NEWS : TECH (NFPC)

Tech Tackles Wine Allergies

Some people are allergic to certain wines -- that nice Loire Valley red gives them a rash or headache, or that California Chardonnay makes them sneeze. The University of British Columbia's Wine Research Center might have found a way to solve this problem.

The team at UBC has modified two genes of a strain of yeast called Saccharomyces cerevisiae, which has been used in winemaking for decades (if not centuries). The yeast was modified to eliminate the need for a species of bacteria needed for the winemaking process. That bacteria produces chemicals that cause allergic reactions. About 30 percent of the population has some allergy to wine.

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Ordinarily winemakers use yeast to convert the sugar in the grape juice to alcohol. But wine isn't just made from juice; it also involves something called must, which is the skin and other stuff from the grapes that get crushed. After the yeast converts the first batch of sugars to alcohol, there's a secondary fermentation that happens, as bacteria in the mixture convert malic acid –- which has a harsh taste –- into lactic acid, which is smoother. In modern commercial winemaking the bacteria is added deliberately.

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Hennie van Vuuren, the Director of the Wine Research Centre at UBC, who led the research, told Discovery News that the bacteria can present a problem: sometimes they convert chemicals called histidines in the wine to histamines. Histamines are what give some people allergic reactions, if they are particularly sensitive to them. (It is not always the histamines that cause the problem; sulfites can as well, and there are people who are allergic to the alcohol itself).

Van Vuuren said his team took the gene from the malolactic bacteria that allow the malic acid -- which yeast usually ignores -- to cross the yeast cell membrane. They also added a bacterial gene that allows the yeast to digest the malic acid.

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The result is yeast that eliminates the need for malolactic bacteria and avoids producing chemicals that can cause reactions to the wine. Since the yeast is digesting the same chemicals that the introduced bacteria would, it doesn't affect the taste.

Van Vuuren noted that for the wine industry it would be a big boost to sales, since it would mean all those people who can't drink wine would be able to do so. He himself has a wine allergy but tended to limit his drinking to wines that have aged. "I really like wine, I couldn't have a meal without it," he said. In older wines the histamines are less of an issue, as they break down over time. But that limited his selection to rather expensive wine, or to ports and Madeiras. So Van Vuuren wanted to solve the problem of making wine allergen-free. It took several years to find the right genes, and find a way to insert them into the right yeast.

As to which wines will use this new yeast, he couldn't say, though he noted that it has been approved for use in Canada and the U.S. Van Vuuren is awaiting approval from the European Union, and at that point, he said the South African winemakers will adopt it as well.

Credit: Wikimedia Commons

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Kids Use Kinect for Robot Competition

With all of the electronic devices and games around, being a kid is days is pretty fun. And it's particularly cool if your school decides to enter a robotics competition. Ten or 15 years ago, such competitions, if they existed, were limitedare signing up for competition and using advanced technology to win the game.

This year, for example, 2,500 teams of students in grades 9-12 (ages 14-18) embarked on a six-week project to build Kinect-powered, basketball-shooting robots for Dean Kamen’s international FIRST Championship. Each team was sent a kit containing 600 to 700 parts, including Kinect hardware and software, in order to build a robot. The end goal was to be able to control the robot using a joystick as well as gestures and spoken commands.

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The course was a basketball court, but it presented challenges that even Kevin Durant might find difficult. (The video below shows the object of the game.) For starters there were other robots on the court trying to block shots and steal balls, and there were obstacles that the robots had to navigate over. But like any good game of basketball, the robots were on a team -- or as it's called here, an alliance. That means three robots working together to make the highest number of field goals.

One of the robots Bomb Squad (pictured at top), from the winning alliance was designed to catapult the basketballs through the net. And it was sturdy enough to navigate the challenges of the course and push the other competitors out of the way. The problem was that when it got to the championship event, fatigue and failure started to plague the accuracy of the machine's shooting system. That meant it wouldn't win on its own. But teamed up with two other well-shooting robots, it was a force to be reckoned with. The Bomb Squad team told Discovery News in an statement, "Immediately, our driving expertise and ball collecting power became a defensive weapon by stealing the opposing team’s balls and delivering them over the bump to our two shooting robots."

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"Ultimately, our success stemmed more from having a set of tools that allowed us to be the jack of all trades allowing our partners to concentrate on shooting while we took care of the rest of the field," they said.

Bomb Squad was build by Team 16 of Mountain Home, Ark., and won along with Team 180, S.P.A.M., of Stuart, Fla., and Team 25, Raider Robotix, of North Brunswick, N.J.

Congratulations to all!

Credit: Bomb Squad, Team 16

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Yeast Gets a Magnetic Personality

Scientists at Harvard's Wyss Institute have genetically engineered an organism to sense magnetic fields, showing that it's possible to make organisms react to magnetism even when they normally don't. 

The work points to a lot of applications in medicine, industry and research. For example, cells sensitive to magnetic fields tend to align themselves in a single direction like tiny compass needles. That means one could move them in a specific direction to, say, build up tissue into a specific shape. The technique could be used to target therapeutic cells at diseases and would also be useful in magnetic resonance imaging.

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Some species of bacteria sense magnetism because they have tiny bits of iron or iron compounds inside them. But most plants and animals don't, and when their cells are exposed to iron, they try to stuff it away into tiny, hollow spaces called vacuoles. (Many animals, including humans, need iron to survive, but that iron is metabolized in very different ways).

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Researchers Pamela Silver and Keiji Nishida took ordinary yeast and grew it in a medium containing iron. The yeast cells took in the iron and stored it inside vacuoles. The scientists then put a magnet under the plate where the yeast was and saw the yeast was slightly magnetic.

Nishida added a protein called ferritin, which joins with iron and prevents it from becoming toxic. He also used genetic engineering to block the yeast's ability to produce a protein that's used to carry the iron into the cell’s vacuoles. That let the iron circulate freely throughout the yeast cell and made the cell sensitive enough that it would migrate toward an external magnet.

One interesting effect was that the genetically altered yeast stored iron in its mitochondria. The altered yeast was also about three times as magnetic as wild yeast, which was just given iron supplements.

The researchers found that other proteins in the yeast -- also found in other animals, including humans -- could be combined to amp up the magnetism. The existence of these proteins in other animals means that with a little genetic tweaking, other one-celled creatures that could become tiny, living bar magnets.

Photo: Yeast made sensitive to magnetism by altering how it reacts to iron. The arrows point to two of the larger concentrations of iron in a single yeast cell.

Credit: Harvard Medical School

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Sequence Your Genome for Under $1,000

Personal medicine is a little bit closer. Now you can sequence your genome for about $1,000 in just one day.

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Genome sequencing was once the realm of big institutions with loads of money, but a company called Ion Torrent is changing that. At the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, the company showed off its gene-sequencing device called the Ion Proton.

The machine itself isn’t cheap, coming in at about $149,000. The company sells another model, called the Ion Personal Genome Machine, which costs about $50,000. But the Proton has a lot more computing power and can sequence genes much faster than the less expensive model because it uses a lab-on-a-chip system -- a technology based on semiconductors.

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The computing power is key, however, as it allows the Ion Proton to sequence a person's entire genome for about the same price as some medical tests. To put it in perspective, the cost of an MRI without any insurance would run from $500 to 3,500.

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The Ion Proton can also sequence exons, the protein-encoding regions of the genome where most disease-causing mutations happen. This opens up a lot to both researchers and doctors.

Via Technology Review

Image: Ion Torrent

This article is part of our ongoing coverage of this year's Consumer Electronics Show. Find more CES articles here.

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Old Genes Make New, Giant-Headed Ants

Every animal carries a record of its past in its genes -- sometimes teeth show up in birds and vestigial limbs on snakes and whales. Ants are no exception. What if that potential could be tapped? And what brings it out?

That’s what a group of scientists at McGill University thought when they ran into a colony of ants on Long Island. A colony of ants known as Pheidole morrisi (more commonly called big-headed ants) had members we call soldiers with really outsized heads and bodies. These were called “super soldiers.”

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Pheidole, like many other ant species, are divided into castes, such as workers, queens and soldiers. Different foods are given to them when they are larvae, which triggers hormones that determine which caste the ant grows up to be.

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Super soldiers occur naturally in some species of Pheidole in the southwestern United States and Mexico. But those living in upstate New York aren’t supposed to have the big heads. Ants are a pretty diverse lot and there are more than 1,100 species within even the Pheidole genus. But only eight of them naturally produce the super soldiers.

Biology professor Ehab Abouheif and PhD student Rajee Rajakumar wondered if the genes that build super soldiers were present in the Long Island ants all along, but were just waiting for some environmental factor to bring them out. The scientists first went to Arizona and collected two other species of ant in the same genus, Pheidole rhea and Pheidole obtusospinosa, which both have a subclass of super soldiers. They then observed how those two species developed their super soliders.

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Next, the scientists gave the young Long Island ants juvenile hormones at certain specific points in their development. In the Pheidole morrisi they got the super-soldier ants, which showed that the potential was always there. It just needed something to bring it out. One interesting phenomenon was the super soldiers had wing buds, which their cousins from Arizona did not. Many ant species develop wings as part of their development and ants and wasps share a common ancestor. The procedure worked in three different species of Pheidole, even though all three were separated by thousands of miles and millions of years of evolution.

Previously, few biologists thought such ancestral traits were important. They were just leftovers like the stuff in your attic. This shows that when necessary, nature has a “tool kit” that it can use to create big morphological changes -- some of them new.

Via: McGill University

Image: Alexander Wild

 

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Vroom! World's Fastest Cells Drag Race

Ladies and gentlemen, start your... Petri dishes.

It may not have been the Indy 500, but a line of fetal mesenchymal bone marrow cells from Singapore recently out-dashed dozens of contenders to take the checkered flag at the World Cell Race. Claiming their title as the world's fastest cells, the microscopic racers zoomed across a Petri dish at the whiplash-inducing speed of 5.2 microns per minute, or 0.000000194 miles per hour.

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Results were announced December 3 at the American Society for Cell Biology's annual meeting in Denver, Colo. Fifty participating labs from around the world used 70 cell lines to not only race, but examine cell movement during the development of embryos, organs and cancer.

Teams shipped the cells frozen to designated laboratories in Boston, London, Heidelberg, Paris, San Francisco and Singapore. Once thawed, the cells were placed in "race tracks" that were 400 microns long (0.015748 inches) and coated with a substance that gave the little guys some tire-like traction. Digital cameras recorded the cells for 24 hours to determine, out of the 200 cells, which one was the fastest to reach the end of the track.

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A line of unaltered breast epithelial cells took second place and third place went to the the same cell type only altered to reflect patterns observed in cancerous cells. Researchers responsible for the winning cells received Nikon digital cameras and World Cell Race medals.

[Via Nature]

Credit: Monya Baker

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Test Tube DNA Brain Gets Quiz Questions Right

Eat your heart out Steven Spielberg -- turns out artificial intelligence is not just a figment of your imagination.

A team of researchers lead by Lulu Qian from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) have for the first developed an artificial neural network -- that is, the beginnings of a brain -- out of DNA molecules. And when quizzed, the brain answered the questions correctly.

They turned to molecules because they knew that before the neural-based brain evolved, single-celled organisms showed limited forms of intelligence. These microorganisms did not have brains, but instead had molecules that interacted with each other and spurred the creatures to search for food and avoid toxins. The bottom line is that molecules can act like circuits, processing and transmitting information and computing data.

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The Caltech used DNA molecules specifically for the experiment, because these molecules interact in specific ways determined by the sequence of their four bases: adenine (abbreviated A), cytosine (C), guanine (G) and thymine (T). And what's more, scientists can encode the sequence into strands of DNA molecules, essentially programming them to function in a predetermined way.

Without getting too complicated, Qian and her team created four highly simplified artificial neurons in test tubes comprised of 112 strands of DNA, each strand programmed with a specific sequence of bases to interact with other strands. The interactions resulted in outputs (or not), basically mimicking the actions of neurons firing. In order to see the DNA neurons firing, the scientists attached a fluorescent molecular marker that lit up when activated.

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Next, the researchers played a trivia game with the neural network to see if it could identify one of four scientists based on a series of yes/no questions. Basic information related to the identity of the scientists was given to the tiny DNA brain in the form of encoded strands of DNA.

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To quiz the brain, a human player placed DNA strands that hinted at the answer into the test tube. With these clues, the neural network was able to produce the correct answer, which was visible thanks to the fluorescent markers.

In this way, the network could also communicate when it lacked enough information to correctly identify one of the scientists, or if any of the clues contained contradictory information.

The research team played this game using 27 possible ways of answering questions and the neural network in the test tube answered correctly each time.

The team published their results in the July 21 issue of the journal Nature.

[Via Laboratory Journal]

Credit: Caltech/Lulu Qian

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First Laser Made of Living Cells Has Arrived

Lasers emit highly concentrated, amplified light. Usually it takes a complex array of crystals, gels or gases to amplify light particles, known as photons, as they bounce around between mirrors inside laser machines. But now scientists have found another way: using engineered living cells that can perform the feat.

The project took place at the Wellman Center for Photomedicine in Massachusetts. The key to this breakthrough involved the use of the widely studied protein known as green fluorescent protein (GFP). This protein, which was first discovered in jellyfish, has (as the name implies) the property of generating light.

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In an article published in Nature Photonics, researchers Malte Gather and Seok Hyun Yun describe how a solution made from GFP was used in combination with a mirrored chamber to create a laser. From this preliminary test, Gather and Yun were able to determine how much GFP was required to create the laser light. Using this result, they then moved ahead to genetically engineer mammalian cells that could express the GFP at the required levels.

The researchers report that they were able to create bright laser pulses that lasted a few nanoseconds with a single cell. Amazingly the cells were not damaged during the production of the laser light but were able to withstand hundreds of pulses. Furthermore, the spherical shape of the cell itself acted as a lens “refocusing the light and inducing emission of laser light at lower energy levels than required for the solution-based device.”

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Although there are no immediate plans to use this technology, the erosion of the barrier between optical technologies and biology could open many doors in therapy and research. Gather tells PhysOrg.com that they “hope to be able to implant a structure equivalent to the mirrored chamber right into a cell, which would [sic] the next milestone in this research."  

Credit: Nature Photonics and Malte Gather, Wellman Center for Photomedicine, Mass. General Hospital

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Human Skin Cells Turned Into Neurons

Over the past few years, the boiling debate over the ethics of stem cell research has been brought to a slow simmer due to a series of huge advances in cellular reprogramming. The latest of these breakthroughs is the conversion of mature human skin cells into neurons.

A group of scientists led by principal investigator Marius Wernig at Stanford University had already achieved this feat with rodent skin cells in January 2010, but this May they published a paper in Nature announcing the successful conversion using human cells.

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One of the most striking aspects of this achievement is that it bypasses the ‘Induced Pluripotent Stem Cell’ (IPS cell) phase. Human IPS cells were first produced in 2007, heralding a new era of scientific inquiry in which stem cell research is no longer automatically associated with the controversial harvesting of embryonic cells. Although this technique has been refined since then, there are still major obstacles to using IPS cells. One major detriment, for instance, is that some of the proteins that play a role in reprogramming cells can cause tumors.

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The new research announced by Wernig’s team skips the IPS stage completely and instead manipulates four genes in the skin cells, causing a direct conversion to electrically active neurons. However, the team still faces some daunting challenges on the road to achieving highly reliable conversions. The efficiency of the conversion appears to be quite low, with about 2 to 4 percent of the skin cells converting to functioning neurons. Another major obstacle is that almost all the converted cells seem to be responding to only 1 out of the roughly 100 neurotransmitters that are active in humans. Although this puts a significant damper on how much neural disease research can be carried out in the immediate future, it is a very substantial step in the right direction.

Credit: 3d4Medical.com/Corbis

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Future Computers May Be DNA-Based

We've all heard our brain likened to a computer. But professor Jian-Jun Shu and his students at Nanyang Technical University are taking that comparison quite literally.

Shu and his team at the university's School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering have proposed a way to use DNA strands for computing operations.

Their article “DNA-Based Computing of Strategic Assignment Problems,” was recently published in the journal Physical Review Letters.

Shu points out that the human body performs computations that are naturally more faster than even the fastest silicon-based computer.

"No matter how fast tomorrow's conventional silicon-based computer can become," their article states,"in order to solve specific classes of problems, it may take the fastest silicon-based computer months or even years to process the calculations. This is mainly due to the serial computing nature of the conventional silicon-based computer."

So Shu and his students manipulated stands of DNA at the test-tube level. They found that they could fuse strands together, cut them and perform operations that would affect DNA's ability to store information.

“Silicon-based computing relies on a binary system,” Shu told PhysOrg.com. “With DNA-based computing, you can do more than have ones and zeroes. DNA is made up of A, G, C, T, which gives it more range. DNA-based computing has the potential to deal with fuzzy data, going beyond digital data.”

Shu says that DNA-based computing is currently in the most elementary stages and that more human manipulations must be done.

Credit: E.M. Pasieka/Science Photo Library/Corbis

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