September 4th, 2007 by Dr. Val Jones in News
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I subscribe to Eureka Alert Breaking News – and although a lot of their press releases are on small studies of questionable relevance, I do think that some of the basic science research is provocative. Let’s see if I can pique your interest with the best of this week’s Petri dish news:
1. Tylenol may inhibit bone growth? A small study conducted at the University of Granada suggested that bone forming cells (called osteoblasts) were inhibited by a Tylenol bath. As far as pain killers are concerned, we’ve known for a while that non steroidal anti-inflammatory medications (NSAIDs) may indeed inhibit bone growth. But since Tylenol is not an NSAID, we were hoping that it would not adversely affect bone healing. Could this mean that Tylenol is not so great for bone surgery pain after all? That’s a stretch… but an interesting question.
2. Can you clean blood with a laser? Boy it sure would be nice to be able to kill all the potential viruses in blood used for transfusions. Apparently there’s a new pulsed laser technique that shows some promise in fracturing viruses with laser vibrations. So far, the laser was successful in reducing bacterial viruses by 1000x. Next up? Let’s see what the technique can do to Hepatitis C and HIV viruses.
3. Skinny people might have a “skinny gene.” Scientists have been studying a gene called Adipose (Adp) for over 50 years now. It was first discovered in fat fruit flies (I kid you not). Apparently if the Adp gene doesn’t work well, the flies become fat and “have difficulty getting around.” Worms, mice, and humans seem to have the same gene. Further analysis might unlock the secret to the genetics of thinness. Or maybe we should just eat less and exercise more?This post originally appeared on Dr. Val’s blog at RevolutionHealth.com.
June 20th, 2007 by Dr. Val Jones in Medblogger Shout Outs, News
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I was perusing Dr. Hsien Hsein Lei’s blog and noticed a link to a pretty interesting tool. Dr. Lei describes it as a “low tech paternity test” and it’s a probability calculator that relies on 3 traits: blood type, eye color, and ear lobe type. Yep, it’s sometimes possible to exclude certain father candidates based on these traits.
Apparently attached earlobes (that don’t hang) are a recessive trait, so if a child has unattached earlobes, both parents can’t have attached earlobes. And as far as eye color is concerned, two blue eyed parents can’t have a brown eyed child – so there’s some opportunity for exclusion there (I was interested to see that two dark brown eyed parents can have a blue eyed child, though it’s rather unlikely).
Did you know about the genetics of ear lobes? I learn something new every day.This post originally appeared on Dr. Val’s blog at RevolutionHealth.com.
March 21st, 2007 by Dr. Val Jones in News
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As spring approaches, we can expect a new onslaught of pollen, bugs, and mud puddles. Mosquito eggs will hatch in stagnant water, and a new generation of hungry little disease vectors will be lurking in wooded areas, awaiting their first meal.
Luckily for those of us who live in North America, those annoying mosquito bites are unlikely to infect us with malaria.
A team of scientists committed to eradicating malaria (one of my personal favorite parasites) has taken a new approach to reducing transmission rates: creating a strain of malaria-immune mosquitoes.
I had been under the mistaken impression that mosquitoes lived in perfect harmony with malaria parasites, but apparently the organisms can make them quite ill as well. Not ill enough to die immediately (hence their ability to spread the disease) but ill enough to die prematurely.
So if we could create a malaria immune mosquito, we could give them a survival advantage over their peers, thus slowly influencing the mosquito population in favor of the new strain. This could result in a new population of mosquitoes who could not harbor malaria.
In humans, malaria parasites have learned how to attach themselves to red blood cell proteins and incubate inside the cells. In mosquitoes, the parasites latch on to a protein (called SM1) on the surface of epithelial cells of their gut lining. Through the miracle of genetic engineering, we’ve managed to alter the SM1 proteins in certain mosquitoes, making them immune to invasion by parasites they ingest through infected blood.
Although the immune mosquitoes are not ready for prime time release in malaria endemic countries (the research only showed that the scientists could genetically engineer resistance to one strain of malaria), it sure would be interesting to see if we could use mosquitoes themselves to fight a disease that claims the lives of over one million people per year.
This is a rare case of a problem becoming the solution!
This post originally appeared on Dr. Val’s blog at RevolutionHealth.com.
