Blog do BioMol-Lab (Universidade Federal do Ceará)

Cyberspace has been awash with claims over the past two weeks that glyphosate, an herbicide used with some genetically modified crops, causes autism. “Half of All Children Will Be Autistic by 2025, Warns Senior Research Scientist at MIT,”  blared   a headlined article on a natural products website that was shared by more than 100,000 people. Other sites had similarly headlined articles. Similar near hysterical claims appear like clockwork every few months on the Internet, promoted by natural products and supplement sites working in concert with anti-GMO activists. The alleged link between autism and GM foods is heavily promoted by  notorious  alternative medicine and natural products advocates, such as  Dr. Joseph Mercola , as well as by  Jeffrey Smith , the  controversial founder  of the anti-GMO one-man Institute for Responsible Technology. Mercola even promotes a Smith video headlined: “Monsanto’s Roundup Herbicide May Be Most Important Factor in Development of Autism and Other C

Abstract Plastics have outgrown most man-made materials and have long been under environmental scrutiny. However, robust global information, particularly about their end-of-life fate, is lacking. By identifying and synthesizing dispersed data on production, use, and end-of-life management of polymer resins, synthetic fibers, and additives, we present the first global analysis of all mass-produced plastics ever manufactured. We estimate that 8300 million metric tons (Mt) as of virgin plastics have been produced to date. As of 2015, approximately 6300 Mt of plastic waste had been generated, around 9% of which had been recycled, 12% was incinerated, and 79% was accumulated in landfills or the natural environment. If current production and waste management trends continue, roughly 12,000 Mt of plastic waste will be in landfills or in the natural environment by 2050. Source and access to article: http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/3/7/e1700782 Postado por David Araripe

Research from Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, Radboud University Medical Centre in the Netherlands, and Stanford University shows that disrupting just one night of sleep in healthy, middle-aged adults causes an increase in a brain protein associated with Alzheimer's disease. Further, a week of poor sleep leads to an increase in another brain protein that has been linked to brain damage in Alzheimer's and other neurological diseases. Shown are brain waves during slow-wave sleep, measured as a study participant slept.  Credit: Yo-El Ju A good night's sleep refreshes body and mind, but a poor night's sleep can do just the opposite. A study from Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, Radboud University Medical Centre in the Netherlands, and Stanford University has shown that disrupting just one night of sleep in healthy, middle-aged adults causes an increase in amyloid beta, a brain protein associated with Alzheimer's disease.

For the first time, a primitive movie has been encoded in -- and then played back from -- DNA in living cells.  Credit: Image courtesy of NIH/National Institute of Mental Health For the first time, a primitive movie has been encoded in -- and then played back from -- DNA in living cells. Scientists funded by the National Institutes of Health say it is a major step toward a "molecular recorder" that may someday make it possible to get read-outs, for example, of the changing internal states of neurons as they develop. "We want to turn cells into historians," explained neuroscientist Seth Shipman, Ph.D., a post-doctoral fellow at Harvard Medical School, Boston. "We envision a biological memory system that's much smaller and more versatile than today's technologies, which will track many events non-intrusively over time." Shipman, Harvard's Drs. George Church, Jeffrey Macklis and Jeff Nivala report on their proof-of-concept for a futur

People who drink coffee live longer, new research suggests. Credit: © iko / Fotolia Here's another reason to start the day with a cup of joe: Scientists have found that people who drink coffee appear to live longer. Drinking coffee was associated with a lower risk of death due to heart disease, cancer, stroke, diabetes, and respiratory and kidney disease for African-Americans, Japanese-Americans, Latinos and whites. People who consumed a cup of coffee a day were 12 percent less likely to die compared to those who didn't drink coffee. This association was even stronger for those who drank two to three cups a day -- 18 percent reduced chance of death. Lower mortality was present regardless of whether people drank regular or decaffeinated coffee, suggesting the association is not tied to caffeine, said Veronica W. Setiawan, lead author of the study and an associate professor of preventive medicine at the Keck School of Medicine of USC. "We cannot say drinki

An artistic rendering of a virus particle (light blue, foreground) bound by brightly-colored reporter molecules in a common laboratory assay.  Credit: Junwei Li/Xiaohu Gao Scientists at the University of Washington have discovered a simple way to raise the accuracy of diagnostic tests for medicine and common assays for laboratory research. By adding polydopamine -- a material that was first isolated from shellfish -- to these tests at a key step, the team could increase the sensitivity of these common bioassays by as many as 100 to 1,000 times. More sensitive tests would allow scientists to identify pathogens, diseases and specific cellular proteins even when these "biomarkers" are present at levels far below the detection threshold of today's standard tests. Initial results show polydopamine boosted the accuracy and resolution of these tests for biomarkers of HIV, Zika virus and proteins on cancerous tumors. "Common bioassays are the real workhorses of la

Visualização do carbono vítreo ultraforte, duro e elástico. A estrutura ilustrada está sobreposta em uma imagem do material feita por microscópio eletrônico. [Imagem: Timothy Strobel] Muitos carbonos O carbono é um elemento químico cujas possibilidades de rearranjo parecem ser infinitas. Por exemplo, os diamantes transparentes e superduros, o grafite opaco e desmanchadiço, o espetacular grafeno , todos são compostos exclusivamente por carbono. E, claro, temos nós, os seres humanos, formados em uma estrutura de carbono. E tem também o diamano , o aerografite e, agora, uma nova forma que parece ser um misto de tudo isso. Meng Hu e seus colegas das universidades Yanshan (China) e Carnegie Mellon (EUA) criaram uma forma de carbono que é, ao mesmo tempo, dura como pedra e elástica como uma borracha - e ainda conduz eletricidade. Essas infinitas possibilidades do carbono parecem ser possíveis porque a configuração dos seus elétrons permite inúmeras combinações de autoligação, dando or

Stephanie Bleicken researches the complex interplay of proteins. Credit: © RUB, Kramer Researchers at the Universities of Tübingen and Konstanz, the Ruhr-Universität Bochum, the Max Planck Institute of Intelligent Systems in Stuttgart, and the German Cancer Research Centers have worked together to gain new insights into a protein network which regulates the programmed break down of cells, also known as apoptosis. These Bcl-2 proteins are difficult to investigate as they exchange between the cell's watery cytoplasm and its oil-like membranes. There are only a few methods which can be used to analyze protein interactions in both environments. With a special type of spectroscopic analysis the team decoded the complex interplay of three components in the network. Their findings are published in the latest Nature Communications. Cell suicide squad "Our good health depends on the strict regulation of cell division and cell death," says Dr. Stephanie Bleicken, who has r

Este chip contém uma matriz dos minúsculos sensores de temperatura que praticamente não consomem energia.[Imagem: David Baillot/UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering] Universo dos sensores Nossa sociedade não poderia viver sem os sensores , e eles prometem se tornar ainda mais cotidianos com a Internet das Coisas, que pretende espalhar esses pequenos aparelhinhos medidores de virtualmente qualquer coisa para todos os cantos do globo - do interior do nosso corpo, para monitorar nossa saúde, até as florestas, para monitorar o meio ambiente e a reciclagem de gases atmosféricos. Por menores que sejam, contudo, são aparelhos que precisam de eletricidade para funcionar. Para não depender de baterias , que precisam ser recarregadas ou trocadas, a ideia é que cada sensor capte energia do próprio ambiente, através de nanogeradores ou alguma outra forma de colheita de energia. Essa possibilidade agora ficou ainda mais viável graças ao trabalho de Hui Wang e Patrick Mercier, da Universid

A model of a computationally designed mini protein from a UW Medicine Institute for Protein Design large-scale study.  Credit: UW Medicine Institute for Protein Design The stage is set for a new era of data-driven protein molecular engineering as advances in DNA synthesis technology merge with improvements in computational design of new proteins. This week's  Science  reports the largest-scale testing of folding stability for computationally designed proteins, made possible by a new high-throughput approach. The scientists are from the UW Medicine Institute for Protein Design at the University of Washington in Seattle and the University of Toronto in Ontario. The lead author of the paper is Gabriel Rocklin, a postdoctoral fellow in biochemistry at the University of Washington School of Medicine. The senior authors are Cheryl Arrowsmith, of the Princess Margaret Cancer Center, the Structural Genomics Consortium and the Department of Medical Biophysics at the University