AI technologies now allow scientists to generate biomolecules unlike any seen in nature. (Illustration by Ian C. Haydon / UW IPD)
More than 90 researchers — including a Nobel laureate — have signed on to a call for the scientific community to follow a set of safety and security standards when using artificial intelligence to design synthetic proteins.
“I view this as a crucial step for the scientific community,” the institute’s director, David Baker, said in a news release. “The responsible use of AI for protein design will unlock new vaccines, medicines and sustainable materials that benefit the world. As scientists, we must ensure this happens while also minimizing the chance that our tools could ever be misused to cause harm.”
At the time, their hypothesis was based on previously published research, computer modeling and lab experiments. But now the same scientists say they’ve found a shallow lake that just might fit the requirements — and it happens to be just a few hundred miles north of their home base in Seattle.
An illustration shows how peptide molecules can slip through a cell membrane. (Image by Ian C. Haydon / UW IPD)
Researchers at the University of Washington have discovered how to create peptide molecules that can slip through membranes to enter cells — and they’ve also created a company to take advantage of the discovery for drug development.
The findings, which were published today in the journal Cell, could eventually lead to new types of oral medications for health disorders ranging from COVID-19 to cancer.
“This new ability to design membrane-permeable peptides with high structural accuracy opens the door to a new class of medicines that combine the advantages of traditional small-molecule drugs and larger protein therapeutics,” senior study author David Baker, a biochemist at the University of Washington School of Medicine, said in a news release.
Small-molecule drugs — for example, aspirin — are small enough to slip through cell membranes to do their work. Protein therapeutics — for example, monoclonal antibodies — can target more complex ailments, but the protein molecules are typically too big to wedge their way through lipid-based cell walls.
Peptide drugs are made from the same building blocks as protein, and offer many of the advantages of protein-based drugs. They can bind protein targets in the body more precisely than small-molecule drugs, promising fewer side effects.
“We know that peptides can be excellent medicines, but a big problem is that they don’t get into cells,” said study lead author Gaurav Bhardwaj, an assistant professor of medicinal chemistry at the UW School of Pharmacy. “There are a lot of great drug targets inside our cells, and if we can get in there, that space opens up.”
The newly reported experiments used a couple of molecular design techniques to create types of peptide molecules that can get into cells more easily.
Artwork shows the early primate species known as Purgatorius mckeeveri. (Andrey Atuchin Illustration via Burke Museum)
The shapes of fossilized teeth from 65.9 million-year-old, squirrel-like creatures suggest that the branch of the tree of life that gave rise to us humans and other primates flowered while dinosaurs still walked the earth. That’s the claim coming from a team of 10 researchers across the U.S., including biologists at Seattle’s Burke Museum and the University of Washington.
In a study published by Royal Society Open Science, the team lays out evidence that an ancient group of primates known as plesiadapiforms must have emerged before the mass-extinction event that killed off the dinosaurs. (Technically, modern-day birds are considered the descendants of dinosaurs, but that’s another story.)
The evidence comes from an analysis of tooth fossils that were unearthed in the Hell Creek area of northeastern Montana.
A full moon hangs over Seattle’s Lake Union on April 7, 2020. (GeekWire Photo / Kevin Lisota)
A newly published study adds to the long-debated evidence that humans are hard-wired to sleep less when the moon is full or the lights are on, probably due to the ancestral quirks of circadian rhythm.
The pattern has been documented in a variety of indigenous communities in Argentina — and at the University of Washington in Seattle, where bright lights and cloudy weather tend to dull even the full moon’s glare.
“We see a clear lunar modulation of sleep, with sleep decreasing and a later onset of sleep in the days preceding a full moon,” senior study author Horacio de la Iglesia, a UW biology professor, said in a news release. “And although the effect is more robust in communities without access to electricity, the effect is present in communities with electricity, including undergraduates at the University of Washington.”
The research was published today in the open-access journal Science Advances. It’s not the first study to report a correlation between lunar phases and sleep cycles. But it does make use of cutting-edge technology, in the form of wrist monitors, to track the sleep patterns of hundreds of experimental subjects reliably under natural conditions.
Human cell atlases are visualized here as the day and night sides of the globe. (Cognition Studio Inc. Illustration / Dani Bergey)
Two new human cell atlases have mapped the molecular machinery that builds tissue in the weeks after conception — and could eventually point the way to addressing developmental disorders.
The researchers behind the atlases say their method for single-cell analysis, detailed in a pair of studies published by the journal Science, could dramatically accelerate efforts to trace how individual cells develop from the embryo to adulthood.
“The key point is that the method scales exponentially,” said University of Washington geneticist Jay Shendure, a senior author for both studies. “When you think about the human body, there’s 37 trillion cells. To really get the kind of comprehensive atlases that we want, we want this kind of scalability.”
Study co-author Dan Doherty, a UW pediatrics professor, compared the procedure’s promise to the impact of the Hubble Space Telescope or the Human Genome Project. “Single-cell methods — it’s hard to overestimate their importance for understanding developmental biology,” he said. “They’re really giving us a picture that we’ve never seen before.”
Eastern California’s Mono Lake has no outflow, allowing salts to build up over time. The high salts in this carbonate-rich lake can grow into pillars. (Matthew Dillon Photo via Flickr / AAAS)
Where did life on Earth get its start? In a newly published study, researchers from the University of Washington argue that carbonate-rich lakes would have been the best place for life’s chemical building blocks to come together.
Chinese researcher He Jiankui discusses his lab’s effort to produce babies whose genes have been altered to protect them from future HIV infection. (The He Lab via YouTube)
Chinese researcher He Jiankui, who stirred up a global controversy last year when he said his experiment produced twin baby girls with gene-edited traits, has been sentenced to three years in prison and ordered to pay a $430,000 fine, the state-run Xinhua news agency reported today.
The organizers of the Dog Aging Project plan to use big-data tools to study canine health – and apply their findings to human health issues as well. (Dog Aging Project / UW / Texas A&M Photo)
Scientists are looking for 10,000 good dogs to take part in a 10-year effort aimed at tracking their health and identifying factors that can lengthen their lifespan.
The pets that are selected for the Dog Aging Project could come in for some scientific pampering, including genome sequencing and health assessments.
But that doesn’t mean the project’s organizers at the University of Washington, Texas A&M University and other research institutions are totally going to the dogs. The larger purpose of the campaign — and the reason it’s getting $15 million in direct funding from the National Institute on Aging at the National Institutes of Health — is to pick up new clues about the aging process in humans.
Researchers can use dogs as a model for human health studies, just as they use lab mice, said project co-director Matt Kaeberlein, a professor of pathology at the UW School of Medicine. And for this project’s purposes, pets bring an extra advantage.
“Unlike laboratory animals, they also share our environment,” he told GeekWire. “So we absolutely believe that, in that respect, pet dogs are going to be superior to laboratory models for understanding the aging process in humans, because we’re able to capture that environmental diversity.”
Kaeberlein and his colleagues have been ramping up the project for several years, but now they’re ready for prime time: The official launch comes today in Austin, Texas, at the annual meeting of the Gerontological Society of America.
Dog owners can nominate their canines as candidates for study on DogAgingProject.org. The nomination process entails setting up a secure user portal and providing health and lifestyle information about their dogs. Participants will also be asked to share their pets’ veterinary medical records.
Biomedical researcher Samantha Morris, shown here in her lab at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, is one of the newly named Allen Distinguished Investigators. ““This award is enabling us to take a big risk in our arena by generating a completely new technology, one which will be useful to the scientific community. That’s really exciting for us,” she said. (Washington University in St. Louis Photo)
The themes for this year’s Allen Distinguished Investigators focus on stem cell therapies and single-cell interactions in their native environments.
“The field of stem cell biology has the potential to change how we treat diseases by helping precision medicine, and there’s so much we still don’t understand about the interplay between cells in living tissues or organs,” Kathy Richmond, director of the Frontiers Group, said today in a news release.
“Our 2019 Allen Distinguished Investigators are pushing their fields in these two areas, through new technology development, probing pivotal interactions in the body that cause health to fail, and generating creative new stem cell models that will improve our understanding of different human diseases,” she said.
