WIKIMEDIA, GUIDO GERDINGA team led by investigators at the Cedars-Sinai Heart Institute in Los Angeles, California, has devised a way to temporarily turn pig heart muscle into pacemaker cells, opening up the possibility of using this transcription factor-driven approach in patients who—perhaps because of an infection—must have their electronic pacemakers removed. The work was published in Science Translational Medicine this week (July 16).
“This is an exciting preclinical advance that makes the prospect of a biological pacemaker closer to reality,” said Jonathan Epstein, a professor of cardiovascular research at the University of Pennsylvania who was not involved in the study.
WIKIMEDIA, FREDERIC DARDELInvestigating the 20-gene family of aminoacyl tRNA synthetases (AARSs), researchers from the Scripps Research Institute and their colleagues have found nearly 250 protein splice variants, many of which had previously gone undetected. The team reported its results in Science this week (July 17).
“This is an interesting finding and fits into the existing paradigm that, in many cases, a single gene is processed in various ways to have alternative functions,” said Steven Brenner, a computational genomics researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, who was not involved in the work.
MBIO, SOO CHAN LEE ET AL.Microbiologists and food safety experts this week (July 15) highlighted some potential shortcomings in a July 8 mBio paper that blamed a virulent subspecies of Mucor circinelloides for consumer-reported illnesses stemming from a September 2013 yogurt recall in the U.S.
