Thiago Carvalho @cyrilpedia@qoto.org

'These biofilms encase immune cells and establish a high local concentration of a secreted hemolysin to kill the immune cells before the biofilms disperse in a c-di-GMP-dependent manner.'

https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(23)00527-5

'A global comparison of the long-read data from young and aged mice showed an age-associated increase in the expression of noncoding transcripts, including IgV pseudogenes, lncRNAs and transcripts with retained introns (Supplementary Fig. 7). This is consistent with observations that an increased frequency of intron retention has been identified as a signature of ageing in fruitfly, mouse and human'

https://www.nature.com/articles/s42003-023-04936-6

"‘Cybernetics and Ghosts’, the 1967 lecture that begins with the tribal storyteller, took its inspiration from avant-garde experiments with basic computers. Calvino thought that the use of machines to destabilise literary form, or produce generative disorder, was eminently human. The machine’s ‘true vocation would be for classicism’, having the capacity to infer and follow stylistic rules exactingly. It is interesting to revisit this argument in the era of AI, not least in light of Calvino’s brief, teasing claim that a true ‘literature machine’ would produce avant-garde work ‘to free its circuits when they are choked’ by classicism"

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n12/james-butler/infinite-artichoke

“Women who desire children are deciding not to get pregnant because the social organisation here is not good for women who have children,” Gervasi says. “Women still need to be the caretakers of their children first — with no help from the government. So they wait; they wait until it’s late.”

https://www.ft.com/content/44ccfd0c-b2bc-4912-bc90-26c6c95a9ba0

My Clinical Pipeline column for Nature Medicine this week examines the state of Sarepta's new gene therapy for Duchenne muscular dystrophy application at the FDA. Whatever its final efficacy turns out to be, the general strategy behind the therapy, an engineered micro-dystrophin is very clever.

It was inspired by the case of a 61 year old patient who had a deletion of almost half of his dystrophin gene and was still alive and walking. Here's that ref, from 1990:
https://www.nature.com/articles/343180a0

And here's my column:

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41591-023-00052-4

"As of January 2023, the estimated prevalence of long Covid among people in the United States who had had acute infection was 11%. According to guidance released in August 2021 by the Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Justice, long Covid can be considered a protected disability under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and under other disability-antidiscrimination mandates (such as Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act and Section 1557 of the Affordable Care Act)."

#covid #longcovid #covid19

https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp2302676?query=featured_home

'Here, we generated a mouse model with insufficient ketogenesis by conditionally knocking out the gene encoding the hepatocyte-specific ketogenic enzyme hydroxymethylglutary-CoA synthase 2 (Hmgcs2 KO). Intriguingly, erythroid maturation was enhanced with boosted fatty acid synthesis in bone marrow of hepatic Hmgcs2 KO mouse under fasting condition, suggesting that systemic ketogenesis has a profound effect on erythropoiesis.'

#Preprint #metabolism

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.06.07.544102v1

'O’Donnell’s plan came good: Lumumba was captured on the road by Mobutu’s officers and flown to Katanga, where he was murdered within hours. The CIA’s broad agenda for the DRC was supported, Williams writes, ‘by the highest level of the government’. The so-called Special Group, a subcommittee of the National Security Council responsible for covert operations, had given the CIA station in Léopoldville the green light and wired Devlin $100,000 to finish the job.'

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n12/kevin-okoth/poison-is-better