News by Subject Technology & Engineering

Far Eastern Federal University (FEFU) scientists teamed up with colleagues from the UK and Mauritius and experimentally demonstrated that extracts of the endemic (i.e. growing only on this island) medicinal herb leaves Acalypha integrifolia, Eugenia tinifolia, and Labourdonnaisia glauca stop the proliferation of esophageal squamous carcinoma cells, ones of the most deadly cancer type worldwide. A related article is published in the Acta Naturae journal.

On April 3, 2019, researchers from the Boyce Thompson Institute published a framework for using new genome sequences as a training resource for undergraduates interested in learning genome annotation. This strategy will both make the process of determining gene functions more efficient and help train the next generation of scientists in bioinformatics.

Since the CRISPR genome editing technology was invented in 2012, it has shown great promise to treat a number of intractable diseases. However, scientists have struggled to identify potential off-target effects in therapeutically relevant cell types, which remains the main barrier to moving therapies to the clinic. Now, a group of scientists at the Gladstone Institutes and the Innovative Genomics Institute (IGI), with collaborators at AstraZeneca, have developed a reliable method to do just that.

A low-tech problem troubles the high-tech world of digital pathology imaging: There are no reliable standards for the quality of digitized tissue slides comprising the source material for computers reading and analyzing vast numbers of images. Poor-quality slides get mixed in with accurate slides, potentially confusing a computer program trying to learn what a cancerous cell looks like. Researchers from Case Western Reserve University are trying to fix this, sharing an open-source quality control standard.

EPFL scientists have discovered how a family of proteins that regulates the activity of transposable elements in the genome allows them to make inheritable changes to the growing fetus.