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Genetics

Conference examines future genetic developments and trends – Shepparton News

World-leading genetics experts will outline what the future is likely to hold for the industry at a major Victorian conference in March.

Genetics Australia will host the three-day conference on March 18 to 20 to examine future directions in genetics with a horizon of 2030.

The conference will start with a one-day forum at Tabcorp Park in Melton on March 18 followed by farm tours in South and West Gippsland during the next two days to showcase progressive breeding programs.

The event has attracted leading international and Australian speakers, including Select Sires International Development vice-president Joel Mergler, Sexing Technologies chief executive officer Juan Moreno, Texas A&M University assistant professor Ky Pohler, Dairy Australia senior industry analyst John Droppert and Agriculture Victoria principal research scientist (genomic and cellular sciences) Jennie Pryce.

Genetics Australia chief executive officer Anthony Shelly said the conference would be a great opportunity to hear from some of the best geneticists and genetic professionals in the world.

The conference will give dairy farmers and industry professionals a glimpse into what the future is likely to hold, MrShelly said.

It is rare to have such an outstanding group of local and international speakers all in one place.

The conference will look at genetic developments in the global space and determine how these developments will impact the Australian breeding industry and the broader Dairy Industry.

Over the past few years the progression of genetics in the dairy industry and more broadly in agriculture has been phenomenal, and with the volume of research and development happening, that will expand even further the next decade, MrShelly said.

This conference will pull together all relevant information and help any interested farmer or industry member to understand how we can adapt to these new technologies to make sure were ahead of the game and achieving the best possible and most profitable outcomes.

Day one of the conference will conclude with a dinner with Sexing Technologies chief executive officer Juan Moreno speaking on his ST journey.

Participants can choose to attend the day one conference, the day one conference and dinner or all three days of the event.

The farm tours on day two and three will showcase the daughters and family members from Australias best bull team and from Genetics Australias international portfolio.

People wanting to attend the conference can register via the Genetics Australia website:genaust.com.au

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Conference examines future genetic developments and trends - Shepparton News

Genetics

Better genetics pay at the feedyard – Beef Magazine

The better the genetics, the more the profit potential. Thats what Cactus Feeders has learned from historical data on hundreds of thousands of cattle, which allows the feeding company to closely project the value of cattle headed to one of its 10 feedyards.

Justin Gleghorn, Cactus Feeders director of value management at the companys Amarillo, Texas, headquarters, outlined the benefits of feeding better quality cattle during his presentation to ranchers and stocker operators at the recent Southwest Beef Symposium in Amarillo.

Related: SS100: Hidden revolution in beef genetics

Cattle with a good brand of genetics usually work better at the feedyard, he said.

Cactus regularly ships about 20,000 fed cattle per week from its feedyards in Texas and Kansas. Close to one out of every 25 head fed in the U.S. is from a Cactus yard. Its database includes steers and heifers, native cattle, those with a Mexican origin, multiple weights and high- and low-risk animals.

Related: Deliberate genetic focus results in quality boost

Detailed records enable Cactus to project breakevens for all cattle. We dont determine success of an animal by its average daily gain, Gleghorn said. We look at what we paid for it and how much we spent for every day it was on feed.

With our historical data, we can typically put value on cattle and develop a breakeven. From that projection, we can hedge them and determine what we can pay for them.

David Anderson, Texas A&M AgriLife Extension livestock marketing economist, points out that a ranchs reputation for producing quality calves gets around and can lead to better prices. Feedlots look for cattle that have better feed efficiency in the feedlot, he said. Also, calves that dont get sick are worth more.

When a cattle feeder knows who produces those calves that are feedlot profitable, there will be demand for that ranchs calves. That produces premium prices over everyone else.

Those strong genetics get proven in feeding through repetition. To get those better prices may involve the rancher and feeder getting together to make a deal based on evidence.

Better calves will also bring better-than-average prices at a market. But again, information has value and being able to communicate that to buyers has value through premium prices, Anderson says.

Gleghorn says Cactus works to sort cattle with the better genetics to assess what they can do at different weights. They usually have better uniformity, which makes it easier to predict how they will perform and grade, he says. Cattle that are more plain have more variability and are harder to project.

Genetic potential has helped cause an increase in hot carcass weight. Carcass weights were about 700 pounds in 1974 compared to about 900 pounds now. Carcasses are above 70% Choice now, compared to about 35% Choice 20 years ago, Gleghorn says. That goes back to more genetic potential.

Gleghorn said the value of higher-quality cattle was highly illustrated the last half of 2019, when the Choice-Select spread took a wide turn upward from the five-year average.

The spread had been in the $3-$6 range until mid-June, when it was near $20. But while the spread has typically narrowed from June through mid-November, it widened substantially.

It approached $25 by July, compared with about $15 for the norm. By mid-August, it was near $28, compared to about $12 for the five-year average. In mid-October it pushed $29, compared to about $13 for the norm. The spread remained above $20 from mid-June through Dec. 1.

AgriLife Extension notes that there is no way to guarantee cattle will always bring top market prices, but with proper management and marketing procedures, discounts can be prevented.

AgriLife suggests that ranchers produce the kind of calf that is in demand, use management practices that will prevent discounts and spend ample time marketing the calves they worked all year to produce.

I think it has to start with a herd that is well fitted to its environment and conditions, Anderson says, a cowherd that is developed to maximize ranch profits productive, high weaning rates, low winter feed costs, good weaning weights, etc.

To realize the value of higher grading cattle, the rancher may have to own those cattle through finishing, or partner in the feeding, while selling on a grid. Cattle with high feed efficiency may not be the same ones that grade the best. There are tradeoffs that require some analysis of what cattle are most profitable at the ranch, feedlot and packer.

Anderson says there is value to good genetics, but we ought to think about our production system and what genetic traits are most profitable to select.

It's a real balancing act across all those different values, he says. Part of our problem is that the market signals across all those segments arent always very clear.

Gleghorn stresses that animal health issues are higher with cattle that are not on a vaccination program. We dont see a lot of issues with cattle on a good vaccination protocol, he says, but issues can also unexpectedly hit cattle with better genetics. Were seeing more BRD in low-risk cattle and working to find out why.

Stalcup is a freelance writer based in Amarillo, Texas.

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Better genetics pay at the feedyard - Beef Magazine

Genetics

Study finds genetic link to extinct relative of humans in 4 modern West African populations – UCLA Newsroom

UCLA genomic research uses statistics rather than ancient DNA to look back more than 600,000 years

Leticia Ortiz/UCLA

The UCLA researchers studied four populations that mostly live in the area marked by the white band, in West Africa.

UCLA computational biologists have discovered that four populations in West Africa can trace about 8% of their genetic ancestry to an archaic hominin, an extinct relative of humans that branched off from the hominid evolutionary tree more than 600,000 years ago about 100,000 years earlier than Neanderthals did. The study is published in Science Advances.

Over the past decade, advances in computing, statistical analysis, molecular biology and genetics have revealed a richer picture of humans and their interactions with ancient relatives, such as Neanderthals. But research on the genetic ancestry of African populations has lagged behind discoveries about people with ancestral roots in Europe.

The researchers, from the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering, analyzed modern DNA obtained from an international repository of genomic data. In the past, researchers would have needed to compare the modern DNA to so-called reference DNA from ancient fossils to draw such conclusions. But the improved statistical techniques available today enabled them to look backward in time hundreds of thousands of years without fossil DNA.

This opens a new path in understanding the complexity of human evolutionary history in Africa, where the picture hasnt been as clear, said Sriram Sankararaman, the studys principal investigator, a UCLA assistant professor with appointments in computer science, human genetics and computational medicine.

The archaic hominin identified in the UCLA research is a close evolutionary relative of humans.

There is not a lot known about these archaic hominins, which makes finding out how this ghost population fits into human evolutionary history challenging. But our findings are very exciting, said Sankararaman, who also is a member of UCLAs Bioinformatics Interdepartmental Program.

Previous genomic studies have presented evidence that modern populations in Africa have complex genetic lineages, in which humans and close evolutionary relatives intermixed as recently as just a few thousand years ago. But this study may provide the strongest evidence yet that this intermixture took place.

The UCLA research reveals much more of that story for the four modern groups of people, the Yoruba of Nigeria, the Mende of Sierra Leone, the Esan of Nigeria and the Gambian in Western Divisions of Gambia.

We dont need reference DNA from fossils of the archaic hominin to confirm that, somewhere deep in our ancestry, humans intermixed with them, Sankararaman said. We can now see that such events took place by looking at our DNA itself.

Segments of Neanderthal DNA extracted from fossils have been found in most modern populations outside of Africa. DNA has also been extracted and analyzed from the more recently discovered Denisovans, another extinct group of archaic humans, whose DNA is found in people living today in South Asia and Oceania.

Archaeological evidence shows that modern and archaic humans coexisted in Africa, and some fossils have features that suggest mixing between the two populations. However, usable DNA has not yet been extracted from archaic human fossils that have been found in that region which is why the researchers ability to draw conclusions about evolution without reference DNA information could go such a long way toward solving previously unanswered questions.

Although the researchers found evidence of the archaic populations DNA in modern humans, the findings are not clear enough to determine whether these two distinct populations intermixed just once or several times over hundreds of thousands of years.

Sankararaman and Arun Durvasula, a UCLA graduate student studying human genetics, used two new statistical methods that look for patterns in the genome that could reveal the presence of DNA from a distantly related unknown archaic population. They looked at genomic data of 405 people from the1000 Genomes Project, an international public repository of genomic data from around the world. The results of both analyses were consistent.

The research was supported by the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and the Okawa Foundation.

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Study finds genetic link to extinct relative of humans in 4 modern West African populations - UCLA Newsroom

Genetics

Philippine fruit bats may be entirely new species of their own, DNA suggests – Mongabay.com

MANILA There might be more fruit bat species in the Philippines than previously thought, according to a genetic study, underlining the possibility that each individual species might be more threatened than initially assumed.

The study on bat genetics, published October 2019 in the peer-reviewed Philippine Journal of Science, highlights two key points: at least four bat species in the country are genetically different from their counterparts elsewhere in Southeast Asia; and one fruit bat found only in the Philippines exhibits significant genetic variation across different island groups within the country.

When analyzing DNA, biologists follow a rule: the greater the degree of variation between species, the higher the possibility that the specimens come from distinct species, Luczon explains. A 2 to 3% difference is the usual benchmark to identify separate species; for bats, the threshold is 2%. What we saw are a high 6 to 7% difference in genetic distance it means that its already a very different population.

Whats the implication of this discovery? Luczon says bat species in the Philippines might be more threatened than initially classified and there might be a need for species reassessment, and if necessary, their reclassification.

Bats are notoriously difficult to study primarily because they are hard to find. They are well hidden in caves and forests, which has at times resulted in the species being grouped based on physical similarities rather than more rigorous standards. The advent of DNA barcoding technology more than a decade ago has made it easier to more precisely identify bat species. In 2019 alone, the number of new bat species grew by 35% for one of the biggest families of bats based on records by the American Society for Microbiology (ASM).

In the Philippines, there are 79 listed bat species, of which 38 are endemic and at least 12 are threatened, according to the countrys red list. Of the total bat species in the Philippines, 26 are from the Pteropodidae family known as fruit bats or flying foxes; 17 of these are endemic to the country. Eleven of the 12 threatened species are fruit bats.

Habitat loss and massive hunting as prized delicacies in some countries have driven some fruit bat species to critically endangered status. For the recent study, the researchers had since 2013 partnered with the Philippine Department of Environment and Natural Resources regional offices to collect tissue samples from 111 bats at 17 sites. But they were only able to get specimens from 19 of the Philippines 26 known fruit bat species.

Luczon attributes this to numerous factors: the researchers werent trained to handle bats, for one, and getting samples proved difficult for the critically endangered species. Its likely that the population is decreasing, Luczon says. These bats are either forest- or cave-dwelling so if their habitats are threatened, its harder to locate them and get samples.

The researchers also requested samples from the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, where an extensive collection of Philippine bats are well-preserved, all with the goal of documenting and comparing their genetic barcodes.

Once theyd gathered the samples, they compared them with known genome sequences in the public-access portals Barcode of Life Data System (BOLD) and GenBank.

That allowed them to clearly delineate four bat species in the Philippines from their counterparts elsewhere in Southeast Asia. The Philippine specimens of those species the long-tongued nectar bat (Macroglossus minimus), Geoffroys rousette (Rousettus amplexicaudatus), white-collared fruit bat (Megaerops wetmorei) and the lesser shorter-nosed fruit bat (Cynopterus brachyotis) were found to have a high 6% genetic difference from specimens of the same species in the region.

Most of the species collected in the Philippines show barcode sequences that are unique, the study says, adding that 13 of the species form distinct lineages that identify them as separate species. Only the cave nectar bat (Eonycteris spelaea) and the small flying fox (Pteropus hypomelanus) have similar genetics across the same species in the region, the study adds.

The discoveries didnt end there. The team found out the Philippine pygmy fruit bat (Haplonycteris fischeri), endemic to the country and classified as least concern by the IUCN, actually has different genetics in each island where it occurs in the Philippines. Comparing samples from the main islands of Luzon, Mindanao and Mindoro, researchers found a difference as high as 7% in pygmy fruit bat genetics, which raises the possibility that they might either be subspecies or new species altogether.

This fruit bat species is known for having a longer pregnancy than even humans: an 11-month gestation period considered the longest of any bat in the world. The new findings raise the need to reassess its conservation status and maybe even its taxonomy. From this study, these species may be flagged for taxonomic reevaluation, the study says.

The groups study on bats is part of a larger effort by the University of the Philippines Institute of Biology and its partners to create a robust database of all species from wildlife to freshwater fish to plants in the country. The program started in 2008 with the bigger goal of using the technology to curb wildlife trafficking and poaching and improving wildlife forensics. Its also seen as addressing the dwindling number of taxonomists studying native species, thanks to its accurate, rapid, and effective method of species recognition, the study says.

Luczon says the study is only a stepping stone for further research into fruit bats. While it doesnt cover the implications of the wide genetic differences in fruit bats, at the very least it opens the portal for reassessing these flying mammals, deepening existing studies on the species, and highlighting their unique genetic lineage.

There are many endangered and threatened bats in the Philippines, Luczon says. If you want to do a conservation program, you might want to create a unique conservation program to implement in each area. Blanket conservations are hard because the needs and threats for each species varies.

Citation:

Luczon, A. U., Ampo, S. A. M. M., Roo, J. G. A., Duya, M. R. M., Ong, P. S., & Fontanilla, I. K. C. (2019). DNA barcodes reveal high genetic diversity in Philippine fruit bats.Philippine Journal of Science Special Issue on Genomics,148(S1), 133-140.

Banner image ofa white-winged flying fox (Desmalopex leucopterus), a fruit bat endemic to the Philippines that is listed in CITES Appendix II. Image by Jay Fidelino

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Philippine fruit bats may be entirely new species of their own, DNA suggests - Mongabay.com

Genetics

The last woolly mammoths on Earth had disastrous DNA – Livescience.com

Dwarf woolly mammoths that lived on Siberia's Wrangel Island until about 4,000 years ago were plagued by genetic problems, carrying DNA that increased their risk of diabetes, developmental defects and low sperm count, a new study finds.

These mammoths couldn't even smell flowers, the researchers reported.

"I have never been to Wrangel Island, but I am told by people who have that in the springtime, it's just basically covered in flowers," study lead researcher Vincent Lynch, an assistant professor of biological sciences at the University at Buffalo in New York, told Live Science. "[The mammoths] probably couldn't smell any of that."

Related: Mammoth resurrection: 11 hurdles to bringing back an ice age beast

Wrangel Island is a peculiarity. The vast majority of woolly mammoths died out at the end of the last ice age, about 10,500 years ago. But because of rising sea levels, a population of woolly mammoths became trapped on Wrangel Island and continued living there until their demise about 3,700 years ago. This population was so isolated and so small that it didn't have much genetic diversity, the researchers wrote in the new study.

Without genetic diversity, harmful genetic mutations likely accumulated as these woolly mammoths inbred, and this "may have contributed to their extinction," the researchers wrote in the study.

The team made the discovery by comparing the DNA of one Wrangel Island mammoth to that of three Asian elephants and two other woolly mammoths that lived in larger populations on the mainland.

"We were lucky in that someone had already sequenced the [Wrangel mammoth's] genome," Lynch said. "So, we just went to a database and downloaded it."

After comparing the mammoths' and elephants' genomes, the researchers found several genetic mutations that were unique to the Wrangel Island population. The team had a company synthesize these tweaked genes; then, the researchers popped those genes into elephant cells in petri dishes. These experiments allowed the researchers to analyze whether the proteins expressed by the Wrangel Island mammoth's genes carried out their duties correctly, by sending the right signals, for instance, in the elephant cells.

The team tested genes involved in neurological development, male fertility, insulin signaling and sense of smell. In a nutshell, the Wrangel Island mammoths were not very healthy, the researchers found, as none of those genes carried out their tasks correctly.

That said, the study looked at only one Wrangel Island mammoth, so it's possible that this individual's comrades didn't have similar genes. But "it's probably unlikely that it was just this one individual that had these defects," Lynch said.

In fact, the case of the Wrangel Island mammoths is a cautionary tale about what can happen to a population that is too small and therefore lacks genetic diversity, he said.

The findings build on those from a study published in 2017 in the journal PLOS Genetics that found that the Wrangel Island mammoth population was accumulating damaging mutations.

The new study was published online Feb. 7 in the journal Genome Biology and Evolution.

Originally published on Live Science.

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The last woolly mammoths on Earth had disastrous DNA - Livescience.com

Genetics

Researchers find genes of mysterious human species that interbred with Africans thousands of years ago – Firstpost

ReutersFeb 17, 2020 09:52:14 IST

Scientists examining the genomes of West Africans have detected signs that a mysterious extinct human species interbred with our own species tens of thousands of years ago in Africa, the latest evidence of humankinds complicated genetic ancestry.

The study indicated that present-day West Africans trace a substantial proportion, some two percent to 19 percent, of their genetic ancestry to an extinct human species what the researchers called a ghost population.

We estimate interbreeding occurred approximately 43,000 years ago, with large intervals of uncertainty, said the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) human genetics and computer science professor Sriram Sankararaman, who led the study published this week in the journal Science Advances.

It is unclear if West Africans derived any genetic benefits from the genes of this mysterious population.

Homo sapiens first appeared a bit more than 300,000 years ago in Africa and later spread worldwide, encountering other human species in Eurasia that have since gone extinct including the Neanderthals and the lesser-known Denisovans.

Previous genetic research showed that our species interbred with both the Neanderthals and Denisovans, with modern human populations outside of Africa still carrying DNA from both. But while there is an ample fossil record of the Neanderthals and a few fossils of Denisovans, the newly identified ghost population is more enigmatic.

Asked what details are known about this population, Sankararaman said, Not much at this stage.

We dont know where this population might have lived, whether it corresponds to known fossils, and what its ultimate fate was, Sankararaman added.

Sankararaman said this extinct species seems to have diverged roughly 650,000 years ago from the evolutionary line that led to Homo sapiens, before the evolutionary split between the lineages that led to our species and to the Neanderthals.

The researchers examined genomic data from hundreds of West Africans including the Yoruba people of Nigeria and Benin and the Mende people of Sierra Leone, and then compared that with Neanderthal and Denisovan genomes. They found DNA segments in the West Africans that could best be explained by ancestral interbreeding with an unknown member of the human family tree that led to what is called genetic introgression.

It is unclear if West Africans derived any genetic benefits from this long-ago gene flow.

We are beginning to learn more about the impact of DNA from archaic hominins on human biology, Sankararaman said, using a term referring to extinct human species. We now know that bothNeanderthal and Denisovan DNA was deleterious in general but there were some genes where this DNA had an adaptive impact. For example, altitude adaptation in Tibetans was likely facilitated by a Denisovan introgressed gene.

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Researchers find genes of mysterious human species that interbred with Africans thousands of years ago - Firstpost

Physiology

How the pros handle training during their period – Canadian Running Magazine

Women have a bigger presence in sport than ever before and Dina Asher Smith, the reigning 200m world champion, is using her platform to discuss a topic that was once tabooa womans period and its possible training implications.

RELATED: The birth control pill: what runners need to know

Womens experience while training with their periods varies enormously from person to person. While some women find themselves needing to take time away from sport, others barely notice a change in their bodies. If youre someone who has struggled while training through your period, Asher-Smith has some good advice.

Kristy Sale is an exercise physiologist with a focus on female physiology. She acknowledged on Twitter last week that more research is needed in this area (something shes personally working to move forward). In the meantime, her best advice for women training through their period is to listen to their bodies and make reasonable adjustments where necessary (and also to keep in mind that everyones body is different).

Sale also gave Asher-Smith a shout out, endorsing the sprinters approach to training on her period.

RELATED: WATCH: Gwen Jorgensen on periods and competition

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How the pros handle training during their period - Canadian Running Magazine

Physiology

How do body parts grow to their right sizes? – The Week Magazine

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Living things just seem to know how big to grow and how big to grow their sundry parts. A human liver maintains itself at just the right volume to do its job. A fruit fly's wings, on opposite sides of its body, somehow wind up the same size as each other, correctly scaled to sustain flight.

In everyday life, we expect body parts to be in proportion, because they usually are. "You notice if somebody comes up in front of you and one leg is way bigger than the other," says Ben Stanger, a gastroenterologist and researcher at the University of Pennsylvania's Perelman School of Medicine, who has studied organ growth.

But as much as we take this basic aspect of life on Earth for granted, scientists don't fully understand it. How do body parts know when to start and stop growing?

In some cases, cells seem to follow an intrinsic program carried out by the activity of their genes. At other times, cells appear to react to a cacophony of messages they receive from other cells and their environment, turning growth on and off as needed.

A lot of times, they seem to do a little of both. And when they're cancer cells, the whole business has gone awry.

"We don't get it," says Stanger, author of a 2015 article in the Annual Review of Physiology that described mechanisms that control liver growth.

Starting with salamanders

Scientists have been trying to "get it" for a long time. In the 1930s, Yale zoologists Victor Twitty and Joseph Schwind conducted experiments in salamanders, cross-transplanting limb buds from a smaller species, Ambystoma punctatum, with those of a larger but closely related species, Ambystoma tigrinium. In some experiments, the researchers found that taking a limb bud from the small salamander and grafting it onto the larger salamander resulted in an animal with three large limbs and one small one (and vice versa). This suggests that "the information for size was embedded in that group of cells very early on and didn't care what was happening in the animal," Stanger says.

But Twitty and Schwind found in other experiments that nutrition an external regulator also affected limb size. "It's nature and it's nurture," Stanger says. "In biology, it's never either/or."

Developmental biologists soon discovered a variety of ways that organs and structures achieve their ultimate sizes. In one famous 1960s experiment, researcher Donald Metcalf implanted 6 or 12 fetal mouse spleens into individual adult mice whose own spleens had been removed. He found that each implanted spleen grew to a proportional fraction of the size of a normal adult spleen leaving the animal with a normal total amount of spleen material. This suggests that spleen tissue has a way of understanding how much of it there is in relation to the body, says Jamie Davies, an experimental anatomist at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. But "really annoyingly," Davies says Metcalf also found that multiple thymus grafts implanted in an adult mouse behave completely differently: Each grows to its full adult size.

Decades later, Stanger found similar growth differences in the mouse liver and pancreas: Cells that give rise to the liver use environmental cues to determine how much the developing organ should grow, while those that form the pancreas follow an "autonomous trajectory" they always achieve a preprogrammed size, no matter what is going on around them.

Pumping the brakes on growth

Scientists have sussed out a reasonable amount of detail about some of the feedback-based programs that direct growth. A protein called myostatin, for instance, helps to suppress muscle growth. When the tissues get large enough to pump out a threshold amount, muscle cells stop growing. The molecular processes that dynamically regulate liver size seem to involve tissues in the gut: When levels of bile acid fall (a sign of reduced liver function), those gut tissues produce factors that disengage a brake on liver growth known as the Hippo pathway. As a result, growth kicks into gear allowing the liver to grow to its proper size. When bile acid levels rise to normal, Hippo comes back on, and liver growth turns off again. And so on.

The Hippo pathway is a super-popular subject of study today, both because of its job in regulating organ size and because of its potential role in controlling cancers. Many questions about it remain unanswered.

Mysteries also remain for cases where instructions for size are baked in, as seen in those early experiments with salamander limbs, says Laura Johnston, a geneticist and developmental biologist at Columbia University Medical Center. Labs are delving into a number of inputs that may play a role in directing cells to grow, from information about cell fates and cell organization that are hardwired in the DNA, to mechanical forces on tissues.

Johnston's own research, some of which she and her coauthors described in a 2009 article in the Annual Review of Cell and Developmental Biology, focuses on a phenomenon known as cell competition interactions that lead to the deaths of unfit or unneeded cells. It seems to play a role in stabilizing organ size. When researchers in her lab blocked cell-death mechanisms in the cells that give rise to fruit fly wings, they found that the bell-curve-shaped distribution of wing sizes normally seen in fly populations broke down. A larger-than-usual number of flies developed overly large wings, or overly small ones. It's as if, she says, "the precision of size regulation is lost if the cells can't do these competing interactions."

There's still much to learn out about the deceptively simple, fundamental questions of how an arm matches its corresponding limb or how a liver ends up just the needed size. But the questions have practical ramifications too. Many growth studies today, including myriad explorations of the Hippo pathway, are conducted in the service of understanding and treating cancers. "Researchers are saying, 'Look cancer is development gone wrong, and it's obviously growth-connected, so we really need to understand growth on its own,'" Davies says.

Also interested in organ growth are researchers who want to engineer tissues using stem cells. "There's always the worry that if you build something that will grow up inside the body," Davies says, "will it know when to stop?"

This article originally appeared in Knowable Magazine, an independent journalistic endeavor from Annual Reviews. Sign up for the newsletter.

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How do body parts grow to their right sizes? - The Week Magazine

Cell Biology

Stem Cell Therapy Contract Manufacturing Industry, 2019-2030 – Availability of Cutting-Edge Tools & Technologies has Emerged as a Differentiating…

Dublin, Feb. 17, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The "Stem Cell Therapy Contract Manufacturing Market, 2019-2030" report has been added to ResearchAndMarkets.com's offering.

This report features an extensive study on contract service providers engaged in the development and manufacturing of stem cell therapies. The study features in-depth analyses, highlighting the capabilities of various stem cell therapy CMOs

Advances in the fields of cell biology and regenerative medicine have led to the development of a variety of stem cell-based therapies for many cardiovascular, oncological, metabolic and musculoskeletal disorders. Driven by the revenues generated from stem cell therapies, the regenerative medicine market is anticipated to generate revenues worth USD 100 billion by 2030.

With a promising pipeline of over 200 stem cell therapy candidates, it has become essential for developers to scale up the production of such therapeutic interventions. Given that stem cell therapy manufacturing requires highly regulated, state-of-the-art technologies, it is difficult for stakeholders to establish in-house expertise for large-scale manufacturing of stem cell therapies.

As a result, stem cell therapy developers have begun outsourcing their manufacturing operations to contract manufacturing organizations (CMOs). Specifically, small and mid-sized players in this sector tend to outsource a substantial proportion of clinical and commercial-scale manufacturing processes to contract service providers. In addition, even big pharma players, with established in-house capabilities, are gradually entering into long-term business relationships with CMOs in order to optimize resource utilization and manage costs.

According to a recent Nice Insight CDMO survey, about 55% of 700 respondents claimed to have collaborated with a contract service provider for clinical and commercial-scale product development requirements. Considering the prevalent trends, we believe that the stem cell therapy manufacturing market is poised to grow at a steady pace, driven by a robust pipeline of therapy candidates and technological advances aimed at mitigating challenges posed by conventional methods of production. Amidst tough competition, the availability of cutting-edge tools and technologies has emerged as a differentiating factor and is likely to grant a competitive advantage to certain CMOs over other players in the industry.

One of the key objectives of the report was to estimate the future size of the market. Based on parameters, such as increase in number of clinical studies, target patient population, anticipated adoption of stem cell therapies and expected variation in manufacturing costs, we have provided an informed estimate of the likely evolution of the market in the mid to long term, for the period 2019-2030.

Amongst other elements, the report includes:

In order to provide a detailed future outlook, our projections have been segmented on the basis of:

Key Topics Covered

1. Preface

2. Executive Summary

3. Introduction

4. Market Overview

5. Regulatory Landscape

6. Stem Cell Therapy Contract Manufacturers in North America

7. Stem Cell Therapy Contract Manufacturers in Europe and Asia-Pacific

8. Partnerships and Collaboration

9. Contract Manufacturing Opportunity Assessment

10. Capacity Analysis

11. Demand Analysis

12. Market Forecast

13. Key Performance Indicators

14. Concluding Remark

15. Executive Insights

16. Appendix 1: Tabulated Data

17. Appendix 2: List of Companies and Organizations

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Cell Biology

Cell biology storm provides a view of the choreography of life – WLNS

New findings by the National Institutes of Health show a lack of assistance for young people battling opioid addiction.

Only 1 in 3 people aged 13-22 who survived an opioid overdose received any kind of follow-up addiction treatment.

The study of over 3,600 young people also showed that less than 2 percent received one of three approved medications for opioid use disorder.

The findings reported in JAMA Pediatrics come from Rachel Alinsky, an adolescent medicine and addiction medicine fellow at Johns Hopkins Childrens Center, Baltimore.

Alinsky used data on more than 4 million mostly low-income adolescents and young adults whod been enrolled in Medicaid for at least six months in 16 states. The sample included 3,606 individuals whod been seen by a doctor and diagnosed with opioid poisoning. A little over half of them were female and most were non-Hispanic whites.

Nationally more than 4,000 fatal opioid overdoses occurred in people between the ages of 15 and 24 in 2016.

Nonfatal opioid overdoses for teens and young adults lead to more than 7,000 hospitalizations and about 28,000 emergency department visits in 2015.

Heroin accounted for about a quarter of those overdoses. The rest involved other opioids, most often prescription painkillers.

Some overdoses from heroin might have been caused by fentanyl, according to researchers. The use of fentanyl, often mixed with heroin, was on the rise in the studys final years, but it was rarely included in drug tests at the time.

Opioid addiction rewires the brain so will power alone is simply not sufficient to achieve and sustain recovery, according to the NIH. After one overdose, the risk of dying from another one rises dramatically. So, it is critical to get those who survived an overdose into effective treatment right away, according to the NIH Director.

Less than 20 percent of young people in the sample received a diagnosis of opioid use disorder. 68.9 percent did not receive addiction treatment of any kind, while 29.3 percent received behavioral health services alone and only 1.9 percent received one of three approved medications for opioid use disorder. The three approved medications are buprenorphine, naltrexone, or methadone.

Researchers suggest pediatricians might be inexperienced in diagnosing and treating opioid addiction. Adding, even when a problem is recognized, doctors sometimes struggle to take the next step of connecting young people with the proper addiction treatment facilities.

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Cell biology storm provides a view of the choreography of life - WLNS