Archive by category | Research

Vaccines the world over

Vaccines the world over

Recently in an opinion piece in Authors Journal, I claimed that science is not popular. I said this because even though vaccines and antibiotics have greatly improved our health, most people do not understand that without them many of us would die before 40. The precise history of vaccines is difficult to know, but the concept is centuries old.  Read more

A new tool to study the immune system

A new tool to study the immune system

Beyond fighting infection, the immune system has important roles in many systems in the body. To study the involvement of T cells and B cells, researchers often sequence their T cell and B cell receptors (TCRs and BCRs), which provide insights into their clonal diversity. However, even more useful would be to gather T cell and B cell receptor information together with the transcriptomic profile of their tissue sample of origin. Now, in a paper published in Nature Biotechnology, Dmitriy Chudakov and colleagues report a software tool that enables extracting TCR and BCR sequences from bulk RNA-seq data sets. Because RNA-seq data is already available for thousands of tumor samples, this method will allow revisiting those data sets to extract important information.  Read more

Bacteria to build materials

Bacteria to build materials

Bacteria can be engineered to do all sort of useful things.  A field that is gaining traction is using bacteria to build materials made of organic and inorganic components. Writing in Nature Biotechnology, Lingchong You and colleagues develop an approach that uses synthetic biology to assemble materials in a programmable manner. The authors use self-assembling bacteria to generate inorganic-organic structures by applying gold nanoparticles to the bacterial colonies. The geometry of the bacterial-made structures can be changed by altering the characteristics of the membrane the bacteria are grown on (pore size and hydrophobicity). Using this approach, the researchers make pressure sensors (and provide accompanying video of the result).  Read more

Insect resistance to transgenic crops

The pink bollworm rapidly evolved resistance to genetically engineered cotton in India, where ‘refuges’ of conventional host plants were scarce, but not in the USA, where growers planted planted non-Bt cotton refuges and suppressed this invasive caterpillar pest with mass releases of sterile moths.

Farmers plant transgenic crops that produce insecticidal proteins from Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) to combat destructive insect pests, such as the pink bollworm, that are capable of decimating yields. But resistant insects can overcome transgenic plant tech, potentially rendering transgenic crop lines obsolete.  How much of a problem is insect resistance to Bt transgenic crops around the world? Bruce Tabashnik and Yves Carrière review the global status of resistance of insects to transgenic crops producing insecticidal proteins from Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) in the October issue of Nature Biotechnology. They extract the lessons learned from planting both single- and stacked-gene- insect-resistant Bt crops and consider tactics that could maintain transgenic crop efficacy in the future. The field data that inform this Review covers a large set of Bt toxins, crops and pest species, from 10 countries, on six continents.  Read more

Characterizing antibody-secreting cells one at a time

Characterizing antibody-secreting cells one at a time

Antibodies are a major component of the immune response and a powerful tool in research and disease therapeutics. But characterizing antibody-secreting cells in terms of their antibody production rate and the specificity and affinity of the antibodies they make has not been possible at the single cell level. In a recent paper in Nature Biotechnology, Jean Baudry and colleagues report a method that enables massively parallel characterization of single IgG-secreting cells. The microfluidic approach encapsulates individual cells in droplets and immobilizes them onto an array.  Magnetic nanoparticles are used to establish an in-droplet immunoassay with a fluorescent readout that allows quantifying the different parameters.  Read more

Is Science a Priority in Less Developed Countries?

Is Science a Priority in Less Developed Countries?

Twenty five years ago the Christian Democrat President of Chile Eduardo Frei Ruiz-Tagle invited the most prominent scientific authorities in the world to visit Chile, or, as he called it, the end of the world. In the agenda one simple question: can less developed countries (LDCs) perform long-term science at the same level that developed countries do? Most people attended from the World Bank, AAAs, Japanese and Korean authorities, and many others of the main scientific institutions in the world. I was there, too. The Minister of Science and Technology, Israel Vargas, included me in his team from Brazil.  Read more

Where are your B cells?

Where are your B cells?

B cells express antibodies that are key to fighting infections and preventing their re-occurrence. When they recognize cognate antigen, B cell clones expand and mutate the antibody genes to increase antigen recognition and effector function. How these B-cell-clonal lineages are distributed in the human body is not known, in large part because of the difficulty in assessing normal immune function in healthy individuals. In a paper published this week in Nature Biotechnology, Eline Luning Prak and colleagues sequence the B cell receptor heavy chain of 8 tissues in 6 human organ donors. The researchers find that the most expanded B cell clones are distributed in two networks, one that includes the blood, bone marrow, lungs and spleen, and another one comprising gut tissues (jejunum, ileum and colon).  Read more

Brazil’s plunging science investment

Brazil’s plunging science investment

In my recent opinion piece in Biotechnology Research and Innovation, I called attention for the fact that Brazil invested roughly $25 billion in science and technology in public and private money in 2013, and should invest at least twice as much. The US, for example, invests 16 times more than what Brazil does, and yet the National Growth Income (NGI) in the US is only eight times larger than the NGI in Brazil. The NGI of Brazil and Canada are comparable, but Canada invests 10 times more in science and technology than Brazil. The private sector should invest in science and technology in Brazil twice as much the public sector, which is what happens in most developed countries.  Read more

The Gene Editing Bazaar

The Gene Editing Bazaar

On February 15, 2017, the US patent authorities ended a legal battle over IP rights between University of California at Berkeley and the Boston-based Broad Institute. According to the long awaited decision, Broad keeps its patents allowing them to own the use of CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing technologies in any eukaryotic organisms (including yeast, plants, animals and humans), while Berkeley’s broader patent application, which allows general use of CRISPR-Cas9 in any type of cell (including bacteria), will proceed before the USPTO. Gene editing – the precise and relatively easy deletion, insertion or modification of particular DNA sequences in the genome – is one of the latest innovations aiming to convert genetic engineering into a real engineering discipline. In the past, precise modifications were hard or almost impossible to achieve, frequently leaving genetic marks and requiring rather expensive and time-consuming processes.  Read more