MicroRNAs act as transcriptomic modifiers of the preimplantation embryo even if the embryo is donated.

Endometrial fluid is a viscous fluid secreted by endometrial glands into the uterine cavity and its function is the nutrition of the embryo and gives an environment in which the first communication between the maternal endometrium and the embryo occurs during the window of implantation. This endometrial fluid contains different molecules such as proteins, glycodelin, lipids and cytokines, which are employed by the embryo for its development, but they can also create an impact in its physiology. A clear example are microRNAs from endometrial fluid (small, 19-22 nucleotide sequences of non-coding RNA), which can regulate the gene expression of endogenous genome (embryo). 

This study says that the mother can change the genetic information even when the egg has been donated. The finding shows an exchange between endometrial fluid and embryo, it had been though because of the physical similarity between mother and children of ovodonation, as well as disease incidence in children related with maternal pathologies during gestation, such as obesity and smoking (fig. 1).

Figure 1. Analysis of microRNAs content in endometrial fluid and evaluation of its biological function.

Transmission of molecules occurs during the window of implantation, it is because after fecundation, the embryo takes 5 days to move from fallopian tubes to the uterine cavity, and then are necessary around 24-36 hours to the implantation. In this period the embryo takes the genetic information of endometrial fluid and it can modify its development. These microRNAs prepare the embryo for implantation with specific protein expression (fig. 2). That communication can inhibit specific functions or on the other hand can express new functions.

With this information, researchers can employ the knowledge in future to avoid diseases such as obesity.

Figure 2. Endometrial fluid from the maternal endometrium modify the embryo transcriptome.

Reference:
Vilella, F., Moreno-Moya, J. M., Balaguer, N., Grasso, A., Herrero, M., Martínez, S., ... & Simón, C. (2015). Hsa-miR-30d, secreted by the human endometrium, is taken up by the pre-implantation embryo and might modify its transcriptome. Development, 142(18), 3210-3221.

Full paper: http://dev.biologists.org/content/142/18/3210.full#ref-list-1

Producing opiates from sugar

For several years, synthetic research teams have modified pathways into microorganisms to produce benzylisoquinoline alkaloids which are used in pharmacology. If it were possible, the analgesic production would be cheaper, safer and more effective. In recent years, synthetic biologists have engineered yeast strains to make morphine (belonging to opiates, naturally produced from the opium poppy Papaver somniferum) from sugar.

Going from glucose to morphine is a complex pathway which is carried out in 18 stages. Vicent Martin and his collages at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada, created yeast that can go to R-reticuline to morphine. R-reticuline is an intermediate compound in this pathway. To go from glucose to S-reticuline (an intermediate compound before R-reticuline), John Deuber's team at University of California, Berkeley carried out their research. Both groups worked together to found the enzyme needed to transform S-reticuline to R-reticuline and have the complete pathway, but this could take many years. 

Stages known of glucose-morphine pathway. (Oye et al., 2015)

The last week, a research team by Cristina Smolkey, a synthetic biologist at Standford Universty in Palo Alto, California, published in Science that they had achieved to turn sugar into thebaine, a key opiate precursor to morphine, by a Saccharomyces cerevisiae strain. This biosynthesis required the expression of 21 genes from a rat, a bacterium and several plants. This research presents the most complete pathway of glucose to morphine, because thebaine is the last intermediate in this pathway, but is still the first piece of the project. Is necessary to increase the yield to each cell 100, 000 times to accomplish that the process scales up, be economically feasible and can compete with the oppium poppy production in pharmacology.

References:

- Galanie, S., Thodey, K., Trenchard, I. J., Interrante, M. F., & Smolke, C. D. (2015). Complete biosynthesis of opioids in yeast. Science, aac9373.

- Oye, K. A., Lawson, J. C., & Bubela, T. (2015). Drugs: Regulate'home-brew'opiates. Nature,521(7552), 281.

Felicidades Nayeli

Me da mucho gusto compartir la noticia que la M.C. Nayeli Ortiz Silos, compañera de Biorem y egresada como Ingeniera Bioquímica de nuestra Facultad, ha sido nombrada como Secretaria de la Facultad de Ciencias Químicas de la Universidad Veracruzana. Muchas Felicidades Nayeli y mejores deseos para muchas éxitos en su camino profesional y nivel personal.

M.C. Nayelo Ortiz Silos

Study of Effects of Pollution in Health Through Mouse Embryonic Stem Cells

During our life we are exposed to several substances due to industrial processes. These compounds tend to accumulate in the environment, thus, we are at risk of several health effects caused by them, even if we don't have a direct contact with the pollutants. Stem cell toxicology is a favorable alternative to animal tests or in vitro assays because it allows the develope of a pollutant of interest, quickly, thoroughly, and cost-effectively. Embryonic stem cells (ESCs) have several advantages such as the ability of be cultived indefinitely in dishes, can be employed in developmental toxicity assays, and they can virtually differentiate specifically into any type of cell of an adult organism.

One of the most studied pollutants is Bisphenol A (BPA) that is employed to make polycarbonate plastics in different products, and is recognized by the effects in health such as fertility problems, behavioral abnormalities, heart disease, diabetes, and obesity. 

The researchers used a combination of biochemical and cell-based assays to examine the gene expression during the differentiation of mouse embryonic stem cells upon treatment with BPA.

Previous reports have employed many in vivo and in vitro systems, but almost none utilized stem cells and when BPA was used in mouse ESCs, the effects were not toxic or not detected. In this study the effects of the toxicant BPA on mouse ESCs were tested with the stem cell toxicology system., resulting in a contradiction to previous reports, because the stem cell toxicology system was able to detect BPA toxicity in vitro, particularly towards the neural ectoderm specification.

"Our stem cell toxicology system proved to be very sensitive and reflective of the physiological toxic effects of BPA", said Francesco Faiola, Professor at the State Key Laboratory of Environmental Chemistry and Ecotoxicology. "What's even more valuable is the fact that this system can be applied to assess numerous other pollutants for their toxicity and/or lethality without the expenses of time-consuming animal models.



If you want to know more visit: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1001074215002776

Tiny little lasers

Injectins cells with a luminiscent dye and droplets of oil turns the cells in tiny little lasers that can be used in diagnosting diseases and like a label for a cell.

An optical fibre is shown activating tiny lasers created within pig skin cells.

Scientists turned cells in lasers at injecting oil or fat mixed with a luminiscent dye an activating it with short pulses of light.

This finding could be used for diagnosis and for medical treatment and was divised by Seon Hyuk Yun and Matjaz Humar, optical physicists from Harvard Medical School in Cambridge, Massachussets and uses oil droplets or fat to reflect and amplify the light to generate a laser.

The lipid droplet (orange) within a fat cell can be used as a natural laser.

Luminiscent probes, which includes proteins and fluorescent dyes, had a broad emission spectra around 30 to 100 nanometers. With this broad bands its limits the number of probes, because its difficult to distinguish the sources of light.

This could change because the spectra from this source of light is narrow - around 500 to 800 nanometers, making it easy to label cells. Also, Yan and Humar reported that can vary the wavelenght and can tag individual cells using polystirene beads with different diameter rather than inject oil or fat. And also reports that in theory usind differents dyes with different spectral properties and different polystirene bends they can tag every cell in the human body. 

Sun + Water + Microorganisms= Renewable energy

Photovoltaic cells have considerable potential to satisfy future renewable-energy needs, but efficient and scalable methods of storing the intermittent electricity they produce are required for the large-scale implementation of solar energy.

Renewable-fuels generation has emphasized water splitting to produce hydrogen and oxygen. For accelerated technology adoption, bridging hydrogen to liquid fuels is critical to the translation of solar-driven water splitting to current energy infrastructures. One approach to establishing this connection is to use the hydrogen from water splitting to reduce carbon dioxide to generate liquid fuels via a biocatalyst. 

Fig.1 Schematic diagram of bioelectrochemical cell (Torella et al., 2015)

An alternative approach to the direct reduction of CO₂ to liquid solar fuels is to engineer fuel production in organisms that naturally use light energy to fix CO₂ to biomass. Notwithstanding, photosynthetic organisms suffer inefficiencies arising from nonideal light-harvesting properties that are not likely to be addressed in the near term.  As a result, the observed solar-to-biomass efficiency by plants typically approach only 1% of the thermodynamic maximum annually or between 1.4% and 2.0% over the growing season when calculated on the basis of total solar radiation.

This way providing a foundation for the development of new biological, H₂-based CO₂ reduction strategies to produce liquid and solid fuels.

For more information about the article you could click on the link:

http://www.pnas.org/content/112/8/2337.full.pdf?sid=c8601066-7ada-49bf-9f64-2557223b9a9f

Sleeping Beauty, the forgotten publications

In science, sleeping beauty refers to several papers whose importance isn't recognized in the moment when they are published, however, after several years have an impact in the science world.

According to new analysis of 22 million studies that had been published over more than a century,  it was found that the "sleeping beauty" phenomenon is very common.

"We followed the history of these papers from the moment they were published to the moment they received maximum citations in other papers," said Alessandro Flammini, one of the study's authors and professor of informatics and computing at Indiana University .

Maybe the most famous example of the sleeping beauty is a paper published in 1935 by Albert Einstein, Boris Podolsky and Nathan Rosen, wich rested unloved for decades, until it started being citated by other researchers in 1994.

Albert Einstein wrote a paper in 1935 that wasn't widely cited until 1994.

Radicchi and his colleagues established  the term "beauty coefficient", a value based on the number of citations and how long after the publication acquired them.

The most known "sleeping beauty" are listed in the following table.

Top 15 sleeping beauty.

Therefore,if you have published something and it haven't been cited, you still can hope about it being cited in the future. However, Radicchi warns about not to hold out too much hope that all publications with not citations are sleeping beauties."I expect, if you look at a paper that is 10 years old (and not cited) my guess is it will continue to have zero citations forever" said Radicchi.

The zombies exist!

A new research publicated the last week in Scientific Reports in Nature showed that when bacteria are exposed to a solution of silver, can absorbe the silver particles and die, after this dead-bacteria can kill a viable culture of the same bacterium. 

The silver was used since 1893 as antimicrobial for Karl Wilhelm Von Nageli showed the silver's properties as the capacity for permeability of the membrane and once inside the cell, altering its enzymatic system, inhibiting its metabolism and energy production and modifying its genetic material, losing the ability to grow and replication, for this has been employed in the elimination of pathogenic microorganisms. 

But the zombie effect has been recognized to now. This mechanism was show with Pseudomonas aeruginosa (viable bacterial population of ca. 108 CFU/ml) wich was killed when was added nitrate silver solution to different concentrations (1, 2, 5, 15 and 20 ppm) then, this tubes were centrifugated and filtrated and the supernatat was mixed with viable culture of the same bacteria (108 CFU/ml) for 6 hours, then were counted the viable cells. 

P. aureginosa before to treatment with silver (Wakshlak et al., 2015).

P. aeruginosa after to treatment with silver; the white granules represent silver deposition which account for the ‘‘zombies’’ biocidal action (Wakshlak et al., 2015). 

The results showed that at all concentrations the dead-bacterias act as biocidal agents, they achieved to kill the 99.999% of viable cells and this elimination increased with the silver concentration. 

This is due to the dead-bacteria serve as reservoir of silver and the metallic cations are released which are lethal for the live bacteria, the explanation of this phenomenon is given by the principle of Le-Chatelier wich says that if in a equilibrium system is modificated some factor (pressure, temperature, concentration, ..) the system evolves in the direction that tends to oppose this modification. It is said that the equilibrium is shifted to the right (if increases products concentration and decreases the reactive to the initial equilibrium), or left (if increases the reactants concentration and the product concentration decrease).

In this experiment the principle was demonstrated when the silver cations were transferred to dead-bacteria and the viable bacteria because they acted as new unoccupied adsorption sites for silver, and the equilibrium of silver between the reservoir and the liquid, is shifted. 

This investigation proposed a new biocidal agent for microbial infection when the silver concentration adequate is added. Although exist diverse factors involved that can be reviewed in future researches.

If you want to know more: Antibacterial activity of silver-killed bacteria: the "zombies" effect

Reaction map suggest meteorite chemistry route to life.

The scientists believe their reaction network could explain the rapid emergence of many different chemicals needed for life.

UK chemist showed a network chain reaction that could explain the rapid emergence of life, but it could be wrong and right in a certain way. The mapped reactions produces 3 sugars, amino acids, ribonucleotides and glycerol. These substances form part of proteins, and could  become ribonucleic acid (RNA) molecules. The map shows how these products were form on Earth's surface with just hydrogen cyanide, hydrogen sulfide and ultraviolet light from the sun. 

This model gain insight because tries to answer where the RNA molecules were from, and that's for the content of the meteorite that crashed on the Earth, that contents that reacted with the nitrogen on the atmosphere, creating cyanide, indispensable for the model, also the meteorite contents iron sulfide. 

Under this condition, it can produce 11 types of amino acids, glycerol, also synthetised molecules cytidine and uridin ribonucleotides and small sugars. This condition yielded 60%-70% of the products while in the experiment of Miller origins of life experiments that zapped electricity through a mixture of methane, ammonia, hydrogen and water only produced 1% of the products.

This method was carried out by adding one substrate after another instead of mixing them all. This would done with a slope formed for the water in the layers of the Earth, carrying the substrates on streams and pools. But this was geological improbable because it needs high concentrations of cyanide but there isn't proof to back up this idea (yet).

This teach us that with an open mind, knowledge and logic you could assemble great and innovative ideas.

For more information about the article you could click on the link:
http://www.rsc.org/chemistryworld/2015/03/reaction-map-suggests-meteorite-chemistry-route-life

"They reveal Nitrogen compounds on the surface of the planet Mars"

The latest data from NASA's Curiosity rover reveal, for the first time, nitrogen compounds on the surface of Mars. This discovery brings new tracks of that the planet red could have hosted life in some moment of their history before return is dry and sterile.

Previously identified nitrogen compounds in the atmosphere of Mars, but never before found nitrates on the surface, but now with this finding was found in both surface dust samples and sediments Gale Crater.

Fig. 1. Sedimentary rocks of the Gale crater (Grotzinger et al., 2014).

Nitrogen in the form of N2 makes up approximately 2% of the Martian atmosphere, is now shown that the concentration of nitrogen in the surface of Mars is of 20-250 nanomoles in the form of nitric oxide or nitrogen monoxide, but little is known about other potential reservoirs of N on Mars, including those which may contain fixed forms of N (i.e. NH₃, NH₄⁺ and NO₃⁻) in the mantle, crust and sediments.

There is a concentration of nitrogen in the surface of Mars, it suggests that "the existence of a source of biochemically accessible nitrogen on Mars seems a fundamental prerequisite for the possible habitability of the planet", an example of this is the terrestrial life that requires a form fixed nitrogen for incorporation in biomolecules as nucleobases and amino acids that are the building blocks for DNA, RNA and proteins

Thus the presence of N fixed on Mars suggests that, at some point, was established the first half of the nitrogen cycle. On Earth, the N in your cycle returns to the atmosphere by denitrification by biological activity, but on Mars, the likely absence of life near the surface would result in fixed N accumulated as nitrate in the geological surface of Mars.

If you want to know more: 

http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2015/03/18/1420932112.full.pdf?sid=f4b9cfe9-fd7e-434d-badc-095f6362fd1a