Bioscience News - GEG Tech top picks

In a recent review published in the journal Nature Medicine, scientists discussed the results of a two-year weekly effort to track and communicate significant developments in medical AI. In particular, AI has been a game-changer in the crucial task of protein folding, which involves predicting the 3D structure of a protein from its chemical sequence. Improvements in protein structure prediction can reveal mechanistic information about a variety of events, including drug-protein interactions and mutation effects. With AI, non-invasive cancer screening, prognosis, and tumor origin identification are now possible. Moreover, deep learning has improved CRISPR-based gene editing by helping predict guide RNA activity and identifying anti-CRISPR protein families. According to one study, BioBERT, a model trained on a large corpus of medical literature, outperformed previous peers on natural language tasks such as answering biological questions.  

A naturally occurring steroid made by the dogfish shark prevents the buildup of a lethal protein in animal studies, reports an international team of researchers. The clustering of this protein, alpha-synuclein (α-synuclein), is the hallmark of Parkinson’s disease and dementia with Lewy bodies, suggesting a new potential compound for therapeutic research.

Human gut bacteria could help develop medicines in the future to improve health and wellbeing by breaking down complex sugars.

 As someone who loves to learn so much, the author of this article pursued stories about 3D printing in education, and reached out to some of the 3D printing community on YouTube.

The panel that hands out the Nobel Prize for Medicine has demanded the resignation of two of its judges for allegedly mishandling a scandal over a disgraced Italian surgeon who specialised in stem cell therapy.