Medical Bulletin 3/January/2022

Here are the top medical news for the day:

Good hydration linked to healthy aging

Most people have been adviced to drink 6 to 8 ounce glasses of water each day. That’s a reasonable goal. However, different people need different amounts of water to stay hydrated. Most healthy people can stay well hydrated by drinking water and other fluids whenever they feel thirsty. For some people, fewer than 8 glasses may be enough. Other people may need more than 8 glasses each day.

So , according to a National Institutes of Health study published in eBioMedicine, adults who stay well-hydrated appear to be healthier, develop fewer chronic conditions, such as heart and lung disease, and live longer than those who may not get sufficient fluids. 

Reference:

Good hydration linked to healthy aging; EBioMedicine; DOI:10.1016/j.ebiom.2022.104404

Duping antibodies with a decoy, researchers aim to prevent rejection of transplanted cells

Researchers at UCSF have developed a novel, potentially life-saving approach that may prevent antibodies from triggering immune rejection of engineered therapeutic and transplant cells.

The new strategy, described in the issue of Nature Biotechnology, involved using a “decoy” receptor to capture the antibodies and take them out of circulation before they could kill the therapeutic cells, that they treat as invading foreigners. The tactic may also be useful for organ transplants.

Reference:

Duping antibodies with a decoy, researchers aim to prevent rejection of transplanted cells; Nature Biotechnology

Self-assembling proteins can store cellular “memories”

Biological systems such as organs contain many different kinds of cells, all of which have distinctive functions. One way to study these functions is to image proteins, RNA, or other molecules inside the cells, which provide hints to what the cells are doing. However, most methods for doing this offer only a glimpse of a single moment in time, or don’t work well with very large populations of cells. Study appears in Nature Biotechnology.

As cells perform their everyday functions, they turn on a variety of genes and cellular pathways. MIT engineers have now coaxed cells to inscribe the history of these events in a long protein chain that can be imaged using a light microscope.

Reference:

Self-assembling proteins can store cellular “memories”; Nature Biotechnology; DOI: 10.1038/s41587-022-01586-7.