Science Stories

Prediabetes is a condition in which a person has high blood sugar, but not enough to be called Diabetic. This condition is considered a warning sign for the people. The person has a high chance of developing type 2 diabetes if he continues the same lifestyle without any medication. But it is not too late, it's possible to bring a blood sugar level back to normal. Lifestyle changes, weight loss, and medication are believed to help to bring the blood sugar level back to normal. However, its effective has always been controversial. According to American Diabetes Association’s (ADA’s) Professional Practice Committee, they say it has been shown that healthy eating and regular physical activity   have been shown (along with the medication metformin for select patients) to delay or prevent progression to diabetes. Reference:  Evidence supports prediabetes treatment. Science   26 Apr 2019:                       https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aax3548

PARP inhibitor PARP inhibitors have been used successfully as medicine for HR deficiency, a defect in cell’s DNA repair machinery usually found in most cancers. However, detection of the deficiency is very difficult because the standard genetic test used in the clinic does not reliably detect cancer-causing HR deficiency. A scientist from Harvard medical school has designed an algorithm called SigMA that can successfully read the molecular signature of the cancer-driving defect, HR deficiency. This could help identify patients who could benefit from treatment with PARP inhibitors. This is a big step towards personalized therapy for cancer. Reference: 1. Detecting the mutational signature of homologous recombination deficiency in clinical samples. 15 April 2019 https://doi.org/10.1038/s41588-019-0390-2

Antibiotic resistance has always been one of the biggest threats to humanities. Most of the bacteria are becoming resistant to antibiotics. The antibiotics that we are using are not effective against bacteria anymore. Discovery of new antibiotics is the solution to this problem, but there has been only one antibiotic discovered in the last 20 years. The scientist has found out that antibiotic-resistant bacteria use a virus in evading the immune response, a breakthrough discovery. When a virus-infected bacteria were subjected to immune response, the phagocytes digest some of the bacteria but sent signals to other immune cells to digest only the virus. Thus, the rest of the bacteria were saved from an immune attack. However since the virus is protected inside the bacteria, the immune cells could not recognize them and were safe from the immune response. This is how Virus and Bacteria coexist together helping each other in survival. References: 1. Bacteriophage trigger antivir

Researchers from the USA in collaboration with some German scientists have developed stem cells that can evade immune attack of the host. They used CRISPR-Cas9 technology to develop the cells. MHC complex defines whether the cells are your own or foreign. During organ transplantation, MHC of the donor and the recipient should be matched. If there is a mismatch between the two individuals in their MHC, the immune cells of the recipient considers the transplanted organ as foreign and will be destroyed by immune cells. No two individuals have identical MHC complexes. Normally foreign cells are attacked by immune cells. This is the main reason for the difficulty in transplantation. Using CRISPR, the researcher has deleted the genes that code for MHC complex and as a result, there is no more MHC in the cells. Since there is no more MHC, they are not recognized as foreign and are accepted as their own. One problem is that those cells that have no MHC are the target of another cell