One of the most provocative recent scientific studies has attempted to determine How did the crossbreeding between modern humans and Neanderthals occur?The sensationalized news in many media outlets claims that ancestral pairings primarily occurred between Neanderthal men and modern human women. However, in science, press headlines are not always a reliable reflection of scientific data, because they often seek social impact or clickbait

Tumors can have thousands of mutations, but only a few are significant and cause disease. Understanding which ones trigger cancer is crucial for targeting precise and effective treatments. And yet, it remains a major and often insurmountable challenge in biology. This could now begin to change thanks to an AI developed by the Google DeepMind lab, which will allow for a better understanding of the genome and a more efficient and rapid interpretation of differences in DNA sequences.

African American children with asthma are six times more likely to die from complications of the respiratory disease than European children because they do not respond well to bronchodilator treatments. And, in general, Asian and Latin American people are three times more likely to develop lupus—an autoimmune disease—than Europeans. These are two examples of the crucial role our genetic ancestry plays in our risk of developing a disease or in how effectively medications work for us. This is why studying genes is crucial to identifying both the functions they perform and the characteristics they are responsible for. Since the human genome was first sequenced in 2001, scientists have used it as a reference and have created gene maps—highly detailed catalogs that show the position of each human gene and all its functions. The problem is that these maps have been built almost exclusively from data of people of European descent. They are biased and do not represent all of humanity, as revealed for the first time by a study co-led by two Catalan centers, the Barcelona Supercomputing Center - National Supercomputing Center (BSC-CNS) and the Centre for Genomic Regulation (CRG) of Barcelona, ​​and published in Nature Communications"These gene maps, fundamental to biomedical research and used daily by the scientific community, are based on a small sample of humanity," notes Pau Clavell, a researcher at the BSC and the CRG and author of the study. "They have blind spots because they don't include the specific biology of populations from other continents," he emphasizes, adding that this means that RNA molecules—fragments of DNA that genes create to perform a specific function and that are fundamental to biological processes—which could be potentially important in diseases are "invisible" to the scientific community. Discoveries of thousands of new molecules

Catalan researchers analyzed the genetic information of immune cells present in the blood of 43 individuals from eight different human populations: three African, two Asian, two European, and one Native American. They discovered 41,000 new RNA sequences, the vast majority in the genetic material of populations of non-European ancestry. Some of these new sequences appeared in genes related to diseases whose incidence varies among populations, such as lupus, rheumatoid arthritis, asthma, and cholesterol control. "Without these RNA molecules, reference gene maps do not contain key information for understanding why some common diseases act differently in some human groups," notes BSC researcher Marta Melé, senior co-author of the study. They also identified 476 new genes, regions of the genome that were not previously known to produce RNA molecules.

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When I began working in the field of virology two decades ago, searching for antiviral treatments, I never imagined that the knowledge accumulated in our field would contribute years later to the design of new therapies for Alzheimer's. However, in recent years, there has been growing interest in laboratories around the world, including our own, IrsiCaixa, in understanding the role that viruses play in the neurocognitive degeneration process linked to this type of dementia. These studies are now beginning to yield astonishing results.

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Ten years after the UK legalized the possibility of using genetic material from three people to obtain a healthy embryo and avoid life-threatening mitochondrial problems, scientists at Newcastle University conducting the first clinical trial of this technique have confirmed the birth of eight healthy babies using this method. Just over two years ago, the UK's Human Fertilization and Embryology Authority (HFEA) confirmed that until April 20, 2023 there were five, those born of two mothers and a father, within the framework of this trial.

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If someone mentions "water bears" in a conversation, they're likely to encounter surprised expressions from their interlocutors, who are probably imagining some kind of gigantic amphibious mammal they didn't learn about in class. If, instead of the nom de guerre, they use the official one, the result may not be very different, because not many people are familiar with the existence of tardigrades, one of the truly amazing animals that inhabit the Earth, capable of surviving the most extreme conditions on the planet... and in outer space! A recent article published in the journal Science reveals the possible secret of this unusual resistance.

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Ana Hospital had always imagined dedicating herself to another specialty. In fact, while studying medicine, she worked as a primary care physician in a village, and also in a pediatrician's office. It was in the latter that she met Dr. Narcís Bardalet, who held dual positions as a pediatrician and forensic pathologist. Some days, after the consultation, she would accompany him to body removals. She enjoyed that job more than she imagined, and today she is a forensic doctor at the Institute of Forensic Medicine of Catalonia, a dentist, and a professor at the International University of Catalonia.

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"We have taken a very important step towards understanding the language of DNA." With this statement, Lars Velten, a researcher at the Center for Genomic Regulation (CRG), tried to quantify the extent to which the results of the study his team published this Thursday in the journal CellThe research group from the CRG and EMBL-Barcelona has succeeded in creating an artificial intelligence (AI) tool capable of designing regulatory DNA sequences never seen in nature. "We can say that we have created new switches [enhancers] that until now did not exist in the mammalian genome and that in the future could be used to control whether a gene is turned on or not in a specific cell," explains Velten, lead author of the research.

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April 25 is considered Biologist's Day in commemoration of the same day in 1953, which was when the magazine Nature Three consecutive articles on the structure of DNA were published, with just one image each. Two of the images show X-ray diffraction: one of the images is imprecise and is signed by Maurice Wilkins and collaborators; the other is clear and reproduced in all the books, obtained by Rosalind Franklin; as a model of the structure of DNA and has no experiments, but is based on the results of other scientists, it is signed by the famous James Watson and Francis Crick. scientist without whom they would not have obtained the precious award, and who unfortunately died in 1957 from ovarian cancer, at just 37 years old.

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