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RNA 'Transcriptome' Sequenced in Immune Cells
When studying any kind of population — people or
cells — averaging is a useful, if flawed, form of
measurement. According to the US Census Bureau, the
average American household size in 2010 was 2.59. Of
course, there are no homes with exactly 2.59 people. By
inspecting each house individually, one would see some
homes occupied by a single individual, and others by
large families. These extremes get lost when values are
averaged over a population.
A similar masking of
information happens when cells are studied in large
numbers. Researchers have typically taken top-down
approaches, watching how things change in thousands or
millions of cells and trying to infer what happened
within each one. New technological advances, however,
are giving scientists powerful, high-resolution genomic
tools to monitor individual cells, offering an
unprecedented view of cellular function and circuitry.
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2-year-old girl gets windpipe made from stem cells
Hannah Warren has been unable to breathe, eat, drink
or swallow on her own since she was born in South Korea
in 2010. Until the operation at a central Illinois
hospital, she had spent her entire life in a hospital in
Seoul. Doctors there told her parents there was no hope
and they expected her to die.
The stem cells came from Hannah's bone marrow,
extracted with a special needle inserted into her hip
bone. They were seeded in a lab onto a plastic scaffold,
where it took less than a week for them to multiply and
create a new windpipe.
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for media details
Gold nanocages could image and treat tumours
Tiny gold particles called nanocages that emit
Cerenkov light could be used to image tumours and
deliver drugs to destroy them at the same time. That is
the claim of researchers in the US, who have detected
Cerenkov light from within live mice that had been
injected with the nanoparticles. The nanocages are among
the very first reported "theranostic" nanoparticles that
have the potential to fulfil both therapeutic and
diagnostic roles in medicine.
Gold nanocages are tiny structures with hollow
interiors and ultrathin porous walls. They are of
particular interest to medical researchers because they
do not interact with biological materials and can
therefore be used within the body. Nanocages can also be
designed to absorb and scatter light in the
near-infrared (NIR) region of the electromagnetic
spectrum. Light at these wavelengths (700–900 nm) can
penetrate deeply into soft biological tissue and so is
perfect for optical imaging based on photoacoustic and
optical-coherence tomography.
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