'Tracking Bugs' Reveal Secret of Cancer Cell Metabolism

One of the hallmarks of cancer is a change in cellular metabolism, a series of chemical reactions so fundamental to life that their alteration makes cancer cells seem creepily malevolent.

Healthy cells take in blood sugar (glucose molecules), which they break down to extract energy. This happens in two phases—one phase that takes place in the cytoplasm and a subsequent phase that occurs inside cellular compartments called mitochondria.

Cancer cells are thought to mostly skip the mitochondrial phase, compensating for the energy they forgo by revving up the first phase and breaking down glucose rapidly to secrete large quantities of lactate—a form of partially digested glucose that has long been regarded as a "waste product.

Read more: 'Tracking Bugs' Reveal Secret of Cancer Cell Metabolism

Metabolism is nothing if not complicated. Some of the major metabolic pathways are shown in this
metro-style map.

Source: phys.org

It’s ‘Digital Heroin’: How Screens Turn Kids into Psychotic Junkies

Susan bought her 6-year-old son John an iPad when he was in first grade. “I thought, ‘Why not let him get a jump on things?’ ” she told me during a therapy session. John’s school had begun using the devices with younger and younger grades — and his technology teacher had raved about their educational benefits — so Susan wanted to do what was best for her sandy-haired boy who loved reading and playing baseball.

She started letting John play different educational games on his iPad. Eventually, he discovered Minecraft, which the technology teacher assured her was “just like electronic Lego.” Remembering how much fun she had as a child building and playing with the interlocking plastic blocks, Susan let her son Minecraft his afternoons away.

At first, Susan was quite pleased. John seemed engaged in creative play as he explored the cube-world of the game. She did notice that the game wasn’t quite like the Legos that she remembered — after all, she didn’t have to kill animals and find rare minerals to survive and get to the next level with her beloved old game. But John did seem to really like playing and the school even had a Minecraft club, so how bad could it be?

Read more: It’s ‘Digital Heroin’: How Screens Turn Kids into Psychotic Junkies

Source: nypost

Watch video: 'Digital Heroin'

Most Aggressive Form of Prostate Cancer on the Rise

A new analysis suggests infrequent screening has resulted in an increase in the number of men diagnosed with the metastatic form of the disease.

For decades, experts have said the diagnostic used to screen patients for prostate cancer is too unreliable to use routinely because it produces high rates of false positives and often results in additional unnecessary and invasive tests, as well as overtreatment. However, a new study suggests efforts to limit the use of the prostate-specific antigen (PSA) test may be partially responsible for a rise in incidences of the most aggressive form of the disease.

Read more: Most Aggressive Form of Prostate Cancer on the Rise

Source: newsweek

Overcoming the Fear of Injections for Diabetes

Do you have an objection to injections? If you have type 2 diabetes, you may be afraid you’ll eventually need to give yourself insulin injections, or maybe your doctor has mentioned non-insulin injections might be in your future.

Treating diabetes with injections does not mean you have failed or did not follow your doctor’s instructions. Many diabetics will need insulin shots over time, and non-insulin injections are just a newer form of diabetes medication. However, you do need to overcome your fear and resistance if you want to get your diabetes under control. In order to do this, it’s important to determine the root of your anxiety, and identifying the problem can help you find solutions.

Get the Facts

While there have been attempts at developing an inhaled insulin, injections are currently the most common form of delivery with the technology available today.

Read more: Overcoming the Fear of Injections for Diabetes

Source: msn/health/medical

Simplify Residual Renal Function (RRF) Estimation

Determination and monitoring of RRF has been a long-standing challenge for laboratories. Unreliable, labor-intensive urine collection and complex equations have made accurate measurement and reporting problematic.

Siemens N Latex BTP assay is the first marker to accurately, reliably, and simply estimate RRF status with one serum sample.

Read more:  Simplify Residual Renal Function (RRF) Estimation

"BTP provides a promising blood measure of RRF that could facilitate existing recommendations to
integrate regular assessment of RKF.

Source:healthcare/siemens

Food Pathogen Detection via Handheld 'Nanoflower' Biosensor

At present, harmful pathogens in food are mostly only discovered when people get sick. Earlier detection - preferably before food reaches consumers - could prevent many cases of foodborne illness and save the cost and effort involved in food recalls. Now, a team working toward solving this problem has developed a portable biosensor based on "nanoflowers" that detects harmful bacteria.

The new technology is the work of researchers at Washington State University (WSU) in Pullman, who describe how they developed and tested it in a paper published in the journal Small.

Even tiny amounts of harmful bacteria and other microbes can give rise to serious health risks, but the available sensor technology is unable to detect them easily and quickly in small quantities.

The key challenge in solving this problem is finding a way to detect the faint chemical signals that the harmful microbes emit at the molecular level.

Read more:  Food Pathogen Detection via Handheld 'Nanoflower' Biosensor

The nanoflower biosensor detects tiny chemical signals emitted by bacteria and amplifies them so they
can be picked up easily with a simple handheld pH meter.

Source: medicalnewstoday

Biomedical Laboratory Automation

Improve safety and efficiency in various types of clinical laboratories with Thermo Scientific™ TCAutomation™ Laboratory Automation Solutions. This expandable and scalable, fully-featured laboratory automation solution allows labor-intensive tasks in pre- and post-analytical phases of sample management to be automated in different combinations. Depending on the floor plan and efiiciency requirements, the TCAutomation™ systems can be expanded step-by-step.

TCAutomation™ systems throughput can range from 250 up to 1000 tubes per hour. Because solutions are modular, they are easy to expand. Automating can be started from a certain function and built up towards total laboratory automation. Samples are transported in the system within dual-lane conveyors in a multitube carrier which accommodates several tube sizes. The carrier includes an embedded microchip, based on RFID technology, making sample identification fast and reliable, and enabling excellent real-time sample tracking possibilities.

Read more: Biomedical Laboratory Automation

Download: Thermo Scientific TCAutomation Laboratory Automation Solution

Source: ThermoFisherScientific

A Laboratory for Empowerment

Though women earn 50 percent of degrees in science and engineering, they only represent 27 percent of the workforce in those fields. The UCSD Guardian investigates women’s representation in STEM at UCSD, as well as the steps the university is taking to increase their presence.

Seventy-seven cents to every man’s dollar. It’s a statistic often thrown around when discussing the oppression of women in the United States, but less often understood. The number does not come from comparing one male engineer’s salary to that of a female engineer’s. Instead, 77 cents to every one male-earned dollar is a statistic that compares the total income generated by men in the U.S. to the total income generated by American women. It’s a statistic that reveals that, on average, women are employed in lower-paying careers than men are. It’s not that female engineers are being paid 23 percent less than their male counterparts. It’s that there aren’t as many female engineers as male engineers to begin with; considering that, according to Payscale.com, the top 14 paying majors in the U.S. are in science, technology, engineering and math, this is a huge missed opportunity.

This is where STEM comes in. It’s a little acronym that represents a big conversation in today’s society. According to the U.S. Department of Commerce, in 2011, women held nearly half the jobs in the U.S. economy, but filled less than a quarter of the country’s STEM-related positions. Although women today have far more opportunities in academia than in the past, there are still far more men occupying STEM-related jobs than women. According to a 2013 study compiled by the National Girls Collaborative Project, while women are earning 50 percent of bachelor’s degrees in science and engineering, only 27 percent of the science and engineering workforce is made up of women. With nearly half of science and engineering bachelor’s degrees going to women, one would expect women to be equally represented in the workforce, making these statistics surprising.

Read more: A Laboratory for Empowerment

Source: Illustration by Alex Liang

New gene testing method can identify mutations, prioritize variants in breast and ovarian cancer genes

A research team led by an award-winning genomicist at Western University has developed a new method for identifying mutations and prioritizing variants in breast and ovarian cancer genes, which will not only reduce the number of possible variants for doctors to investigate, but also increase the number of patients that are properly diagnosed.

These potentially game-changing technologies, developed by Peter Rogan, PhD, students and his collaborators from Western's Schulich School of Medicine & Dentistry, reveal gene variants that were missed by conventional genetic testing.

Their method, described in BMC Medical Genomics, was first applied to 102 individuals at risk or with a diagnosis of inherited breast cancer. The team also studied 287 women with no known mutations for an article published in Human Mutation.

Rogan, Canada Research Chair in Genome Bioinformatics, says that 16 to 20 per cent of women in southwestern Ontario, who have their BRCA genes tested for breast and/or ovarian cancer risk, carry disease-causing gene variants that are well-understood by clinicians and genetic counselors. If a patient tests positive for an abnormal BRCA1 or BRCA2 gene and have never had breast cancer, there is a much higher-than-average risk of developing the deadly disease.

Read more: New gene testing method can identify mutations, prioritize variants in breast and ovarian cancer genes

Source: azonano

Insights on the Growing Fingerprint Challenge

Although some fingerprint analysis is new, the concept—using fingerprints for identification—started centuries ago.

The Future of Identifying People Will Require More Than One Method

Standing in the immigration line at the Indira Gandhi International Airport in Delhi, India, I watch person after person be fingerprinted. First, you put your left four fingers on a digital pad, then your right four, and finally both thumbs at once. If all goes smoothly, the Indian government collects all ten fingerprints for everyone entering the country. It’s not as easy as it sounds, even from the start. More than one person is asked to try again and again. So obtaining a print can be as difficult as analyzing one.

Although some fingerprint analysis is new, the concept— using fingerprints for identification—started centuries ago. Thousands of years ago in Babylon, a fingerprint served as a signature of sorts on business papers. Finally, in 1880, British surgeon Henry Faulds described using fingerprints to identify people; he gets credit for the first use of this technology of lifting a print from an alcohol bottle.

Read more: Insights on the Growing Fingerprint Challenge

Source: labmanager

Next Generation Blood Separation Technology

A next-generation blood separation technology that is designed to enhance sample quality, improve laboratory efficiency and reduce laboratory turnaround time has received the Conformité Européenne (CE) marking. 

The tube is a single-use, plastic evacuated tube used to collect, separate, transport and process venous blood specimens to obtain high-quality plasma for in vitro diagnostic use and the tube has a revolutionary separator technology, providing a cleaner plasma sample with less cellular contamination, meaning the sample is more stable and allows a longer window to conduct testing when compared to existing blood separation tubes. 

BD Barricor tubes (BD, Becton, Dickinson and Company, Franklin Lakes, NJ, USA) are optimized to deliver a high quality plasma sample by reducing cellular content (versus plasma gel tubes), as a result of the mechanical separator remaining open throughout the centrifugation cycle.

Read more: Next Generation Blood Separation Technology

BD vacutainer separation tubes for blood specimens

Source: Becton, Dickinson, and Company

Human sperm created from mature skin cells for infertility solution

Scientists in Spain say they have created human sperm from skin cells, which could eventually lead to a treatment for infertility.

The researchers said they were working to find a solution for the roughly 15 per cent of couples worldwide who are unable to have children and whose only option is to use donated gametes (sperm or eggs).

"What to do when someone who wants to have a child lacks gametes?" asked Dr Carlos Simon, scientific director of the Valencian Infertility Institute, Spain's first medical institution fully dedicated to assisted reproduction.

"This is the problem we want to address: to be able to create gametes in people who do not have them."

The result of their research, which was carried out with Stanford University in the United States, was published on Tuesday in Scientific Reports, the online journal of Nature.

Read more: Human sperm created from mature skin cells for infertility solution

Infertile sperm cells were created by adding genes to skin cells

Source: ABC News Breakfast

Visualizing looks of the future lab

Driven forward by improving technologies and increasing demands, the lab of the future could be markedly different in appearance from the laboratories we work in today. From incorporating 3D printing technology to changing the way that lab data is recorded, we take a closer look at how the next generation of laboratories might evolve. 

The paperless lab concept is not a particularly new one, and many laboratories currently operate without physically recording research and development. Tablet devices allow laboratory teams to record their findings electronically, reducing physical waste and optimising storage organisation.

However, Cloud storage tools have made it simpler for laboratory workers to save their findings in a safe and accessible location. This allows laboratories around the world to help and assist each other in real time. The commercial science lab of the future could incorporate Cloud-connected devices to alert the team of relevant updates and developments. Increased connectivity could help ensure less of the budget and less time is wasted, and more is invested in genuine progress. This momentum towards a paperless research laboratory will require labs to obtain access to trusted servers, data centres and secure network connectivity.

The increasing power and availability of 3D printers have made it possible (not to mention affordable) to create pieces of hardware in the laboratory. Specially designed nails, screws and other important components can be created to fit specific requirements. A number of design companies offer open-source hardware printing services, which enable labs with access to 3D printers to immediately develop their own hardware essentials.

Read more: Visualizing looks of the future lab

Source: shutterstock