QuickBiology News

Early detection of causative microorganisms in patients with severe infection is critical to informing clinical interventions and the administration of appropriately targeted antibiotics. The traditional culture-based method is time-consuming (taking days or even weeks), especially some microorganisms are unculturable in a lab setting. PCR tests using conserved 16S ribosomal RNA gene and 28S-ITS PCR regions of bacteria and fungi, respectively have low sensitivity of genus/species level. Specifical clinical tests only focusing on certain pathogens makes it impossible for discovering unknown pathogens as most infectious syndromes present with indistinguishable clinical manifestations.Read More

Cancer immunotherapy like chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cells has been approved and used in blood and bone marrow cancer. Although CAR-T therapy is much more powerful and promising in these types of cancers, long-term remissions are still observed in < 50% of patients.Read More

In 2020, The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2020 to Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer A. Doudna, who have discovered CRISPR/Cas9 system, a genetic scissor for rewriting the code of life. David Liu’s lab at the Broad Institute of MIT & Harvard has been inventing new CRISPR gene-editing systems without double-strand DNA break in CRISPR/Cas9 system. In 2016, they invented “base editing”, which seamlessly does four transition editing (C to T, G to A, A to G, and T to C). In 2019, they gave the world “prime editing”, which is devised to achieve all 12 base-to-based conversions, in addition, it can mediate targeted insertions and deletions. Read More

Chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL) is a disease that remains incurable by conventional chemotherapy. SF3B1 is a splicing factor, a core component of the U2 snRNP of the spliceosome, and associates with the U2 snRNA and branch point adenosine of the pre-mRNA. Recurrent somatic mutations in SF3B1 have been linked to CLL. In CLL, mutations in the heat-repeat domain of SF3B1 is shown to associate with poor clinical outcome. Previous whole transcript profiling mainly focused on exon level using Illumina short reads NGS platform. The extent to which full-length isoforms contribute to such disease due to splicing regulator SF3B1 mutations are not well characterized. Read More

Stem cell therapy or regenerative medicine promotes the repair response of diseased, injured, or dysfunctional tissues using stem cells. The important biosafety for the use of human pluripotent stem cells is to make sure there are not any mutations, especially in genes associated with cancer that occurred during stem cell in vitro propagation. Read More

Human cancer cell lines have been a driving force in cancer research. The NCI-60 Human Tumor Cell Lines cover 60 different human tumor cell lines, representing leukemia, melanoma, and cancers of the lung, colon, brain, ovary, breast, prostate, and kidney cancers (ref1). The Cancer Cell Line Encyclopedia (CCLE) project started in 2008 as a collaboration between the Broad Institute, and the Novartis Institutes for Biomedical Research, and its Genomics Institute of the Novartis Research Foundation (ref2). Read More

Autism is a serious developmental disorder that impairs the ability to communicate and interact. According to the Centers for Disease Control, autism affects an estimated 1 in 54 children in the United States today. It is a genetic disorder in multiple genes.Read More

COVID-19 cases continue to rise across countries. Researchers at Harvard Medical School and Broad Institute recently has developed new COVID-19 tests called eRPA (enhanced Recombinase Polymerase Amplification) and SHINE (SHERLOCK and HUDSON Integration to Navigate Epidemics), two complementary diagnostic platforms that deliver accurate results with minimal equipment. Read More

Ebola virus was first discovered in 1976, it has been infecting people, leading to outbreaks in several African countries. Ebola Virus Disease (EVD) is a rare and deadly zoonotic disease in human and non-human primates. Understanding the virus life cycle (e.g. host preferences/transmission, virus survival rate/stability in certain environments) helps us prevent infection. Understanding virus-host cell interaction can be the key to novel therapeutics or vaccines.Read More

In recent years, single-cell transcriptome sequencing technology has provided powerful tools for solving key biomedical problems. Although the single-cell transcriptome solves the problem of cell heterogeneity, it cannot restore its specific spatial location, and it is impossible to accurately explore cell functions. Spatial transcriptomics can fill this gap. Using spatial transcriptome technology, researchers can locate the gene expression information of cells in the tissue to the original spatial position of the tissue, thereby analyzing the differences in the function and gene expression of different parts of the tissue.Read More