article thumbnail

Nanorobot hand made of DNA grabs viruses for diagnostics and blocks cell entry

Science Daily: Pharmacology News

A tiny, four-fingered 'hand' folded from a single piece of DNA can pick up the virus that causes COVID-19 for highly sensitive rapid detection and can even block viral particles from entering cells to infect them, researchers report.

DNA 104
article thumbnail

Ancient Viruses Might Be Spurring Modern-Day Cancers

Drugs.com

FRIDAY, July 19, 2024 -- Cancer growth can be fueled by flecks of ancient viral DNA lodged into the genetics of modern humans, a new study says.Overall, about 8% of the human genome is made of bits of DNA left behind by viruses that infected our.

Virus 97
Insiders

Sign Up for our Newsletter

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

article thumbnail

Engineering viruses to kill deadly pathogens

Science Daily: Pharmacology News

In the new study, researchers successfully modified DNA from four types of phages to kill a deadly pathogen. Antimicrobial resistance is an urgent and growing global crisis. Researchers are exploring phages, viruses that infect bacteria, as a possible solution.

Virus 99
article thumbnail

Ancient DNA reveals how a chicken virus evolved to become more deadly

SCIENMAG: Medicine & Health

An international team of scientists led by geneticists and disease biologists from the University of Oxford and LMU Munich have used ancient DNA to trace the evolution of Marek’s Disease Virus (MDV). This global pathogen causes fatal infections in unvaccinated chickens and costs the poultry industry over $1 billion per year.

DNA 67
article thumbnail

Researchers engineer in vivo delivery system for prime editing, partially restoring vision in mice

Broad Institute

Williams January 8, 2024 Credit: Susanna Hamilton, Broad Communications Researchers have developed virus-like particles that can deliver gene-editing cargo to cells, including those in the mouse brain. Prime editing, described in 2019 by Liu’s group, can make longer and more diverse types of DNA changes than other types of editing.

article thumbnail

A virus that infected the first animals hundreds of millions of years ago has become essential for the development of the embryo

SCIENMAG: Medicine & Health

Viral genetic material was integrated into the genome of the first multi-cellular beings and is still in our DNA today. All animals have evolved thanks to the fact that certain viruses infected primitive organisms hundreds of millions of years ago.

Virus 69
article thumbnail

Evolved prime editors are smaller and more efficient for therapeutic applications

Broad Institute

Their new editors are more efficient and specialized than previous versions, and are able to modify DNA in cultured cells and in animals that have been difficult to edit, including in immune system cells and inside the brain. In the new work, they focused on improving the heart of the prime editing system—the reverse transcriptase.

DNA 145