WASHINGTON One scientists sweet tribute to her father may one day give beekeepers cluesabout their colonies health, as well as help warn others when crop diseases orpollen allergies are about to strike.

Those are all possible applications thatbiochemistry researcher Roco Cornero of George Mason University in Fairfax, Va.,sees for her work on examining proteins in honey. Cornero describedher unpublished work December 9 at the annual joint meeting of the AmericanSociety for Cell Biology and the European Molecular Biology Organization.

Amateur beekeepers often dontunderstand what is stressing bees in their hives, whether lack of water,starvation or infection with pathogens, says Cornero, whose father kept beesbefore his death earlier this year. What we see in the honey can tell us astory about the health of that colony, she says.

Bees are like miniature scientists thatfly and sample a wide variety of environmental conditions, says cell biologist LanceLiotta, Corneros mentor at George Mason. As bees digest pollen, soil and water,bits of proteins from other organisms, including fungi, bacteria and virusesalso end up in the insects stomachs. Honey, in turn, is basically bee vomit,Liotta says, and contains a record of virtually everything the bee came incontact with, as well as proteins from the bees themselves.

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The information archive in honey isunbelievable, Liotta says. But until now, scientists have had a hard timestudying proteins in honey. Its so gooey and sticky and hard to work with,he says. Sugars in honey gum up lab equipment usually used to isolate proteins.

So Cornero developed a method to pullpeptides bits of proteins out of honey using nanoparticles a feat noother researchers have previously managed, Liotta says. Once extracted from thehoney, the peptides are analyzed by mass spectrometry to determine the order ofamino acids that make up each fragment of protein. Those peptides are thencompared with a database of proteins to determine which organisms produced thehoney proteins.

A group of high school students workingat George Mason for the summer collected 13 honey samples from Virginia,Maryland. Two additional samples came from Corneros hometown of Mar del Platain Argentina. The Argentine honey was from the last batches her fathercollected from his bees.

Proteins from bees, microbes and a widevariety of plants were among the components of the honey. Peptides in honeyfrom one sample came from several bacteria, including some that normally livein bees guts and a few disease-causing varieties. Proteins from viruses andparasites that infect bees, including deformed wing virus and Varroa mites,which have been implicatedin colony collapse disorder, were also found in the sample (SN: 1/17/18). Those results could meanbees from that location may have trouble surviving the winter when the insectsimmune systems are less able to fight infections.

Cornero also determined by looking atpollen and plant proteins in the honey that bees had pollinated a variety ofplants, including sunflowers, lilacs, olive trees, red clover, potatoes andtomatoes. By analyzing pollen peptides, scientists may one day be able to learnwhether claims that certain honey is made from wildflowers, clover or orangeblossoms are really true.

Whats more, counting pollen peptides inlocal hives could, for example, give allergy sufferers a better idea of whenhay fever is likely to flare in their area, Cornero says. The researchers alsofound plant virus proteins in the honey, an indication of the types of diseasesthat may be stalking local crops.

Next, Cornero hopes to develop a rapid proteintest that would allow beekeepers to plunge a dipstick into honey and rapidly gaugetheir hives health. Having my dad as a beekeeper, I know how beekeepers work,and it would be a great way to honor his work, she says.

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A biochemists extraction of data from honey honors her beekeeper father - Science News

XconomySan Diego

Nearly nine years ago Jeanne Loring and her colleagues at Scripps Research debuted a test that leveraged advances in genomics and data science to determine, without testing in animals, whether human stem cells were pluripotent, or able to become any type of cell in the body.

Being able to prove that has become increasingly important as scientists look to induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs)mature, specialized cells that have been reprogrammed as immature cells, regaining the capability of becoming any type of cellas material for new regenerative medicines.

Now Loring and Andres Bratt-Leal, who joined her lab in 2012 as a post-doctoral researcher, have founded a biotech that combines stem cell biology and genomics know-how to advance a potential cell therapy for Parkinsons disease.

The startup announced Thursday it raised a seed round of $6.5 million to support its work. Aspens lead drug candidate, which is in preclinical testing, is intended to replace neurons in the brains of people with the disease, which causes those cells to become damaged or die.

When people with Parkinsons disease lose neurons, they also lose a chemical messenger the cells produce, called dopamine. Without dopamine, communication between nerve cells falters, which leads to the debilitating motor problems that characterize the disease. Existing Parkinsons drugs aim to alter dopamine levels. Aspen, however, wants to fix the upstream problem that leads to those lowered levels by reconstructing patients damaged neural networks.

The cell therapy would involve harvesting patients own living cells through a skin biopsy, reprogramming them to immature cells, or iPSCs, then further engineering them to become predisposed to mature into neurons. Once enough of those cells have been grown in the lab, those neuron precursor cells would be delivered directly to the brain.

Using a patients own cells avoids the dangerous immune system reactions that can occur when donor cells are used in such therapies, and obviates the need for immunosuppression drugs. Two cell therapies that use genetic engineering have been approved by the FDA, both of which take and tweak patients T cells into treatments for cancer. Stem cell transplants have been used to treat some cancers.

Aspen worked to ensure the company could ably manufacture a so-called autologous replacement cell therapy, or one from a patients one cells, by improving the process of differentiating iPSCs into dopamine neurons, Loring says. And the group developed another predictive genomic-based test, similar to the effort Loring spearheaded nearly a decade ago to determine whether cells were pluripotent, that can detect which iPSCs are destined to become neurons.

(Bratt-Leal) put his biological engineering expertise into coming up with a way that was reproducible, that we would get the same cells no matter who we got the original cells from, she says.

The company plans to test the therapy in patients that they determine, through genomic testing, have the most common form of Parkinsons, which is referred to as sporadic and arises without a clear genetic predisposition. It also has a second treatment in the works that it intends to develop for patients with familial forms of the disease, and uses a gene editing toolyet to be selectedto alter their stem cells during the reprogramming process.

Howard Federoff, who was most recently vice chancellor for health affairs and CEO of the UC Irvine Health system, is Aspens CEO. Federoff says he has come to believe that Parkinsons patients need more than just to stabilize their disease They need to turn the clock back.

Many companies are working on drugs to treat Parkinsons, but most are meant to manage symptoms rather than reverse the disease. Levodopa, which supplants missing dopamine, is used widely, but it can cause side effects, including involuntary movement called dyskinesia; and, as the disease progresses, the drug eventually stops working between doses.

Aspen claims it is the only company working toward an autologous neuron replacement. The company, however, will need to raise a Series A round to move its drug candidates through Phase 2 proof-of-concept trials, Loring says.

The company raised its seed round from a group of investors including Domain Associates, Alexandria Venture Investments, Arch Venture Partners, Axon Ventures, OrbiMed, and Section 32. Initially, it was financed through grants from Summit for Stem Cell, a San Diego-based nonprofit.

Sarah de Crescenzo is an Xconomy editor based in San Diego. You can reach her at sdecrescenzo@xconomy.com.

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Aspen Neuro Bags $6.5M to Test Parkinson's Disease Stem Cell Therapy - Xconomy

This past June, Princeton University molecular geneticist Coleen Murphy and colleagues published their research documenting that after consuming a pathogen, C. eleganscan pass on information about it to their offspring, allowing the next generation to avoid making the same mistake. But only some pathogenic bacteria trigger this transgenerational avoidance response. Murphy wanted to know why.

Her group started exposing worms to various bits of pathogenic Pseudomonas bacteria, which the team had previously found to trigger the avoidance response across generations. To the researchers surprise, exposure to bacterial metabolites did not trigger an avoidance response, nor did bacterial DNA. Small RNAs in the bacteria, however, did. When they squirted a bunch of Pseudomonas small RNAs onto the worms usual diet of E. coli, the nematodes later avoided eating Pseudomonas, even though theyd never encountered the actual organism before.

The team looked for differences in the expression of small RNAs between Pseudomonas bacteria cultured at 25 Ca temperature at which the microbes are pathogenic and trigger the avoidance response in C. elegansthat consume themand those cultured at 15 Cconditions that result in no response in the wormsand identified six bacterial small RNAs that were upregulated in the bacteria kept at the warmer temperature. Further experiments with E. coligenetically engineered to express each of these small RNAs narrowed the search to one particular culprit that appears to trigger the avoidance responseeven if the worms dont actually get sick. Its like a false memory, says Murphy, who presented the findings on Monday (December 9) at the American Society for Cell Biology annual meeting in Washington, DC, and earlier this year as a preprint on bioRxiv.

Small RNAs isolated from Serratia marcesans, a pathogen that does not trigger a transgenerational avoidance response, did not have this effect, she tells The Scientist.

Digging into the phenomenon further, her team found that the molecular pathways underlying the worms initial avoidance of Pseudomonasand their ability to pass that information on to their offspring appear to be one and the same. In fact, the small RNAs signal must go from the gut to the germline before it can reach the neurons that control the avoidance behavior. We got this crazy result early on, Murphy says, referring to the signals route of transmission through the body. We thought it was a mistake we made.

But it was no mistake. In the study published in June, the team had found that lots of tiny C. elegans RNAs known as Piwi-interacting RNAs (piRNAs) were expressed differently after exposure to pathogenic Pseudomonas, and that knocking out prg-1, which encodes a regulator of piRNAs, in the germline blocked the transgenerational response.

In this latest project, the researchers found that knocking out prg-1 in the germline also blocked the avoidance response in the mothers. Every single thing that was required for transgenerational inheritance was also required for avoidance in the mother, says Murphy. It basically is this system-wide signaling that the worms use to interpret what theyre eating.

The team confirmed the results with wild C. elegansand wild bacteria, to demonstrate that this was not simply an artifact of the laboratory environment. Although the exact mechanisms by which the Pseudomonassmall RNA triggers avoidance behaviornot to mention the passing of that behavior on to the next generationremain a bit of a black box, Murphy and her colleagues did determine that they do not involve the known components of pathways for processing microRNAs or viral RNAs. Its something thats completely new, she says. [It] opens up a whole new set of questions.

Jef Akst is managing editor ofThe Scientist. Email her atjakst@the-scientist.com.

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How Worms Avoid Eating Bad Bacteria and Warn Their Offspring Too - The Scientist

Do you love burgersbut not the animal cruelty and environmental degradation that go into making them? I come bearing good news: Someday, you might be able to get your meat fix, without all that bad stuff. Scientists can now grow animal flesh, without raisingor in most cases killingan animal. This food, called lab-grown meat, cell-based meat, cultured meat, cultivated meat, clean meat, or as comedian Stephen Colbert jokingly called it in 2009, shmeat, has set off a flurry of media attention in recent years. Dozens of lab-grown meat companies have materialized, most aiming to solve the problems associated with large-scale beef, pork, poultry, and seafood production.

Finless Foods, a 12-person food-tech startup founded in 2017 and based in Emeryville, California, claims to be the first company to focus on lab-grown fish, although a handful of other startups have since joined them. In October, 28-year-old Finless Foods co-founder Mike Selden gave me a tour of their facility, and I dished about it on the latest episode of the Mother Jones food politics podcast Bite:

Selden and his co-founder Brian Wyrwas, both products of an agricultural biochemistry program at UMass Amherst, started the company, he says, to make something good.

We started off with zebrafish and goldfish, which already had a lot of cell biology research behind them, Selden explains. From there, we did our first prototypes, which were carp. The company grew tilapia, bass, rainbow trout, salmon, Mahi Mahi, lobster, and Fugu (poisonous pufferfish) meat before settling on Bluefin tuna, whose stocks have dropped sharply in the last few decades.

The idea behind lab-grown fish, Selden says, is multi-pronged. The technology, they hope, will prevent the killing of animals for food, cut down on overfishing, and eliminate mercury and microplastic contamination in seafood. We see this as creating a clean food supply on land: no mercury, no plastic, no animals involved, and it can still meet peoples needs.

Finless Foods carp croquettes, in September 2017

Finless Foods

Selden doesnt like the term lab-grown.Industry insiders argue it makes their products sound artificial and unappetizing.He instead prefers to call it cell-based. He argues that the process of growing fish in a lab is actually very similar to how fish grow and develop in the wild.

It begins with a sampleabout the size of a grain of riceof real meat from a real fish. (The tuna doesnt have to die during this process, but often does. In the companys two-and-a-half-year history, theyve killed fewer than 20 tuna.) Those cells are put in a liquid feed, like a nutritious soup, which gives them the energy to grow and divide, just like they would in a real, growing fish.

Despite the obvious advantages of lab-grown fish, there arent any products on the market. For Finless Foods, the cost of making one serving of their fish is still too high for consumers. I wont say exactly what number it is, Selden tells me, but youre not going to buy it. This is true across the industry: lab-grown beef, at one point costing as much as $280,000 to produce a hamburger, is also still prohibitively expensive, though its price is expected to drop to a mere $10 in two years.

Hitting the right price is one of the industrys biggest hurdles, if not the biggest one, according to Liz Specht, associate director of science and technology at the Good Food Institute, a nonprofit which lobbies for plant-based and cell-based alternatives to meat, dairy, and eggs. The industry, she says, has the science down. What does need to happenand I dont want to downplay or trivialize how challenging this will beis getting it to the scale and the price point that will ultimately be necessary.

On top of that, Finless Foods is still working out the kinks on the flavor. The first iteration of its fish, carp served as a croquette and prepared by a local chef, which it unveiled in 2017, didnt taste like much, Selden concedes. At the time, journalist Amy Fleming described it in a story for The Guardian as delicious and disappointing. When I called Fleming in November to get more detail about the taste, she said she recalls it being crispy on the outside and smooth and delicate on the inside. It had a subtle flavor of the sea, as the chef described it to Fleming, like water in an oyster shell. They were really lovely, she says, But did taste of fish? It was hard to say. You couldnt see any fish in there and you can discern any fleshy fish sort of texture.

Now, after two more years of taste-tests Selden claims the flavor of his Bluefin is really good. I think it tastes fantastic, he says. And I think that it really speaks for itself. (Ill have to take Seldens word for it; at the time of my visit, they didnt have any fish available for tasting.)

Finless Foods lab-grown carp, in a frying pan.

Finless Foods

The companys success could depend on finding the right flavor. When I ask Selden why people would choose his product over other alternatives, like sustainably caught or farm-raised fish, he says, They wont. He elaborated: Were specifically shooting for people who really dont care about sustainability. To appeal to seafood connoisseurs, he says, his company plans to first sell to upscale restaurants rather than grocery stores. Fine dining, he believes, is an easier way to get public perception on your sideespecially when were specifically searching for foodies rather than for a sustainably-minded consumer.

Funders seem to agreethey have already invested millions of dollars into Finless Foods. Early supporters include an aquaculture investment firm based out of Norway called Hatch, an Italian food science company, Hi-Food, a Japanese tuna company, Dainichi Corporation, and Draper Associates, a venture capital firm founded by Silicon Valley investor Tim Draper. Animal welfare organizations including PETA and Mercy for Animals have voiced support for lab-grown meat as a whole. And according to a 2018 survey conducted by Faunalytics, a non-profit animal advocacy research organization, 66 percent of consumers were willing to try clean meat.

There is one group of people that likely isnt so enthusiastic about lab-grown seafood: fishermen. I think that we need essentially a Green New Deal but for agriculture, says Selden. He believes a jobs guarantee might alleviate some of the growing pains associated with transitioning to a partial lab-grown meat food system. I think that the people who are doing that fishing, are doing that farming, we need to provide something for them so that they can still survive, even if we transition out of their industry as a method of food production.

It is yet to be seen whether Finless Foods sashimi will win over die-hard seafood fanatics. Then again, they might not have a choice: As climate change worsens, and the ocean becomes too hot, too acidic, too polluted, and over-fished, its possible that one day some types of seafood may come only in a lab-grown variety. As Specht told me, I think cultivated meat may truly be our only option for preserving the diversity of aquatic species we eat.

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We Destroyed the Oceans. Now Scientists Are Growing Seafood in Labs. - Mother Jones

Director of Research/Cell Biology, tells us that genome editing is just a way of speeding up mother nature. Genome editing, the advantage is it is not GMO. Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue said he is not going to push for regulations on genome editing where it does not involve any plant pest and the reason for that is the nucleotide substitution, mother nature does the very same thing. We call them snips, a single nucleotide polymorphism and its the snips that plant breeders take advantage of for yield gains and that is the basis of plant breeding. We are just able to harness that ability that mother nature has developed and use it in a way that we can do it a whole lot faster. The outcome is the same as what mother nature would do.

In a 60 minutes report, a scientist suggested that genome editing may ultimately enable us to cure every disease known to man.

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Speeding up nature - AG INFORMATION NETWORK OF THE WEST - AGInfo Ag Information Network Of The West

Parkinsons disease is characterized by the loss of specific brain cells that make the chemical dopamine. Without dopamine, nerve cells cannot communicate with muscles and people are left with debilitating motor problems. Aspen is focusing on human pluripotent stem cells, cultured cells that can become any cell type in the human body. Many health technology startups are on the raise to cure this disease. At the forefront is Aspen Neuroscience, a healthtech startup developing first-of-its-kind personalized cell therapy for Parkinsons disease.

Aspen Neuroscience is a development stage, private biotechnology company that uses innovative genomic approaches combined with stem cell biology to deliver patient-specific, restorative cell therapies that modify the course of Parkinsons disease.

Today,Aspen Neuroscience announced its official launch with $6.5 million seed financingto develop the first autologous cell therapies for Parkinsons disease.The round was led by Domain Associates and Axon Ventures and including Alexandria Venture Investments, Arch Venture Partners, OrbiMed and others.

Aspens proprietary approach was developed by the companys co-founders, Jeanne F. Loring, Ph.D., Professor Emeritus and founding director of the Center for Regenerative Medicine at The Scripps Research Institute, and Andres Bratt-Leal, Ph.D., a former post-doctoral researcher in Dr. Lorings lab. The company was initially supported by Summit for Stem Cell, a founding partner and non-profit organization which provides a variety of services for people with Parkinsons disease. Aspen is led by industry veteran Howard J. Federoff, M.D., Ph.D., as Chief Executive Officer.

The companys research is specific to induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs), which it develops by taking a skin biopsy from a person with Parkinsons disease and turning the tissue into pluripotent stem cells using genetic engineering. Aspen then differentiates the pluripotent stem cells into dopamine-releasing neurons that can be transplanted into that same person (autologous), thereby restoring the types of neurons lost in Parkinsons disease.

As an autologous cell therapy for Parkinsons disease, Aspens treatment would eliminate the need for immunosuppression because the neurons are transplanted back into the same patient from which they were generated. The use of immunosuppression is necessary with currently available cell therapies for Parkinsons disease and when transplanting cells from one patient to another (allogeneic) to prevent rejection but can pre-dispose the patient to life-threatening complications including infection and add cost to the patient and health system. Aspen is the only company in the world offering an autologous neuron replacement therapy for Parkinsons disease.

Aspen encompasses a powerful executive leadership team including Dr. Federoff who, in addition to his leadership roles at the UC Irvine Health System, was the Executive Vice President for Health Sciences and the Executive Dean of Medicine at Georgetown University. Dr. Federoff also has significant biotech industry experience including co-founding MedGenesis Therapeutix and Brain Neurotherapy Bio, as well as leading the U.S. Parkinsons Disease Gene Therapy Study Group. The company is also proud to announce the addition of several experienced and well-known members to its leadership team including Edward Wirth, M.D., Ph.D., as Chief Medical Officer.

Dr. Wirth currently serves as the Chief Medical Ofcer for Lineage Cell Therapeutics where he oversees clinical development of its two therapeutic programs for spinal cord injuries and lung cancer. He received his M.D. and Ph.D. from the University of Florida in 1994 and remained to conduct postdoctoral research including leading the University of Florida team that performed the rst human embryonic spinal cord transplant in the U.S. Dr. Wirth went on to serve as the Medical Director for Regenerative Medicine at Geron Corporation where the worlds rst clinical trial of human embryonic stem cell (hESC)-derived product occurred which demonstrated initial clinical safety.

Drs. Federoff and Wirth are joined by Dr. Loring, as Chief Scientific Officer; Jay Sial, as Chief Financial Officer; Andres Bratt-Leal, Ph.D., as Vice President of Research and Development; Thorsten Gorba, Ph.D., as Senior Director of Manufacturing and Naveen M. Krishnan, M.D., M.Phil., as Senior Director of Corporate Development.

Aspen is developing a restorative, disease modifying autologous neuron therapy for people suffering from Parkinsons disease, said Dr. Federoff. We are fortunate to have such a high-caliber scientific and medical leadership team to make our treatments a reality. Our cell replacement therapy, which originated in the laboratory of Dr. Jeanne Loring and was later supported by Summit for Stem Cell and its President, Ms. Jenifer Raub, has the potential to release dopamine and reconstruct neural networks where no disease-modifying therapies exist.

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Aspen Neuroscience launches with $6.5M seed funding to develop personalized and autologous cell therapy for Parkinson's disease - TechStartups.com

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