as seen by the James Webb Space Telescope’s NIRCam instrument.
Image credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, Data reduction and analysis: PDRs4All ERS Team; graphical processing S. Fuenmayor

An international research team including University of Michigan researchers has just revealed the first images of the Orion Nebula, the richest and closest star nursery in the solar system, captured by the James Webb Space Telescope.

Located in the constellation of Orion, 1,350 light years from Earth, the Orion Nebula is an area rich in matter where many stars are formed. Its environment is similar to the environment in which our solar system was born more than 4.5 billion years ago. Studying allows researchers to understand the conditions in which our solar system formed.

“Orion Bar is a prototype region for processes that occur throughout our galaxy and the universe as stars continually irradiate nearby material,” said Felipe Alarcon, U-M graduate student and member of the international group. “This amazing picture will be a template image.”

The heart of star nurseries, such as the Orion Nebula, is obscured by large amounts of dust—impossible to observe in visible light with telescopes such as the Hubble Space Telescope. The JWST observes the infrared light of the cosmos, penetrating these layers of dust.

The image reveals many spectacular structures, down to scales of about 40 astronomical units, or about the size of our solar system. These structures include a number of dense filaments of matter, which could launch the birth of a new generation of stars. The image also reveals forming stellar systems. These consist of a central proto-star surrounded by a disc of dust and gas inside which planets form.

Dark Energy Camera Captures Bright, Young Stars Blazing Inside Glowing Nebula

NOIRLab, captures the star-forming nebula NGC 6357, which is located 8000 light-years away in the direction of the constellation Scorpius.
Hi-Res Zoomable Image
Credit: CTIO/NOIRLab/DOE/NSF/AURA  T.A. Rector (University of Alaska Anchorage/NSF’s NOIRLab), J. Miller (Gemini Observatory/NSF’s NOIRLab), M. Zamani & D. de Martin (NSF’s NOIRLab)

The 570-megapixel US Department of Energy-fabricated Dark Energy Camera at NOIRLab’s Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile is one of the most powerful tools in astronomy and astrophysics. To commemorate its first decade of discovery and exploration, NOIRLab has released a stunning image of the Lobster Nebula, a brilliant star-forming region located 8000 light-years from Earth in the direction of the constellation Scorpius. The image was unveiled at a conference highlighting DECam’s breakthrough science results.

The Dark Energy Camera (DECam) mounted on the Víctor M. Blanco 4-meter Telescope at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile, a Program of NSF’s NOIRLab, is celebrating 10 years as one of the highest-performance, wide-field CCD imagers in the world.

To help commemorate DECam’s first decade of operation, NOIRLab has released a breathtaking image of the star-forming Lobster Nebula (NGC 6357), which is located about 8000 light-years from Earth in the direction of the constellation Scorpius. This image reveals bright, young stars surrounded by billowing clouds of dust and gas.

Mothers Influence Gut Microbial Development in Wild Primates

A baby gelada foraging in Simien Mountains National Park in Ethiopia. Their early-life gut microbiome, from infancy through first years of life, are shown to be influenced by bacteria likely passed down from mom.
Credit: Sharmi Sen

The bacteria that reside in the human gut (“the gut microbiome”) are known to play beneficial and harmful roles in human health. Because these bacteria are transmitted through milk, mothers can directly impact the composition of bacteria that their offspring harbor, potentially giving moms another pathway to influence their infant’s future development and health. A study of wild geladas (a non-human primate that lives in Ethiopia) provides the first evidence of clear and significant maternal effects on the gut microbiome both before and after weaning in a wild mammal. This finding, published in Current Biology, suggests the impact of mothers on the offspring gut microbiome community extends far beyond when the infant has stopped nursing.

A research team co-led by Stony Brook University anthropologist Amy Lu, and biologists Alice Baniel and Noah Snyder-Mackler at Arizona State University, came to this conclusion by analyzing one of the largest datasets on gut microbiome development in a wild mammal.

“Early life gut microbial development is known to have a large impact on later life health in humans and other model organisms,” said Lu, associate professor in the Department of Anthropology in the College of Arts and Sciences at Stony Brook University. “Now we have solid evidence that mothers can influence this process, both before and after weaning. Although we’re not 100% certain how mothers do this, one possible explanation is that they transfer specific bacteria to their offspring.”

FSU researcher finds forest canopies are warmer than previously thought

 

Stephanie Pau, an associate professor in the Department of Geography.
Source: Florida State University

A study by a Florida State University researcher finds that temperatures in forest canopies are higher than previous estimates, threatening forests’ vital role in mitigating global warming.

Stephanie Pau, an associate professor in the Department of Geography, was part of a team whose study was published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Pau said leaves have optimal temperatures at which they capture carbon from the atmosphere. And as carbon dioxide fuels rising global temperatures, forests remain the most important part of the carbon cycle on land, she said.

“The implications of our study are that with greater warming in the future, tree canopies will not cool as much as we thought they would, and this means they may sequester less carbon from the atmosphere.”

She added: “Global temperatures that are livable for us are very closely tied to how much carbon dioxide forests can remove from the atmosphere.”

The study included the use of cutting-edge thermal camera monitoring technology that measured temperatures every five minutes across a network of sites. While it’s long been known that leaf temperatures often differ from air temperatures, the bulk of previous studies came from experiments on individual leaves.

Healthy rivers, healthy people

A new Stanford University-led study in Costa Rica reveals that restoring relatively narrow strips of riverfront forests could substantially improve regional water quality and carbon storage. The analysis, available online and set to be published in the October issue of Ecosystem Services, shows that such buffers tend to be most beneficial in steep, erosion-prone, and intensively fertilized landscapes – a finding that could inform similar efforts in other countries.

“Forests around rivers are key places to target for restoration because they provide huge benefits with very little impediment to productive land,” said study lead author Kelley Langhans, a PhD student in biology at Stanford University affiliated with the Natural Capital Project. “A small investment could have a really big impact on the health of people and ecosystems.”

Unleashing potential

Vegetated areas adjacent to rivers and streams absorb harmful pollutants in runoff, keeping them out of waterways. Creating effective policies to safeguard these riparian buffers and prioritizing where to implement them is a challenge in part because of a lack of data quantifying the impact of restoring such areas. The researchers, in partnership with officials from Costa Rica’s Ministry of Environment and Energy, Central Bank, and PRIAS Laboratory, analyzed one such policy – Costa Rica’s Forest Law 7575. Passed in 1996 and unevenly enforced since then, the law mandates protection of forested riverfront strips 10 meters (about 33 feet) to 50 meters (about 164 feet) wide.

Through the quantum looking glass

Green laser light illuminates a metasurface that is a hundred times thinner than paper, that was fabricated at the Center for Integrated Nanotechnologies. CINT is jointly operated by Sandia and Los Alamos national laboratories for the Department of Energy Office of Science.
Photo credit: Craig Fritz

An ultrathin invention could make future computing, sensing and encryption technologies remarkably smaller and more powerful by helping scientists control a strange but useful phenomenon of quantum mechanics, according to new research recently published in the journal Science.

Scientists at Sandia National Laboratories and the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light have reported on a device that could replace a roomful of equipment to link photons in a bizarre quantum effect called entanglement. This device — a kind of nano-engineered material called a metasurface — paves the way for entangling photons in complex ways that have not been possible with compact technologies.

When scientists say photons are entangled, they mean they are linked in such a way that actions on one affect the other, no matter where or how far apart the photons are in the universe. It is an effect of quantum mechanics, the laws of physics that govern particles and other very tiny things.

Although the phenomenon might seem odd, scientists have harnessed it to process information in new ways. For example, entanglement helps protect delicate quantum information and correct errors in quantum computing, a field that could someday have sweeping impacts in national security, science and finance. Entanglement also enables new, advanced encryption methods for secure communication.