I guess the missile knows where it is
Well, actually the missile knows where it isn’t.
Metacelsus
Karma: 1,081
Turns out that several of the main studies about cerebrolysin may have been fraudulent: https://www.science.org/content/article/research-misconduct-finding-neuroscientist-eliezer-masliah-papers-under-suspicion
Making Eggs Without Ovaries
A lot of “weird testis genes” are epigenetically silenced in somatic cells (for example, suppressed by DNA methylation), and this epigenetic control becomes defective in disease states, especially cancer. There are a whole category of “cancer/testis antigens,” proteins which are usually expressed only in the testis but which are expressed in cancers like melanoma. There are currently cancer vaccine trials to target immune responses against these proteins (which might also cause male infertility but that’s probably an acceptable tradeoff).
Maybe something similar is going on with LINC01609 in Alzheimer’s.
Dietary vitamin A (beta carotene) is not the active form of vitamin A (retinoic acid), it needs to be converted into the active form by the body’s enzymes. Once retinoic acid is formed, it can bind to the retinoic acid receptor and regulate gene expression.
Retinoid treatment bypasses these enzymes and directly activates retinoic acid receptor signaling. So, eating vitamin A in the form of beta carotene won’t directly increase retinoic acid receptor signaling because the rate-limiting step is the enzymes, but retinoid treatment will. This is also why you can’t overdose on vitamin A by eating carrots.
Does this meet your criteria for a good answer? If not I can explain in more detail.
Lastly, you shouldn’t use Retinoids if you’re pregnant or likely to become pregnant.
This needs more emphasis. Retinoid signaling is very important for embryonic development, so excess retinoids will really mess up your baby.
I agree with this. There’s a lot of snake oil out there and cerebrolysin is just one example. I had no idea it was so popular though.
200 mg/day is a pretty high dose (at least for me)
Not just mammals, as far as I know it only works in E. coli bacteria and not in any eukaryotes.
Source:
How (and why) to get tested for CMV
Interestingly there was just a similar article in the news section of Science, about glacier geoengineering.
>I’m using Quaise Energy as an example of a much larger overall trend—of the inability of investors to effectively evaluate technologies. The ability of investors to recognize good technical evaluations is the key thing that’s lacking in the economy today; there are plenty of good ideas and there’s plenty of investment capital.
Yeah, just look at Varda “manufacture drugs in space,” and Colossal “bring back the wooly mammoth.” It just doesn’t make sense for these to be profitable businesses.
Reposting a comment from the Substack:
>Recently, he solved this problem!
I’m flattered, but I actually haven’t gotten all the way to haploid cells yet. As I wrote in my preprint and associated blog post, right now I can get the cells to initiate meiosis and progress about 3⁄4 of the way through it (specifically, to the pachytene stage). I’m still working on getting all the way to haploid cells and I have a few potentially promising approaches for this.
Very cool. I wonder which University of Missouri lab the lentiviral plasmid leaked from...
I went a few times but eventually got grossed out by all the mold. (At least they don’t sell live pangolins there.)
At the time, one of the biggest problems in physics was the “Blackbody spectrum”, which describes the spectrum of electromagnetic wavelengths emitted by a Blackbody. The problem with it was that the emitted spectrum was not explainable by known physics. Einstein achieved a breakthrough by considering light not just as a wave, but also as light quanta. Although this idea sufficiently explained the Blackbody spectrum, physicists (at least almost) unanimously rejected it. The fight between the “light is corpuscles” and “light is a wave” faction had been decided a century ago, with a clear victory for the “wave” faction.
I thought blackbody radiation was Planck, not Einstein.
Interestingly, many cancer “neoantigens” (for example, MAGEB1) are also expressed in meiotic cells in the testis. This is because they’re usually epigenetically suppressed in healthy tissues, but cancer cells have messed up epigenomes. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cancer/testis_antigens
Also, I would disagree that synthesizing long polypeptides is easier than synthesizing long mRNAs. With polypeptides you have 20 amino acids to work with, and some require special treatment (protecting groups on sidechains). With mRNAs the chemistry is much simpler.
On Minicircle
Testosterone will land you in more legal trouble than modafinil.
>Mice lacking the Yap and Taz genes that control liver size have larger livers…but they also have liver cancers, and worse regeneration from liver injury.16 Similarly, mutant mice lacking Hippo signaling have unusually large livers that don’t stop growing when they hit the usual “maximal size”…but they also get lots of liver tumors not seen in wild-type mice.17
Notably, Yap and Taz are downstream mediators of Hippo signaling so these studies are looking at the same thing.