How Did Life Begin? RNA That Replicates Itself Indefinitely Developed For First Time

One of the most enduring questions is how life could have begun on Earth. Molecules that can make copies of themselves are thought to be crucial to understanding this process as they provide the basis for heritability, a critical characteristic of living systems. New findings could inform biochemical questions about how life began.

Now, a pair of Scripps Research Institute scientists has taken a significant step toward answering that question. The scientists have synthesized for the first time RNA enzymes that can replicate themselves without the help of any proteins or other cellular components, and the process proceeds indefinitely.

The work was recently published in the journal Science.

In the modern world, DNA carries the genetic sequence for advanced organisms, while RNA is dependent on DNA for performing its roles such as building proteins. But one prominent theory about the origins of life, called the RNA World model, postulates that because RNA can function as both a gene and an enzyme, RNA might have come before DNA and protein and acted as the ancestral molecule of life. However, the process of copying a genetic molecule, which is considered a basic qualification for life, appears to be exceedingly complex, involving many proteins and other cellular components.

For years, researchers have wondered whether there might be some simpler way to copy RNA, brought about by the RNA itself. Some tentative steps along this road had previously been taken by the Joyce lab and others, but no one could demonstrate that RNA replication could be self-propagating, that is, result in new copies of RNA that also could copy themselves

In Vitro Evolution

A few years after Tracey Lincoln arrived at Scripps Research from Jamaica to pursue her Ph.D., she began exploring the RNA-only replication concept along with her advisor, Professor Gerald Joyce, M.D., Ph.D., who is also Dean of the Faculty at Scripps Research. Their work began with a method of forced adaptation known as in vitro evolution. The goal was to take one of the RNA enzymes already developed in the lab that could perform the basic chemistry of replication, and improve it to the point that it could drive efficient, perpetual self-replication.

Lincoln synthesized in the laboratory a large population of variants of the RNA enzyme that would be challenged to do the job, and carried out a test-tube evolution procedure to obtain those variants that were most adept at joining together pieces of RNA.

Ultimately, this process enabled the team to isolate an evolved version of the original enzyme that is a very efficient replicator, something that many research groups, including Joyce's, had struggled for years to obtain. The improved enzyme fulfilled the primary goal of being able to undergo perpetual replication. "It kind of blew me away," says Lincoln.

Immortalizing Molecular Information

The replicating system actually involves two enzymes, each composed of two subunits and each functioning as a catalyst that assembles the other. The replication process is cyclic, in that the first enzyme binds the two subunits that comprise the second enzyme and joins them to make a new copy of the second enzyme; while the second enzyme similarly binds and joins the two subunits that comprise the first enzyme. In this way the two enzymes assemble each other — what is termed cross-replication. To make the process proceed indefinitely requires only a small starting amount of the two enzymes and a steady supply of the subunits.

"This is the only case outside biology where molecular information has been immortalized," says Joyce.

Not content to stop there, the researchers generated a variety of enzyme pairs with similar capabilities. They mixed 12 different cross-replicating pairs, together with all of their constituent subunits, and allowed them to compete in a molecular test of survival of the fittest. Most of the time the replicating enzymes would breed true, but on occasion an enzyme would make a mistake by binding one of the subunits from one of the other replicating enzymes. When such "mutations" occurred, the resulting recombinant enzymes also were capable of sustained replication, with the most fit replicators growing in number to dominate the mixture. "To me that's actually the biggest result," says Joyce.

The research shows that the system can sustain molecular information, a form of heritability, and give rise to variations of itself in a way akin to Darwinian evolution. So, says Lincoln, "What we have is non-living, but we've been able to show that it has some life-like properties, and that was extremely interesting."

Knocking on the Door of Life

The group is pursuing potential applications of their discovery in the field of molecular diagnostics, but that work is tied to a research paper currently in review, so the researchers can't yet discuss it.

But the main value of the work, according to Joyce, is at the basic research level. "What we've found could be relevant to how life begins, at that key moment when Darwinian evolution starts." He is quick to point out that, while the self-replicating RNA enzyme systems share certain characteristics of life, they are not themselves a form of life.

The historical origin of life can never be recreated precisely, so without a reliable time machine, one must instead address the related question of whether life could ever be created in a laboratory. This could, of course, shed light on what the beginning of life might have looked like, at least in outline. "We're not trying to play back the tape," says Lincoln of their work, "but it might tell us how you go about starting the process of understanding the emergence of life in the lab."

Joyce says that only when a system is developed in the lab that has the capability of evolving novel functions on its own can it be properly called life. "We're knocking on that door," he says, "But of course we haven't achieved that."

The subunits in the enzymes the team constructed each contain many nucleotides, so they are relatively complex and not something that would have been found floating in the primordial ooze. But, while the building blocks likely would have been simpler, the work does finally show that a simpler form of RNA-based life is at least possible, which should drive further research to explore the RNA World theory of life's origins.

The Super Tall Tower would be 24 times the height of Dubai’s Burj Khalifa, has been planned to build:also be used to launch rockets into space

Engineers led by sci-fi writer Neal Stephenson have unveiled plans for the tallest building in the world. Tall Tower would be 24 times the height of Dubai’s Burj Khalifa, considered the tallest building in the world, and would double the maximum heights for commercial airspace, as the designers believe the tower could also be used to launch rockets into space. A building this high poses many structural issues, and we don’t know if it will ever be built.

Read more: http://bbc.in/18k1WIg via BBC News

The World's First Incredible Bionic Man.....can Talk & his Heart Beats like Human beings

The term "bionic man" was the stuff of science fiction in the 1970s, when a popular TV show called "The Six Million Dollar Man" chronicled the adventures of Steve Austin, a former astronaut whose body was rebuilt using artificial parts after he nearly died.

Now, a team of engineers have assembled a robot using artificial organs, limbs and other body parts that comes tantalizingly close to a true "bionic man." For real, this time.

Meet Frank, the Incredible Bionic Man: He's a bit awkward at walking but he mirrors what happens in the human body.

The world's first bionic man has exhibited at the Air and Space museum in Washington, complete with working heart, lung and speech functions

Complete with a functioning circulatory system, more than a million sensors and 200 processors, Frank can walk, talk and see.

 It can walk, talk, grasp, see, hear. The possibilities are endless.

Listen to his heartbeat and hear him talk. Meet Frank the world's first bionic man.

The artificial "man" is the subject of a Smithsonian Channel documentary that airs Sunday, Oct. 20 at 9 p.m. Called "The Incredible Bionic Man," it chronicles engineers' attempt to assemble a functioning body using artificial parts that range from a working kidney and circulation system to cochlear and retina implants.

"(It's) an attempt to showcase just how far medical science has gotten,"  says  Richard Walker, managing director of Shadow Robot Co. and the lead roboticist on the project.

Walker says the robot has about 60 to 70 percent of the function of a human. It stands six-and-a-half feet tall and can step, sit and stand with the help of a Rex walking machine that's used by people who've lost the ability to walk due to a spinal injury. It also has a functioning heart that, using an electronic pump, beats and circulates artificial blood, which carries oxygen just like human blood. An artificial, implantable kidney, meanwhile, replaces the function of a modern-day dialysis unit.

It seems futuristic but some of the technology is being used in humans today. 

"Artificial and implantable trachea, an early artificial and implantable lung, an artificial and implantable heart. It is not a prototype, it's been used all over the world. This technology has the potential of overcoming a lot of disabilities and disease."

Bertolt Meyer says, "He has an artificial pancreas and through his tubes flows artificial blood made up of nano parts that can bind and give off oxygen."

Although the parts used in the robot work, many of them are a long way from being used in humans. The kidney, for example, is only a prototype. And there are some key parts missing: there's no digestive system, liver, or skin. And, of course, no brain.

The bionic man was modeled after Bertolt Meyer, a 36-year-old social psychologist at the University of Zurich who was born without his lower left arm and wears a bionic prosthesis. The man's face was created based on a 3D scan of Meyer's face.

"We wanted to showcase that the technology can provide aesthetic prostheses for people who have lost parts of their faces, for example, their nose, due to an accident or due to, for example, cancer," Meyer says.

Meyer says he initially felt a sense of unease when he saw the robot for the first time.

"I thought it was rather revolting to be honest," he says. "It was quite a shock to see a face that closely resembles what I see in the mirror every morning on this kind of dystopian looking machine."

He has since warmed up to it, especially after the "man" was outfitted with some clothes from the U.K. department store Harrods.

And the cost? As it turns out, this bionic man comes cheaper than his $6-million-dollar sci-fi cousin. While the parts used in the experiment were donated, their value is about $1 million. but even bit to large

For instance a small video camera mounted on the glasses can one day help the blind. "The image that picks up is transmitted in a chip that sits in the back of the eye in someone who's blind and restores a sense of vision."

Cheryl Hunter, a Minnesota resident says, "It's more than I would have ever expected in my lifetime to see something like that."

Bringing a bionic man into the world, creates ethical questions.

Meyer says, "Would people elect to replace healthy limbs with bionic ones? These are questions we raise in the documentary."

Most of the bionic parts are prototypes and far from being implemented in every day surgeries but it could be a window into our future.   

Watch the Incredible Bionic Man documentary on the Smithsonian Channel on Sunday at 9pm. And see the Bionic Man in person at the Air and Space Museum through December 11th, 2013..

it's all seems that Age of Cyborg Has Arrised

what you think about this  Incredible Bionic Man your Reviews are Welcome

Gold-plated nano-bits find, destroy cancer cells

By merging gold and iron oxide particles and adding antibodies to guide them through the bloodstream, researchers managed to target and kill cancer cells with absorbed infrared heat.

Cancer cells need to be heated up a few degrees to die, and this technique targets them better without causing damage to healthy tissue.

Read more: http://bit.ly/1gPmvQH via Cornell Chronicle

New Model for Neurotransmitter Release, Proposed by Nobel Prize Winner

One of this year's Nobel Laureates in physiology or medicine, Thomas C. Südhof of Stanford University, has proposed a new mechanism to explain neurotransmitter release in the journal Neuron. Researchers knew that vesicles containing neurotransmitters formed at the end of the axon, and that the neurotransmitters had to travel from the vesicle, through the membrane and into the synapse. Südhof found that the previous understanding of how this happened (SNARE proteins on the outside of the vesicle and on the axon would cause the vesicle and cell membrane to form a pore through which the neurotransmitters were released) was incorrect. Instead, he characterized a new model, in which the SNARE proteins cause the vesicle (pictured: blue sphere) and cell membrane into very close contact, causing them to fuse and spill the neurotransmitters into the synapse. In this model, the role of the SNARE proteins isn't fusion, it's to force the vesicle and cell membrane into close contact, from which fusion follows. Years of research indicating SNARE proteins functioned by forming pores make these new results controversial, but also show just how much scientists don't know about neurotransmitter release.

Read more: http://bit.ly/1aqjNfl

Journal article: Lipid-Anchored SNAREs Lacking Transmembrane Regions Fully Support Membrane Fusion during Neurotransmitter Release. Neuron, 2013. 

Nanoparticles reprogram immune cells to fight cancer

Researchers at the University of Georgia are developing a new treatment technique that uses nanoparticles to reprogram immune cells so they are able to recognize and attack cancer.

However, most cancerous cells are able to avoid detection by the immune system because they so closely resemble normal cells.

That leaves the cancerous cells free to multiply and grow into life-threatening tumors while the body’s only protectors remain unaware.

“What we are working on is specifically geared toward breast cancer,” said Shanta Dhar, the study’s co-author and an assistant professor of chemistry in the UGA Franklin College of Arts and Sciences.

Effective immune stimulation

“Our paper reports for the first time that we can stimulate the immune system against breast cancer cells using mitochondria-targeted nanoparticles and light using a novel pathway.”

In their experiments, Dhar and her colleagues exposed cancer cells in a petri dish to specially designed nanoparticles. The nanoparticles invade the cell and penetrate the mitochondria — the organelles responsible for producing the energy a cell needs to grow and replicate.

They then activated the nanoparticles inside the cancer cells by exposing them to a tissue-penetrating long-wavelength laser light. Once activated, the nanoparticles disrupt the cancer cell’s normal processes, eventually leading to its death.

The dead cancer cells were collected and exposed to dendritic cells, one of the core components of the human immune system. What the researchers saw was remarkable.

“We are able to potentially overcome some of the traditional drawbacks to today’s dendritic cell immunotherapy,” said Sean Marrache, a graduate student in Dhar’s lab. “By targeting nanoparticles to the mitochondria of cancer cells and exposing dendritic cells to these activated cancer cells, we found that the dendritic cells produced a high concentration of chemical signals that they normally don’t produce, and these signals have traditionally been integral to producing effective immune stimulation.”

Dhar added that the “dendritic cells recognized the cancer as something foreign and began to produce high levels of interferon-gamma, which alerts the rest of the immune system to a foreign presence and signals it to attack. We basically used the cancer against itself.”

A new cancer vaccine

She cautions that the results are preliminary, and the approach works only with certain forms of breast cancer. But if researchers can refine the process, this technology may one day serve as the foundation for a new cancer vaccine used to both prevent and treat disease.

“We particularly hope this technique could help patients with advanced metastatic disease that has spread to other parts of the body,” said Dhar, who also is a member of the UGA Nanoscale Science and Engineering Center, Cancer Center and Center for Drug Discovery.

If the process were to become a treatment, doctors could biopsy a tumor from the patient and kill the cancerous cells with nanoparticles. They could then produce activated dendritic cells in bulk quantities in the lab under controlled conditions before the cells were injected into the patient.

Once in the bloodstream, the newly activated cells would alert the immune system to the cancer’s presence and destroy it. “If we can refine the process further, we may be able to use similar techniques against other forms of cancer as well,” Dhar said.

The work was supported by a startup grant from the National Institutes of Health to UGA, by the UGA Office of the Vice President for Research to Dhar, and by a grant from the National Institutes of Health to Harn.

REFERENCES:

• Sean Marrache et al., Ex Vivo Programming of Dendritic Cells by Mitochondria-Targeted Nanoparticles to Produce Interferon-Gamma for Cancer Immunotherapy, ACS Nano, 2013, DOI: 10.1021/nn403158n

In the Future, We’ll Program Cells Like Computers

Researchers developing method to program human cells to combat HIV, cancer, Alzheimer’s—even aging

Scientists at the biotech startup Immusoft have a unique mission statement: They want to program human cells to become drug factories. They’re currently trying to get stem cells in bone marrow to produce antibodies for neutralizing HIV. If they’re successful, they may produce a unique front-line treatment for the disease.

But Immusoft isn’t stopping there—the company hopes to use their methods to treat Alzheimer’s, cancer, cardiovascular disease, and many more—even the effects of aging, potentially allowing for life extension.

Via New Scientist: 

IMAGINE never having to take a pill again. Instead, mini drug factories hidden inside your bones, and made from your own immune cells, would churn out personalised drugs and other molecules designed to keep you fit and healthy. Such a factory has been created in mice, and could soon be tested in humans to treat HIV.

“We want to turn people’s cells into drug factories, giving them the genetic information they need to produce their own treatment,” says Matthew Scholz of Immusoft in Seattle, which is developing the technique…

Ultimately, it might be possible to engineer B-cells to churn out any protein of choice. They could boost levels of hormones that fall as we age, or other substances that keep the body healthy, such as humanin. This protects brain cells against Alzheimer’s disease, and is present at higher than average levels in people who live to be 100. “It might be possible to recreate the biochemical environment of youth,” Scholz says.

According to the company’s website, within 50 years “we will program human cells like we program computers.” Immusoft also claims that getting a patient’s body to manufacture its own drugs will dramatically reduce the cost of treatment of disease—suggesting that treatment of MPS I could go from costing $250,000 to under $500 a year. This may put previously prohibitively expensive medical treatments in the financial range of the developing world.

Below, Immusoft CEO Matthew Scholz discusses the new technology.

New method of recording brain activity is leading to mind reading devices

Method of Recording Brain Activity Could Lead to Mind-Reading Devices, Stanford Scientists Say

Oct. 15, 2013 — A brain region activated when people are asked to perform mathematical calculations in an experimental setting is similarly activated when they use numbers -- or even imprecise quantitative terms, such as "more than" -- in everyday conversation, according to a study by Stanford University School of Medicine scientists.

The finding could lead to "mind-reading" applications that, for example, would allow a patient who is rendered mute by a stroke to communicate via passive thinking. Conceivably, it could also lead to more dystopian outcomes: chip implants that spy on or even control people's thoughts.

read more on .....http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/10/131015123525.htm via science daily

A first look inside Google's futuristic quantum lab :- Google and NASA's Quantum Artificial Intelligence Lab

In May, Google launched the Quantum Artificial Intelligence Lab with quantum computing hardware from the Canadian company D-Wave systems and technical expertise from NASA.

Today, the Google Quantum Artificial Intelligence Lab will show a short film. It will be shown at the Imagine Science Films Festival at Google New York. The film takes a look at various researchers working on the project, as well as the computer itself, which has to be operated at near-absolute-zero temperatures. Researchers hope the quantum architecture will eventually be used to optimize solutions across complex and interconnected sets of variables currently outside the capabilities of conventional computing. That could allow for new solutions in computational medicine or help NASA to construct a more comprehensive picture of the known universe. "We don't know what the best questions are to ask that computer," says NASA's Eleanor Rieffel in the video. "That's exactly what we're trying to understand."
Even  checkout this video it's amazing

Google says it's made great leaps in recent experiments with the quantum chips, determining which algorithms work better in a quantum setup and providing further evidence that the D-Wave processor uses quantum entanglement, a behavior that links particles with no apparent physical connection between them. D-Wave has always claimed that its chips involved entanglement, but it had been difficult to conclusively demonstrate before now.

The first practical application has been on Google Glass, as engineers put the quantum chips to work on Glass's blink detector, helping it to better distinguish between intentional winks and involuntary blinks.

Artificial nerves in prosthetic limbs to restore touch: study

By connecting an artificial limb to the brain via electrodes, the researchers managed to mimic the feeling of a real hand, able to sense pressure, timing and location of touch. While it's a great breakthrough, human trials are needed before scientists can determine how effective this process will be for amputees.

Read more: http://bit.ly/1cQ5Qw8