Tag Archives: humans

Nanoparticles and the gut health of major living species of animals

A July 27, 2020 news item on Nanowerk announces research into gut health described as seminal (Note: A link has been removed),

An international team of scientists has completed the first ever study into the potential impact of naturally occurring and man-made nanoparticles on the health of all types of the major living species of animals.

Conceived by researchers at the University of Plymouth, as part of the EU [European Union] Nanofase project, the study assessed how the guts of species from honey bees to humans could protect against the bioaccumulation and toxicological effects of engineered nanomaterials (ENMs) found within the environment.

A July 27, 2020 University of Plymouth press release, which originated the news item, provides more detail,

It showed that the digestive systems of many species have evolved to act as a barrier guarding against the absorption of potentially damaging particles.

However, invertebrates such as earthworms also have roving cells within their guts, which can take up ENMs and transfer them to the gut wall.

This represents an additional risk for many invertebrate species where the particles can be absorbed via these roving cells, with consequent effects on internal organs having the potential to cause lasting damage.

Fortunately, this process is not replicated in humans and other vertebrate animals, however there is still the potential for nanomaterials to have a negative impact through the food chain.

The study, published in the July [2020] edition of Environmental Science: Nano, involved scientists from the UK, the Netherlands, Slovenia and Portugal and focused on particles measuring up to 100 nanometres (around 1/10 millionth of a metre).

It combined existing and new research into species including insects and other invertebrates, fish, birds, and mammals, as well as identifying knowledge gaps on reptiles and amphibians. The study provides the first comprehensive overview of how differences in gut structure can affect the impact of ENMs across the animal kingdom.

Richard Handy, Professor of Environmental Toxicology at the University of Plymouth and the study’s senior author, said:

“This is a seminal piece work that combines nearly 100 years of zoology research with our current understanding of nanotechnology.

“The threats posed by engineered nanomaterials are becoming better known, but this study provides the first comprehensive and species-level assessment of how they might pose current and future threats. It should set the foundations for understanding the dietary hazard in the animal kingdom.”

Nanomaterials come in three forms – naturally occurring, incidentally occurring from human activities, and deliberately manufactured – and their use has increased exponentially in the last decade.

They have consistently found new applications in a wide variety of industrial sectors, including electrical appliances, medicines, cleaning products and textiles.

Professor Handy, who has advised organisations including the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development and the United States National Nanotechnology Initiative, added:

“Nanoparticles are far too small for the human eye to see but that doesn’t mean they cannot cause harm to living species. The review element of this study has shown they have actually been written about for many decades, but it is only recently that we have begun to understand the various ways they occur and now the extent to which they can be taken up. Our new EU project, NanoHarmony, looks to build on that knowledge and we are currently working with Public Health England and others to expand our method for detecting nanomaterials in tissues for food safety and other public health matters.”

Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,

The gut barrier and the fate of engineered nanomaterials: a view from comparative physiology by Meike van der Zande, Anita Jemec Kokalj, David J. Spurgeon, Susana Loureiro, Patrícia V. Silva, Zahra Khodaparast, Damjana Drobne, Nathaniel J. Clark, Nico W. van den Brink, Marta Baccaro, Cornelis A. M. van Gestel, Hans Bouwmeester and Richard D. Handy. Environmental Science: Nano, Issue 7 (July 2020) DOI: 10.1039/D0EN00174K First published 27 Apr 2020

This article is open access.

If you’re curious about Nanofase (Nanomaterial FAte and Speciation in the Environment), there’s more here and there’s more about NanoHarmony here.

CRISPR patent decision: Harvard’s and MIT’s Broad Institute victorious—for now

I have written about the CRISPR patent tussle (Harvard & MIT’s [Massachusetts Institute of Technology] Broad Institute vs the University of California at Berkeley) previously in a Jan. 6, 2015 posting and in a more detailed May 14, 2015 posting. I also mentioned (in a Jan. 17, 2017 posting) CRISPR and its patent issues in the context of a posting about a Slate.com series on Frankenstein and the novel’s applicability to our own time. This patent fight is being bitterly fought as fortunes are at stake.

It seems a decision has been made regarding the CRISPR patent claims. From a Feb. 17, 2017 article by Charmaine Distor for The Science Times,

After an intense court battle, the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) released its ruling on February 15 [2017]. The rights for the CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing technology was handed over to the Broad Institute of Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

According to an article in Nature, the said court battle was between the Broad Institute and the University of California. The two institutions are fighting over the intellectual property right for the CRISPR patent. The case between the two started when the patent was first awarded to the Broad Institute despite having the University of California apply first for the CRISPR patent.

Heidi Ledford’s Feb. 17, 2017 article for Nature provides more insight into the situation (Note: Links have been removed),

It [USPTO] ruled that the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT in Cambridge could keep its patents on using CRISPR–Cas9 in eukaryotic cells. That was a blow to the University of California in Berkeley, which had filed its own patents and had hoped to have the Broad’s thrown out.

The fight goes back to 2012, when Jennifer Doudna at Berkeley, Emmanuelle Charpentier, then at the University of Vienna, and their colleagues outlined how CRISPR–Cas9 could be used to precisely cut isolated DNA1. In 2013, Feng Zhang at the Broad and his colleagues — and other teams — showed2 how it could be adapted to edit DNA in eukaryotic cells such as plants, livestock and humans.

Berkeley filed for a patent earlier, but the USPTO granted the Broad’s patents first — and this week upheld them. There are high stakes involved in the ruling. The holder of key patents could make millions of dollars from CRISPR–Cas9’s applications in industry: already, the technique has sped up genetic research, and scientists are using it to develop disease-resistant livestock and treatments for human diseases.

But the fight for patent rights to CRISPR technology is by no means over. Here are four reasons why.

1. Berkeley can appeal the ruling

2. European patents are still up for grabs

3. Other parties are also claiming patent rights on CRISPR–Cas9

4. CRISPR technology is moving beyond what the patents cover

As for Ledford’s 3rd point, there are an estimated 763 patent families (groups of related patents) claiming CAS9 leading to the distinct possibility that the Broad Institute will be fighting many patent claims in the future.

Once you’ve read Distor’s and Ledford’s articles, you may want to check out Adam Rogers’ and Eric Niiler’s Feb. 16, 2017 CRISPR patent article for Wired,

The fight over who owns the most promising technique for editing genes—cutting and pasting the stuff of life to cure disease and advance scientific knowledge—has been a rough one. A team on the West Coast, at UC Berkeley, filed patents on the method, Crispr-Cas9; a team on the East Coast, based at MIT and the Broad Institute, filed their own patents in 2014 after Berkeley’s, but got them granted first. The Berkeley group contended that this constituted “interference,” and that Berkeley deserved the patent.

At stake: millions, maybe billions of dollars in biotech money and licensing fees, the future of medicine, the future of bioscience. Not nothing. Who will benefit depends on who owns the patents.

On Wednesday [Feb. 15, 2017], the US Patent Trial and Appeal Board kind of, sort of, almost began to answer that question. Berkeley will get the patent for using the system called Crispr-Cas9 in any living cell, from bacteria to blue whales. Broad/MIT gets the patent in eukaryotic cells, which is to say, plants and animals.

It’s … confusing. “The patent that the Broad received is for the use of Crispr gene-editing technology in eukaryotic cells. The patent for the University of California is for all cells,” says Jennifer Doudna, the UC geneticist and co-founder of Caribou Biosciences who co-invented Crispr, on a conference call. Her metaphor: “They have a patent on green tennis balls; we have a patent for all tennis balls.”

Observers didn’t quite buy that topspin. If Caribou is playing tennis, it’s looking like Broad/MIT is Serena Williams.

“UC does not necessarily lose everything, but they’re no doubt spinning the story,” says Robert Cook-Deegan, an expert in genetic policy at Arizona State University’s School for the Future of Innovation in Society. “UC’s claims to eukaryotic uses of Crispr-Cas9 will not be granted in the form they sought. That’s a big deal, and UC was the big loser.”

UC officials said Wednesday [Feb. 15, 2017] that they are studying the 51-page decision and considering whether to appeal. That leaves members of the biotechnology sector wondering who they will have to pay to use Crispr as part of a business—and scientists hoping the outcome won’t somehow keep them from continuing their research.

….

Happy reading!

Informal roundup of robot movies and television programmes and a glimpse into our robot future

David Bruggeman has written an informal series of posts about robot movies. The latest, a June 27, 2015 posting on his Pasco Phronesis blog, highlights the latest Terminator film and opines that the recent interest could be traced back to the rebooted Battlestar Galactica television series (Note: Links have been removed),

I suppose this could be traced back to the reboot of Battlestar Galactica over a decade ago, but robots and androids have become an increasing presence on film and television, particularly in the last 2 years.

In the movies, the new Terminator film comes out next week, and the previews suggest we will see a new generation of killer robots traveling through time and space.  Chappie is now out on your digital medium of choice (and I’ll post about any science fiction science policy/SciFiSciPol once I see it), so you can compare its robot police to those from either edition of Robocop or the 2013 series Almost Human.  Robots also have a role …

The new television series he mentions, Humans (click on About) debuted on the US tv channel, AMC, on Sunday, June 28, 2015 (yesterday).

HUMANS is set in a parallel present, where the latest must-have gadget for any busy family is a Synth – a highly-developed robotic servant, eerily similar to its live counterpart. In the hope of transforming the way his family lives, father Joe Hawkins (Tom Goodman-Hill) purchases a Synth (Gemma Chan) against the wishes of his wife (Katharine Parkinson), only to discover that sharing life with a machine has far-reaching and chilling consequences.

Here’s a bit more information from its Wikipedia entry,

Humans (styled as HUM∀NS) is a British-American science fiction television series, debuted in June 2015 on Channel 4 and AMC.[2] Written by the British team Sam Vincent and Jonathan Brackley, based on the award-winning Swedish science fiction drama Real Humans, the series explores the emotional impact of the blurring of the lines between humans and machines. The series is produced jointly by AMC, Channel 4 and Kudos.[3] The series will consist of eight episodes.[4]

David also wrote about Ex Machina, a recent robot film with artistic ambitions, in an April 26, 2015 posting on his Pasco Phronesis blog,

I finally saw Ex Machina, which recently opened in the United States.  It’s a minimalist film, with few speaking roles and a plot revolving around an intelligence test.  Of the robot movies out this year, it has received the strongest reviews, and it may take home some trophies during the next awards season.  Shot in Norway, the film is both lovely to watch and tricky to engage.  I finished the film not quite sure what the characters were thinking, and perhaps that’s a lesson from the film.

Unlike Chappie and Automata, the intelligent robot at the center of Ex Machina is not out in the world. …

He started the series with a Feb. 8, 2015 posting which previews the movies in his later postings but also includes a couple of others not mentioned in either the April or June posting, Avengers: Age of Ultron and Spare Parts.

It’s interesting to me that these robots  are mostly not related to the benign robots in the movie, ‘Forbidden Planet’, a reworking of Shakespeare’s The Tempest in outer space, in ‘Lost in Space’, a 1960s television programme, and in the Jetsons animated tv series of the 1960s. As far as I can tell not having seen the new movies in question, the only benign robot in the current crop would be ‘Chappie’. It should be mentioned that the ‘Terminator’, in the person of Arnold Schwarzenegger, has over a course of three or four movies evolved from a destructive robot bent on evil to a destructive robot working on behalf of good.

I’ll add one more more television programme and I’m not sure if the robot boy is good or evil but there’s Extant where Halle Berry’s robot son seems to be in a version of the Pinocchio story (an ersatz child want to become human), which is enjoying its second season on US television as of July 1, 2015.

Regardless of one or two ‘sweet’ robots, there seems to be a trend toward ominous robots and perhaps, in addition to Battlestar Galactica, the concerns being raised by prominent scientists such as Stephen Hawking and those associated with the Centre for Existential Risk at the University of Cambridge have something to do with this trend and may partially explain why Chappie did not do as well at the box office as hoped. Thematically, it was swimming against the current.

As for a glimpse into the future, there’s this Children’s Hospital of Los Angeles June 29, 2015 news release,

Many hospitals lack the resources and patient volume to employ a round-the-clock, neonatal intensive care specialist to treat their youngest and sickest patients. Telemedicine–with real-time audio and video communication between a neonatal intensive care specialist and a patient–can provide access to this level of care.

A team of neonatologists at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles investigated the use of robot-assisted telemedicine in performing bedside rounds and directing daily care for infants with mild-to-moderate disease. They found no significant differences in patient outcomes when telemedicine was used and noted a high level of parent satisfaction. This is the first published report of using telemedicine for patient rounds in a neonatal intensive care unit (NICU). Results will be published online first on June 29 in the Journal of Telemedicine and Telecare.

Glimpse into the future?

The part I find most fascinating was that there was no difference in outcomes, moreover, the parents’ satisfaction rate was high when robots (telemedicine) were used. Finally, of the families who completed the after care survey (45%), all indicated they would be comfortable with another telemedicine (robot) experience. My comment, should robots prove to be cheaper in the long run and the research results hold as more studies are done, I imagine that hospitals will introduce them as a means of cost cutting.

SWEET, sweet transporters

A Sept. 4, 2014 news item on Azonano is all about sugar,

Sugars are an essential source of energy for microrganisms, animals and humans. They are produced by plants, which convert energy from sunlight into chemical energy in the form of sugars through photosynthesis.

These sugars are taken up into cells, no matter whether these are bacteria, yeast, human cells or plant cells, by proteins that create sugar-specific pores in the membrane that surrounds a cell. These transport proteins are thus essential in all organisms. It is not surprising that the transporters of humans and plants are very similar since they evolved from their bacterial ancestors.

Sugar transporters can also be a source of vulnerability for plants and animals alike. In plants they can be susceptible to takeover by pathogens, hijacking the source of the plant’s food and energy. In animals, mutations in sugar transporters can lead to diseases, such as diabetes.

New work from a team led by the Stanford University School of Medicine’s Liang Feng and including Carnegie’s [Carnegie Institution for Science] Wolf Frommer has for the first time elucidated the atomic structures of the prototype of the sugar transporters (termed “SWEET” transporters) in plants and humans. These are bacterial sugar transporters, called SemiSWEETs (because they are just half the size of the human and plant ones). …

A Sept. 3, 2014 Carnegie Institution for Science news release, which originated the news item, describes the importance of understanding these transporters,

Until now, there was very limited information about the unique structures of these important transport proteins, which it turns out are different from all other known sugar transporters.

Discovering the structure of these proteins is important, as it is the key to unlocking the mechanism by which they work. And understanding their mechanism is crucial for figuring out what happens when these functions fail to work properly, because that knowledge can help in addressing the resulting diseases or growth problems in both plants and animals.

The research team performed a combination of structural and functional analyses of SemiSWEETs and SWEETs and was able to crystallize two examples in different states, demonstrating not only the protein’s structure, but much about its functionality as well.

They found that the SemiSWEETs do not act as a sugar channel, or tunnel, which allow sugars to pass across the membrane. Rather they act like an airlock, moving the sugars in multiple stages, two of which can be observed in the crystal structures. The SemiSWEETs, among the smallest known transport proteins, assemble in pairs, thereby creating a structure that looks like their bigger plant and human SWEET homologs. This marks the SWEET family of proteins as drastically different from other sugar transport proteins.

“One of the most-exciting parts of this discovery is the speed with which we were able to move from discovering these novel sugar transporters, to determining their actual structure, to showing how they work,” Frommer said. “Fantastic progress made possible by a collaboration with a structural biologist from Stanford University. Our findings highlight the potential practical applications of this information in improving crop yields as well as in addressing human diseases.”

Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,

Structures of bacterial homologues of SWEET transporters in two distinct conformations by Yan Xu, Yuyong Tao, Lily S. Cheung, Chao Fan, Li-Qing Chen, Sophia Xu, Kay Perry, Wolf B. Frommer, & Liang Feng. Nature (2014) doi:10.1038/nature13670 Published online 03 September 2014

This paper is behind a paywall.