Friday, May 10, 2019
Alabama Cracks Down On Abortions By Outlawing All Medical Procedures
MONTGOMERY, AL—Defending the
measure as necessary to fully eliminate the practice of terminating pregnancies,
Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey signed a bill Friday cracking down on abortions by
outlawing all medical procedures in the state.
“The only way to ensure that
not a single abortion ever takes place in the state of Alabama is to close all
hospitals and bar all doctors from practicing medicine,” said Ivey, explaining
that it’s not up to a handful of doctors and medical professionals to play God
and determine if someone should survive any given health condition, and that
contracting any disease whatsoever could carry a maximum sentence of 99 years
behind bars.
“Human beings were never meant
to interfere and subvert God’s divine plans, whether that be a pregnancy,
arthritis, cancer, schizophrenia, infection, hypertension, the stomach flu, or
even a common cold. It’s simply not our place to decide who lives and who dies,
so we must no longer allow treatment for any illness or injury.”
At press time, approximately
2,611,489 Alabamans had already died.
Methane-consuming bacteria could be the future of fuel
Discovery illuminates how
bacteria turn methane gas into liquid methanol
May 9, 2019
Northwestern University
Researchers have found that
the enzyme responsible for the methane-methanol conversion in methanotrophic
bacteria catalyzes the reaction at a site that contains just one copper ion.
This finding could lead to newly designed, human-made catalysts that can convert
methane -- a highly potent greenhouse gas -- to readily usable methanol with
the same effortless mechanism.
Known for their ability to
remove methane from the environment and convert it into a usable fuel,
methanotrophic bacteria have long fascinated researchers. But how, exactly,
these bacteria naturally perform such a complex reaction has been a mystery.
Now an interdisciplinary team
at Northwestern University has found that the enzyme responsible for the
methane-methanol conversion catalyzes this reaction at a site that contains
just one copper ion.
This finding could lead to
newly designed, human-made catalysts that can convert methane -- a highly
potent greenhouse gas -- to readily usable methanol with the same effortless
mechanism.
"The identity and
structure of the metal ions responsible for catalysis have remained elusive for
decades," said Northwestern's Amy C. Rosenzweig, co-senior author of the
study. "Our study provides a major leap forward in understanding how
bacteria methane-to-methanol conversion."
"By identifying the type
of copper center involved, we have laid the foundation for determining how
nature carries out one of its most challenging reactions," said Brian M.
Hoffman, co-senior author.
The study will publish on Friday,
May 10 in the journal Science. Rosenzweig is the Weinberg Family
Distinguished Professor of Life Sciences in Northwestern's Weinberg College of
Arts and Sciences. Hoffman is the Charles E. and Emma H. Morrison Professor of
Chemistry at Weinberg.
By oxidizing methane and
converting it to methanol, methanotrophic bacteria (or
"methanotrophs") can pack a one-two punch. Not only are they removing
a harmful greenhouse gas from the environment, they are also generating a
readily usable, sustainable fuel for automobiles, electricity and more.
Current industrial processes
to catalyze a methane-to-methanol reaction require tremendous pressure and
extreme temperatures, reaching higher than 1,300 degrees Celsius.
Methanotrophs, however, perform the reaction at room temperature and "for
free."
"While copper sites are
known to catalyze methane-to-methanol conversion in human-made materials,
methane-to-methanol catalysis at a monocopper site under ambient conditions is
unprecedented," said Matthew O. Ross, a graduate student co-advised by
Rosenzweig and Hoffman and the paper's first author. "If we can develop a
complete understanding of how they perform this conversion at such mild
conditions, we can optimize our own catalysts."
The study, "Particulate
methane monooxygenase contains only mononuclear copper centers," was
supported by the National Institutes of Health (award numbers GM118035,
GM111097 and 5T32GM008382) and the National Science Foundation (award number
1534743).
Story Source:
Materials provided by Northwestern University.
Original written by Amanda Morris. Note: Content may be edited for style
and length.
Journal Reference:
Matthew O. Ross, Fraser
MacMillan, Jingzhou Wang, Alex Nisthal, Thomas J. Lawton, Barry D. Olafson,
Stephen L. Mayo, Amy C. Rosenzweig, Brian M. Hoffman. Particulate methane
monooxygenase contains only mononuclear copper centers. Science, 2019; 364
(6440): 566-570 DOI: 10.1126/science.aav2572
Phage Therapy Treats Patient With Drug-resistant Bacterial Infection
NEWS May
09, 2019 | Original story from Howard Hughes Medical Institute
Scientists have used an
experimental therapy that relies on bacteria-infecting viruses collected, in
part, through HHMI’s SEA-PHAGES program to fight a Mycobacterium infection in a
15-year-old girl.
The patient, a 15-year-old
girl, had come to London’s Great Ormond Street Hospital for a double lung
transplant.
It was the summer of 2017, and
her lungs were struggling to reach even a third of their normal function. She
had cystic fibrosis, a genetic disease that clogs lungs with mucus and plagues
patients with persistent infections. For eight years, she had been taking
antibiotics to control two stubborn bacterial strains.
Weeks after the transplant, doctors noticed redness at the site of her surgical wound and signs of infection in her liver. Then, they saw nodules – pockets of bacteria pushing up through the skin – on her arms, legs, and buttocks. The girl’s infection had spread, and traditional antibiotics were no longer working.
Now, a new personalized treatment is helping the girl heal. The treatment relies on genetically engineering bacteriophages, viruses that can infect and kill bacteria. Over the next six months, nearly all of the girl’s skin nodules disappeared, her surgical wound began closing, and her liver function improved, scientists report May 8, 2019, in the journal Nature Medicine.
The work is the first to
demonstrate the safe and effective use of engineered bacteriophages in a human
patient, says Graham Hatfull, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI)
Professor at the University of Pittsburgh. Such a treatment could offer a
personalized approach to countering drug-resistant bacteria. It could even
potentially be used more broadly for controlling diseases like tuberculosis.
“The idea is to use bacteriophages as antibiotics – as something we could use to kill bacteria that cause infection,” Hatfull says.
Phage hunters
In October 2017, Hatfull received the email that set his team on a months-long bacteriophage-finding quest.
A colleague at the London
hospital laid out the case: two patients, both teenagers. Both had cystic
fibrosis and had received double lung transplants to help restore lung
function. Both had been chronically infected with strains of Mycobacterium,
relatives of the bacterium that causes tuberculosis.
But maybe something else could help. Hatfull, a molecular geneticist, had spent over three decades amassing a colossal collection of bacteriophages, or phages, from the environment. Hatfull’s colleague asked whether any of these phages could target the patients’ strains.
It was a fanciful idea,
Hatfull says, and he was intrigued. His phage collection – the largest in the
world – resided in roughly 15,000 vials and filled the shelves of two
six-foot-tall freezers in his lab. They had been collected from thousands of
different locations worldwide – and largely by students.
Hatfull leads an HHMI program
called SEA-PHAGES that offers college freshmen and sophomores the opportunity
to hunt for phages. In 2018, nearly 120 universities and colleges and 4,500
students nationwide participated in the program, which has involved more than
20,000 students in the past decade.
There are more than a nonillion (that’s a quadrillion times a quadrillion) phages in the dirt, water, and air. After testing samples to find a phage, students study it. They’ll see what it looks like under an electron microscope, sequence its genome, test how well it infects and kills bacteria, and figure out where it fits on the phage family tree.
“This program engages
beginning students in real science,” says David Asai, HHMI’s senior director
for science education and director of the SEA-PHAGES program. “Whatever they
discover is new information.” That basic biological info is valuable, he says.
“Now the phage collection has actually contributed to helping a patient.”
That wasn’t the program’s original intent, Asai and Hatfull say. “I had a sense that this collection was enormously powerful for addressing all sorts of questions in biology,” Hatfull says. “But we didn’t think we’d ever get to a point of using these phages therapeutically.”
Experimental therapy
The idea of phage therapy has been around for nearly a century. But until recently, there wasn’t much data about the treatment’s safety and efficacy. In 2017, doctors in San Diego, California, successfully used phages to treat a patient with a multidrug-resistant bacterium. That case, and the rise of antibiotic resistance, has fueled interest in phages, Hatfull says.
Less than a month after he
heard about the two infected patients in London, he received samples of their
bacterial strains. His team searched their collection for phages that could
potentially target the bacteria.
They tested individual phages known to infect bacterial relatives of the patients’ strains, and mixed thousands of other phages together and tested the lot. They were looking for something that could clear the whitish film of bacteria growing on plastic dishes in the lab. If a phage could do that, the team reasoned, it might able to fight the patients’ infections.
In late January, the team
found a winner – a phage that could hit the strain that infected one of the
teenagers. But they were too late, Hatfull says. The patient had died earlier
that month. “These really are severe, life-threating infections,” he says.
His team had a few leads for
the second patient, though: three phages, named Muddy, ZoeJ, and BPs. Muddy
could infect and kill the girl’s bacteria, but ZoeJ and BPs weren’t quite so
efficient. So Hatfull and his colleagues tweaked the two phages’ genomes to
turn them into bacteria killers. They removed a gene that lets the phages
reproduce harmlessly within a bacterial cell. Without the gene, the phages
reproduce and burst from the cell, destroying it. Then they combined the trio
into a phage cocktail, purified it, and tested it for safety.
In June 2018, doctors
administered the cocktail to the patient via an IV twice daily with a billion
phage particles in every dose. After six weeks, a liver scan revealed that the
infection had essentially disappeared. Today, only one or two of the girl’s
skin nodules remain. Hatfull has high hopes: the bacteria haven’t shown any
signs of developing resistance to the phages, and his team has prepped a fourth
phage to add to the mix.
Finding the right phages for each patient is a big challenge, Hatfull says. One day, scientists may be able to concoct a phage cocktail that works more broadly to treat diseases, like the Pseudomonas infections that threaten burn patients.
“We’re sort of in uncharted
territory,” he says. But the basics of the young woman’s case are pretty
simple, he adds. “We purified the phages, we gave them to the patient, and the
patient got better.”
This article has been
republished from materials provided by Howard Hughes Medical Institute.
Note: material may have been edited for length and content. For further
information, please contact the cited source.
Reference:
Rebekah M. Dedrick et al. “Engineered bacteriophages for treatment of a patient with a disseminated drug resistant Mycobacterium abscessus.” Nature Medicine. Published online May 8, 2019. doi: 10.1038/s41591-019-0437-z
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)