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Lanthanides are rare-earth heavy metals with useful magnetic properties and a knack for emitting light. Researchers had long assumed that lanthanides’ toxicity risk was low and therefore safe to implement in a number of high-tech breakthroughs we now take for granted: from OLEDs (organic light-emitting displays)¬¬ to medical MRIs and even hybrid vehicles.
In recent years, however, some scientists have questioned lanthanides’ safety. In matters concerning health care, for example, some MRI patients have attributed a litany of side effects, including long-term kidney damage, to their exposure to the lanthanide gadolinium, a commonly used MRI contrast agent. And in the wake of landmark studies showing that gadolinium-based contrast agents (GBCAs) linger in patients’ kidneys, bone and brain tissue for months if not years, scientists have searched for clearer evidence linking lanthanide exposure to disease.
But what’s slowing scientists down is that they don’t know where to start — there are 15 lanthanide elements, and the human genome consists of billions of nucleotide sequences. Understanding how lanthanides might trigger gene mutations associated with cancer and other diseases would require a dataset of mammoth proportions that doesn’t yet exist.
Now, a team of researchers led by the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and UC Berkeley has compiled the most complete library yet of lanthanides and their potential toxicity — by exposing baker’s yeast, aka Saccharomyces cerevisiae, to lanthanide metals. Their findings were recently published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Like us, yeasts are eukaryotes — organisms made up of membrane-bound cells whose chromosomes are neatly packaged in a nucleus. We are made up of tens of trillions of cells; yeasts are just one cell.
“Yeast is the smallest eukaryote — but their thousands of genes represent a great approximation to the gene variants in humans,” said senior author Rebecca Abergel, who holds titles of faculty scientist in the Chemical Sciences Division at Berkeley Lab, where she heads the BioActinide Chemistry Group, and assistant professor of nuclear engineering at UC Berkeley. “What’s cool about this study is that it was done with a library of yeast genes, and we could screen the whole genome of the yeast and compare how a normal gene strain versus a gene-deletion strain was actually affected by lanthanide exposure.”
In an investigation spanning nearly a decade, Abergel and her team relied on a barcoded library of the baker’s yeast genome to screen which cellular functions were disrupted by lanthanides. The library was developed in the early 2000s as part of the Yeast Deletion Project, a consortium of researchers across the U.S. and Canada, to establish relationships between genes and chemical exposures. Co-senior author Christopher Vulpe, a professor of physiological sciences at the University of Florida, is one of the early adopters of this library for functional profiling of various toxicants.
After testing over 4,000 genes against 13 of the 15 lanthanide metals (the study excluded cerium and promethium), the researchers found that lanthanides interrupt the cell-signaling pathways that keep our bodies functioning — such as our skeletal and neurological processes — by hijacking calcium-binding sites in two key cellular activities: endocytosis, the process that governs how nutrients are imported inside the cells, and the ESCRT (endosomal sorting complexes required for transport) machinery, which sorts proteins and helps cells shuttle in critical nutrients like calcium.
“This study could point us to understanding which lanthanide metals are more toxic than others, and whether someone is more genetically predisposed to lanthanide toxicity,” Abergel said.
Abergel’s investigation of baker’s yeast as a genomic model for human disease began in 2012, when she was awarded a Berkeley Lab LDRD (Laboratory Directed Research and Development) Award for her study titled “Global transcriptome, deletome and proteome profiling of yeast exposed to radioactive metal ions: a tool to distinguish radiation-induced damage from chemical toxicity.” Her interest in public health then led to the development of an anti-radiation-poisoning pill, an anti-gadolinium-toxicity pill for MRI patients, and advances in cancer therapies and medical imaging.
As a follow-up to the current study, she and her research team are now studying the toxicity mechanisms of each specific metal, beginning with gadolinium. They also hope to investigate in animal models how cellular abnormalities caused by lanthanide exposure are sustained over time — and possibly even across generations.
“This was a massive study showing all the potential pathways affected by lanthanide metal exposure — but we’re just scratching the surface of a huge dataset” and there’s much more work to be done, she said.

Children who consume too much sugar could be at greater risk of becoming obese, hyperactive, and cognitively impaired, as adults, according to the results of a new study of mice led by QUT and published by Frontiers in Neuroscience.
The study resulted in a reduced risk of sugar-induced weight gain and other health problems when the mice were given a much smaller daily dose of sucrose, supporting World Health Organisation calls for a reduction in sugar intake by humans.
One of the lead authors, QUT neuroscientist Professor Selena Bartlett, says many children, adolescents, and adults in more than 60 countries, including Australia, have a diet consisting of more than four times the sugar (100g) recommended by the World Health Organisation (25g per person per day).
“More work needs to be done in the investigation of the long-term effects of sugar on adolescents and adults but our results with the mouse model are very promising,” said Professor Bartlett.
“Recent evidence shows obesity and impulsive behaviours caused by poor dietary habits leads to further overconsumption of processed food and beverages but the long-term effects on cognitive processes and hyperactivity from sugar overconsumption, beginning at adolescence, are not known,” said Professor Bartlett.
“Our study found long-term sugar consumption (a 12-week period with the mice which started the trial at five weeks of age) at a level that significantly boosts weight gain, elicits an abnormal and excessive stimulation of the nervous system in response to novelty. It also alters both episodic and spatial memory. These results are like those reported in attention deficit and hyperactivity disorders.

A new study from the University of California, Davis and the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai confirms that surgical masks effectively reduce outgoing airborne particles from talking or coughing, even after allowing for leakage around the edges of the mask. The results are published June 8 in Scientific Reports.
Wearing masks and other face coverings can reduce the flow of airborne particles that are produced during breathing, talking, coughing or sneezing, protecting others from viruses carried by those particles such as SARS-CoV2 and influenza, said Christopher Cappa, professor of civil and environmental engineering at UC Davis and corresponding author on the paper.
High-efficiency masks such as N95 respirators are designed to have a tight seal to the face, while surgical and most cloth face masks leave small gaps around the sides, which can be reduced when they are worn correctly.
The researchers looked at particles flowing from these gaps by sitting volunteers in front of an instrument that counts airborne particles down to a size of half a micron. The 12 volunteers read aloud or coughed, with and without a surgical mask of the type widely used by the public, either with their mouth directly in front of the funnel of the particle counter, turned to the side or with their head lowered or raised to count particles passing directly through the mask or leaking around the sides.
The researchers found that wearing a mask while talking reduced particles directly through the mask by an average of 93%, from the bottom by 91%, the sides by 85% and the top by 47%, although with substantial variability between individuals. They got similar results for coughing.
Models to measure leakage
The team used simulations to model the overall reduction in particles due to wearing a mask, allowing for leakage around the edges. They calculated that the overall efficiency of masks was about 70% for talking and 90% for coughing.
“While air escape does limit the overall efficiency of surgical masks at reducing expiratory particle emissions, such masks nonetheless provide substantial reduction,” Cappa said. “Our results confirm that mask wearing provides a significant reduction in the probability of disease transmission via expiratory particles, especially when both infected and susceptible individuals wear masks.”
Masks also redirect the flow of air from a high-velocity plume from the talker or cougher towards anybody in front of them, Cappa said.
Additional authors on the study are: Sima Asadi, Santiago Barreda, Anthony Wexler and William Ristenpart at UC Davis and Nicole Bouvier, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York. (Sima Asadi is now at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.) The work was funded by a grant from the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
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Despite scant evidence that it works, the drug, Aduhelm, is predicted to generate billions of dollars in revenue, much of it from Medicare.The Food and Drug Administration’s decision on Monday to approve a new Alzheimer’s medication over the fierce objections of its scientific advisers sets into motion one of the most controversial drug introductions in years.For its manufacturer, Biogen, the new drug is poised to be a blockbuster. For just about everyone else, it is likely to further inflate high U.S. health care costs.And that is despite the fact that there is not much evidence the drug actually works.More than six million Americans have Alzheimer’s and will be eligible to take the drug, which will be sold under the brand name Aduhelm and must be given as a monthly intravenous infusion. Biogen said it would charge an average of $56,000 a year per patient. There will probably be tens of thousands of dollars in additional costs for screening and monitoring patients.The drug is all but certain to unleash a gusher of profits for Biogen — the drug is expected to become one of the best-selling pharmaceutical products in the world within a few years — as well as for the hundreds of clinics expected to administer the drug.Those billions of dollars in anticipated costs are likely to be shouldered largely by Medicare.The drug’s approval could drive up insurance premiums, according to health care policy experts. And it could add new out-of-pocket costs for some families that are already facing years of staggering costs for caring for loved ones with Alzheimer’s.“This is really what keeps me up at night: A therapy of this cost is going to have enormous implications for everyone,” said Dr. Joseph Ross, a pharmaceutical policy expert at Yale who sits on a committee that advises Medicare on some coverage decisions. “And by everyone, I literally mean you, too. There’s going to be some 60- and 70-year-olds on your plan. If they start getting this treatment, you will see your premiums will go up.”Biogen has said it expects more than 600 sites across the country to soon be ready to administer the drug. But experts predict that demand, including from patients who have not previously sought care for their cognitive problems, will outpace the supply of trained specialists, scanning machines and chairs in which patients receive infusions.“I don’t think we’ll be ready on Day 1 by any stretch. It’s going to be a learning curve,” said Dr. Erik Musiek, who sees Alzheimer’s patients at the memory clinic at Washington University in St. Louis, where new patients already have to wait up to six months for appointments.Aduhelm is a monoclonal antibody that targets a protein in the brain that clumps into plaques in people with Alzheimer’s. It is the first new Alzheimer’s treatment since 2003 and the first ever approved to attack the biological underpinnings of the disease, instead of merely postponing symptoms.“It’s going to be a learning curve,” said Dr. Erik Musiek, who sees Alzheimer’s patients at a memory clinic in St. Louis.Nick Schnelle for The New York TimesBut there is not strong evidence that the drug helps patients, and it comes with potentially serious side effects. Prominent experts, including the F.D.A.’s independent advisory committee and a professional society representing geriatricians and other health care providers for older adults, urged the agency not to approve the drug.“It’s completely unconvincing that we should be using it at all,” said Dr. Peter Bach, a drug pricing expert at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. “In reality, we shouldn’t be paying anything. We should be continuing to research until we have drugs that are shown to be effective.”Biogen’s $56,000 price tag is higher than many Wall Street analysts had expected. The company’s shares soared 38 percent on Monday.The Institute for Clinical and Economic Review, which evaluates the value of medicines, has estimated that Biogen’s drug would be cost-effective only below $8,300.The drug’s sales are expected to pick up slowly in its first months of availability, because of the challenges around administering it and because patients start out on a lower, less expensive dose.But even if only a small fraction of people with Alzheimer’s begin taking the drug, it will be enormously lucrative. Analysts at Cowen said on Monday that they expected the drug to reach 8 percent of Americans with mild Alzheimer’s by 2025, yielding $7 billion in revenue.In addition to the United States, Biogen has asked regulators in Australia, Brazil, Canada, the European Union, Japan and Switzerland to review the drug.The U.S. approval is a crucial victory for a company that has been counting on Aduhelm to make up for stalled or declining revenue from its other products. Competitors last year introduced generic versions of Biogen’s multiple sclerosis drug, Tecfidera, causing the company to miss out on hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue from what had been its top-selling product.The approval “completely transforms” Biogen, said Brian Skorney, an analyst at Robert W. Baird & Company, who is projecting that the drug will generate $7.5 billion in revenue in 2025. “This changes it from a declining revenue company to a growth company,” he said, and, in so doing, “opens up a bit of Pandora’s box” in terms of pricing and reimbursement.While only patients with mild cognitive decline were enrolled in the clinical trials, the F.D.A. approved the drug for anyone with Alzheimer’s, a much broader group of patients than many experts were expecting.Just how lucrative the drug will be for Biogen will depend on how many patients it can reach — and in what circumstances, and for how long, insurers are willing to pay for it.Dr. Steve Miller, the chief clinical officer at the insurer Cigna, said on Monday that he expected his company and most of its peers would pay for the drug only for patients with mild cognitive symptoms and higher-than-normal levels of the protein amyloid in their brains.“There’s just no data that more advanced patients will benefit,” he said.Dr. Miller said he was disappointed that the F.D.A. had made so many patients eligible. “You’re leaving the tough decision-making about who should be covered to the individual payers,” he said.The most important payer will most likely be Medicare’s Part B program, which covers drugs that are administered to seniors in doctors’ offices and other outpatient settings.A spokeswoman for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services said last month that the agency would provide more information in the future if the F.D.A. approved Biogen’s drug. The agency “understands that it is vitally important for our beneficiaries to have access to the latest therapies and wants to ensure that Medicare pays for these treatments appropriately,” the spokeswoman said.Biogen expects the new Alzheimer’s drug to cost about $56,000 a year per patient.CJ Gunther/EPA, via ShutterstockIf Medicare covers the drug, it will very likely become the Part B program’s most costly medication within a few years. In 2019, the Part B program’s biggest drug expenditure, at $2.9 billion, was for Eylea, which treats macular degeneration, followed by $2.7 billion for the cancer drug Keytruda.The program does not generally pay for the PET scans that were used in clinical trials to detect whether patients had amyloid in their brains. While the F.D.A. is not requiring them, such scans are expected to be widely used to help screen patients who might take the drug. Spinal taps, a procedure in which a needle is inserted into the lower back to collect fluid, may also be used in some cases.Insurers also might balk at paying for some associated costs. Those include regular M.R.I. scans to monitor for potential side effects, like brain swelling or bleeding that occurred in 40 percent of clinical trial participants. These effects, while often mild, can be serious.Dr. Miller of Cigna said such additional costs could come to about $30,000 per patient in the first year of treatment, plus about half that each subsequent year.To the extent that those additional costs are covered by insurance, they would probably be a financial boon for so-called memory clinics that see patients with dementia.Such clinics, typically part of larger health systems or medical centers, have historically struggled to make money because of the nature of their services, such as cognitive testing, caregiver support and education. They often rely on research funding and philanthropy to make up for shortfalls in clinical revenue.Money-generating procedures like M.R.I. scans could change that. “People will start expanding their clinics if there’s money to be made,” said Dr. Musiek of Washington University.In the short term, though, the anticipated demand for the new drug is likely to produce logistical headaches and delays.In Las Vegas, the Cleveland Clinic’s Lou Ruvo Center for Brain Health is projecting that nearly 800 people, or more than half of the patients in its cognitive disorders program, might be screened to get the drug. But the center has just six infusion chairs and one PET scanning machine, which can handle two or three patients a day.“We don’t have probably enough diagnostic capacity at this point, and we don’t have enough infusion chairs, and we don’t have a fast way to get a diagnosis,” said Dr. Aaron Ritter, a neuropsychiatrist at the center. “We have to change the entire way that we would deliver care.”

Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory have published the first detailed atomic-level model of the SARS-CoV-2 “envelope” protein bound to a human protein essential for maintaining the lining of the lungs. The model showing how the two proteins interact, just published in the journal Nature Communications, helps explain how the virus could cause extensive lung damage and escape the lungs to infect other organs in especially vulnerable COVID-19 patients. The findings may speed the search for drugs to block the most severe effects of the disease.
“By obtaining atomic-level details of the protein interactions we can explain why the damage occurs, and search for inhibitors that can specifically block these interactions,” said study lead author Qun Liu, a structural biologist at Brookhaven Lab. “If we can find inhibitors, then the virus won’t cause nearly as much damage. That may give people with compromised health a much better chance for their immune systems to fight the virus successfully.”
Scientists discovered the details and developed the molecular model using one of the new cryo-electron microscopes at Brookhaven Lab’s Laboratory for BioMolecular Structure (LBMS), a new research facility built with funding from New York State adjacent to Brookhaven’s National Synchrotron Light Source II (NSLS-II).
“LBMS opened last summer ahead of schedule because of its importance in the battle against COVID-19,” said Sean McSweeney, director of LBMS and a coauthor on the paper. “LBMS and NSLS-II offer complementary protein-imaging techniques and both are playing important roles in deciphering the details of proteins involved in COVID-19. This is the first paper published based on results from the new facility.”
Liguo Wang, scientific operations director of LBMS and another coauthor on the paper, explained that “cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM) is particularly useful for studying membrane proteins and dynamic protein complexes, which can be difficult to crystallize for protein crystallography, another common technique for studying protein structures. With this technique we created a 3-D map from which we could see how the individual protein components fit together.”
“Without cryo-EM, we couldn’t have gotten a structure to capture the dynamic interactions between these proteins,” Liu said.

Women who will develop potentially life-threatening disorders during pregnancy can be identified early when hormone levels in the placenta are tested, a new study has shown.
Pregnancy disorders affect around one in ten pregnant women. Nearly all of the organ systems of the mother’s body need to alter their function during pregnancy so that the baby can grow. If the mother’s body cannot properly adapt to the growing baby this leads to major and common issues including fetal growth restriction, fetal over-growth, gestational diabetes, and preeclampsia — a life-threatening high blood pressure in the mother.
Many of these complications lead to difficult labours for women with more medical intervention and lifelong issues for the baby including diabetes, heart issues and obesity.
Pregnancy disorders are usually diagnosed during the second or third trimester of gestation when they have often already had a serious impact on the health of the mother and baby. The current methods to diagnose pregnancy disorders are not sensitive or reliable enough to identify all at risk pregnancies.
Now scientists have found a way to test hormone levels in the placenta to predict which women will have serious pregnancy complications.
Dr Amanda N. Sferruzzi-Perri, a Fellow of St John’s College, University of Cambridge, runs a lab in the Department of Physiology, Development and Neuroscience and is the lead author of a new paper published today (JUNE 8) in Nature Communications Biology.

A 3D printer that rapidly produces large batches of custom biological tissues could help make drug development faster and less costly. Nanoengineers at the University of California San Diego developed the high-throughput bioprinting technology, which 3D prints with record speed — it can produce a 96-well array of living human tissue samples within 30 minutes. Having the ability to rapidly produce such samples could accelerate high-throughput preclinical drug screening and disease modeling, the researchers said.
The process for a pharmaceutical company to develop a new drug can take up to 15 years and cost up to $2.6 billion. It generally begins with screening tens of thousands of drug candidates in test tubes. Successful candidates then get tested in animals, and any that pass this stage move on to clinical trials. With any luck, one of these candidates will make it into the market as an FDA approved drug.
The high-throughput 3D bioprinting technology developed at UC San Diego could accelerate the first steps of this process. It would enable drug developers to rapidly build up large quantities of human tissues on which they could test and weed out drug candidates much earlier.
“With human tissues, you can get better data — real human data — on how a drug will work,” said Shaochen Chen, a professor of nanoengineering at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering. “Our technology can create these tissues with high-throughput capability, high reproducibility and high precision. This could really help the pharmaceutical industry quickly identify and focus on the most promising drugs.”
The work was published in the journal Biofabrication.
The researchers note that while their technology might not eliminate animal testing, it could minimize failures encountered during that stage.

Even with U.N.’s previous goals unmet, delegates tried to water down provisions regarding protections for vulnerable populations and patents for essential drugs.On Tuesday, the U.N. is expected to adopt new targets for ending AIDS as a public health threat by 2030, seemingly a goal most countries could easily have agreed to. But consensus has been elusive.In early negotiations over the agreement, called a political declaration, the United States and the European Union fought to ban policies and laws that stigmatize, or even criminalize, high-risk groups — and drastically scaled back moves to relax patent protections for H.I.V. drugs.The U.N. declaration sets priorities for the global AIDS response and guides policies at a national level. It also gives global health organizations and civil society organizations leverage to pressure governments to honor their commitments.After several days of heavy edits by delegates from some countries and deft negotiations by others, member countries are expected to accept a final version of the declaration on Tuesday morning. Included in the final draft is an important new goal of having most nations reform discriminatory laws, so that less than 10 percent of the world’s countries would have measures that unfairly target people at risk of, or living with, H.I.V.“Those laws are driving people most affected by H.I.V. away from H.I.V. prevention and treatment,” said Matthew Kavanagh, director of the Global Health Policy and Politics Initiative at Georgetown University. “This could be a critical tool in getting the world back on track to ending AIDS.”On Monday, Dr. Kavanagh and his colleagues published new work showing that countries that criminalize same-sex relationships, drug use and sex work have had much less success in turning back H.I.V.A man undergoes a rapid H.I.V. test in Santiago.Claudio Reyes/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesBut the declaration does not move the needle on patent protections. The United States was among those nations whose delegates significantly watered down — or moved to cut — language to relax patents to allow for greater access to affordable H.I.V. drugs in low- and middle-income countries, a stance at direct odds with the Biden administration’s support of patent waivers for Covid vaccines.“The mixed messaging from the administration, given recent support for Covid-19 vaccine patent waivers, is confusing and disappointing,” said Annette Gaudino, director of policy strategy at Treatment Action Group, an advocacy organization in New York. “This would be far from the first time the U.S. has put pharmaceutical companies’ profits over people and public health.”The U.N. brings together heads of state, health ministers and nongovernmental organizations to set priorities for tackling the H.I.V. pandemic every five years. At a similar meeting in 2016, member countries agreed to aim for fewer than 500,000 new H.I.V. infections annually, fewer than 500,000 AIDS-related deaths and eliminating H.I.V.-related discrimination by 2020.The world did not meet those targets: About 1.5 million people became infected with H.I.V. in 2020, and about 690,000 died.Ending AIDS by 2030 was an aspirational target adopted in 2015 by the U.N., part of a broader agenda regarding sustainable development. But without more progressive policies and laws, the goal is not achievable, Dr. Kavanagh said.“To end AIDS by 2030, governments must commit to take a people-centered, rights-based approach to H.I.V., to work on policy and law reform, to engage and support communities, and to end inequalities,” Winnie Byanyima, executive director of U.N.AIDS, said in an emailed statement.H.I.V. counseling and prevention course facilitators conduct an H.I.V. prevention session to a group comprised of children, adolescents and adults in Nairobi, Kenya.Ben Curtis/Associated PressThe initial draft of the declaration, dated April 28, included a commitment to end “punitive laws, policies and practices, stigma and discrimination based on H.I.V. status, sexual orientation and gender identity.”Delegates from some countries, including China, Russia and Iran, tried to delete allusions to sexual or gender identity, or to sex education for girls. They succeeded only partially: The current text calls for prevention approaches tailored to high-risk groups, including sex workers, men who have sex with men, drug users and transgender people.The declaration, in its current form, also urges countries to “empower women and girls to take charge of their sexual and reproductive health and reproductive rights,” a section that Saudi Arabia, Russia and the Holy See tried to scrub from the text.Representatives from Belarus, China and Russia also deleted a section that asked member countries to recognize citizens’ autonomy on matters related to sexuality; their substituted text encouraged “responsible sexual behavior, including abstinence and fidelity.” The final document reverted to the original text.Even if the declaration is adopted on Tuesday, these countries may disassociate themselves with specific sections that contradict their cultural or religious norms.Including the language about high-risk groups is critical to success, some experts said. Gay men and other men who have sex with men, people who inject drugs, and female sex workers have a nearly 30-fold higher risk of H.I.V., compared with the general population.Lingnan Partner Health Support Center tests a patient for H.I.V. in Guangzhou, China in 2012.Gilles Sabrie for The New York TimesIf those groups cannot access the preventive therapies, clean needles, condoms or education they need, “we are going to erode the possibility of actually ending AIDS by 2030,” said Eric Sawyer, an advocate and long-term survivor with H.I.V.An early draft of the declaration also contained a lengthy section on relaxing patent protections. Under current global rules, only the 50 least developed countries are allowed to eliminate patents on pharmaceutical products in order to distribute them to citizens.The draft called for “an indefinite moratorium on international intellectual property provisions for medicines, diagnostics and other health technologies.” Representatives of the United States and Switzerland deleted that section. A representative of the European Union said, “This is not the place to discuss these general issues.”The United States also added language to the scaled-back version to recognize the “importance of the intellectual property rights regime in contributing to a more effective AIDS response.”Activists said taking a stance against patent protections was entirely consistent for the European Union, which also opposed a waiver for patents on Covid vaccines. Vaccine manufacturers have argued that patent protections are essential for driving innovation.But citing the urgent need for vaccines, officials in the Biden administration have said that they would back a patent waiver that allow companies to make cheaper versions of the vaccines for the rest of the world.Given that development, “it would be really inconsistent for the U.S.” to oppose relaxing patent protections for H.I.V. drugs, said Brook Baker, senior policy analyst for Health Global Access Project, an advocacy organization.“Why in the world would the U.S. be talking out of two sides of its mouth on what seems to be nearly an identical issue?”

Biomolecules regulate the biological functions inside every living cell. If scientists can understand the molecular mechanisms of such functions, then it is possible to detect the severe dysfunction which can lead to illness. At a molecular level, this can be achieved with fluorescent markers that are specifically incorporated into the respective biomolecules. In the past, this has been achieved by incorporating a marker in the bio-molecule by completely rebuilding it from the beginning, necessitating a large number of steps. Unfortunately, this approach not only takes a lot of time and resources, but also produces unwanted waste products. Researchers at the Universities of Göttingen and Edinburgh have now been able to show that a non-toxic complex of the common metal manganese makes it possible to conveniently label a class of special bio-molecules known as peptides right at the last minute of their synthesis. This means the mechanism of action of these labelled peptides can be investigated efficiently. The results were published in the journal Nature Communications.

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People whose sleep pattern goes against their natural body clock are more likely to have depression and lower levels of wellbeing, according to a large-scale new study.
Research led by the University of Exeter, published in Molecular Psychiatry, also found the most robust evidence to date that being genetically programmed to be an early riser is protective against major depression, and improves wellbeing. Researchers suggest this may be because society is set up to be more aligned to early risers, through the standard 9-5 working pattern.
COVID-19 has led to more flexible working patterns and this research may help make the case for more adaptable working habits to suit individuals’ needs.
The team built on previous research which mapped 351 genes linked to being an early riser, or a night owl. They used a statistical process called Mendelian Randomisation to examine whether these genes were causally associated with seven mental health and wellbeing outcomes, including major depression, using data on more than 450,000 UK adults from UK Biobank’s biomedical database and research resource. As well as the genetic information, participants also completed a questionnaire on whether they were a morning person or an evening person.
The team also developed a new measure of “social jetlag” that measures the variation in sleep pattern between work and free days. They measured this in more than 85,000 UK Biobank participants for whom sleep data was available, via wrist-worn activity monitors. They found that people who were more misaligned from their natural body clock were more likely to report depression and anxiety and have lower wellbeing.
Lead author Jessica O’Loughlin, of the University of Exeter, said: “We found that people who were misaligned from their natural body clock were more likely to report depression, anxiety and have lower wellbeing. We also found the most robust evidence yet that being a morning person is protective of depression and improves wellbeing.
We think this could be explained by the fact that the demands of society mean night owls are more likely to defy their natural body clocks, by having to wake up early for work.”
Overall, the research team found that morning people were more likely to be aligned to their natural body clock. They then tested the effect by looking at shift workers, and found that morningness may not be protective for depression in shift workers, meaning morning people who work shifts may not have improved mental health and wellbeing, however, this was inconclusive.
Senior author Dr Jessica Tyrrell, of the University of Exeter, said: “The COVID-19 pandemic has introduced a new flexibility in working patterns for many people. Our research indicates that aligning working schedules to an individual’s natural body clock may improve mental health and wellbeing in night owls.”
The study is entitled ‘Using Mendelian Randomization methods to understand whether diurnal preference is causally related to mental health’, and published in Molecular Psychiatry. The research is supported by the Academy of Medical Sciences. The study involved collaborators from King’s College London, the University of Colorado Boulder, the University of Manchester and Monash University.
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