To explore how these tools might be used, NCI and the National Institute of General Medical Sciences convened a workshop in April called “Synthetic Biology and Biomedicine: Progress, Outlook, and Challenges.” The meeting brought leaders in the field to Bethesda, MD, to discuss everything from state-of-the-art technologies and their potential applications in cancer research to ethical questions raised by new discoveries. (See the sidebar below.)

And for good reason: it claimed that by looking at a random genome in the study, they could predict with 77% accuracy whether or not that subject lived past 100. But these amazing results have raised a few eyebrows among experts, and some significant problems have already been identified with its methods. Here’s a quick rundown of alleged flaws, as well as the authors’ rebuttals.

First off, for many in the genetics community, the effects of single variants on longevity seemed too strong. Jeffrey Barrett of the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute has pointed out in the Guardian that in most genetics studies, a single genetic variant will only sway the chances of showing a phenotype by 1.5 fold, at best. The longevity study found a number of variants with far stronger effects, increasing an individual’s chance of hitting the century mark by as much as 10 fold. Barrett suggested that independent replication of the study would likely find far weaker effects.

We expected that this complex was also a fusogen, but after determining the structure of this key protein complex, we found that it does not resemble other known fusogens," said senior author Ekaterina Heldwein, PhD, assistant professor in the molecular biology and microbiology department at Tufts University School of Medicine.

"This unexpected result leads us to believe that this protein complex is not a fusogen itself but that it regulates the fusogen. We also found that certain antibodies interfere with the ability of this protein complex to bind to the fusogen, evidence that antiviral drugs that target this interaction could prevent viral infection," Heldwein continued. Heldwein is also a member of the biochemistry and molecular microbiology program faculties at the Sackler School of Graduate Biomedical Sciences at Tufts.

The Edinburgh researchers, working with scientists in Italy and Croatia, tested whether the same analysis could be used to distinguish between people from the same country who were separated only by short distances. The team, led by Jim Wilson, studied the genes of people whose four grandparents came from the same village in Scotland, Croatia or Italy. None of the volunteers were related to each other.

Researchers found, while most super-centenarians carried all the longevity markers, centenarians had various genetic variants combinations categorized in 19 genetic profiles.

While, centenarians were not found to be free of genetic variants associated with diseases, the fact remains that they remain unaffected by diseases partly due to the longevity SNPs that negate the negative effect of disease gene variants.

The improved technique will also help to shed light on processes and organisms, which have so far been under-studied because they could not be followed under a microscope. "Non-transparent samples like the fruit fly embryo scatter light, so the microscope picks up a mixture of in-focus and out-of-focus signal– good and bad information, if you like," says Ernst Stelzer, whose group carried out the project at EMBL.

The UTSA College of Sciences, have been granted a U.S. patent for developing a process to create a vaccine for the deadly tularemia infection.

Tularemia, caused by the highly infectious bacterium Francisella tularensis, can cause serious disease in humans.

F. tularensis is carried primarily by animals such as rabbits and rarely causes human infections, but when breathed.

The researchers were surprised to find that other autoimmune diseases like rheumatoid arthritis and type 1 diabetes have already been linked to these same eight genes, so drugs already in development could be used for hair loss.This greatly accelerated our ability to think about new drugs for patients with alopecia areata because.