GoKawiilEvidence is building that red light can help conditions from hair loss to mouth ulcers. Plus, ‘zombie’ bacterial cells revived with a genome transplant and how the war in Iran is reshaping the energy landscape.
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These Mycoplasma capricolum bacterial cells have absorbed a genome engineered from a closely related bacterium, Mycoplasma mycoides.Credit: Thomas Deerinck, NCMIR/Science Photo Library
Researchers have resurrected ‘dead’ bacterial cells by replacing their defunct DNA with the working genome of another species. The functionally dead Mycoplasma capricolum received engineered genomes from the closely-related Mycoplasma mycoides. If researchers can routinely make zombies from more diverse bacteria, the technique could open the door to re-engineered microbial life imbued with useful properties, such as the ability to make drugs or biofuels. For instance, it could help transform a laboratory staple, such as Escherichia coli, into “a general-purpose platform for synthetic biology”, suggests synthetic biologist Olivier Borkowski.
Nature | 5 min read
Reference: bioRxiv preprint (not peer reviewed)
After 20 years and more than 30,000 cloning attempts, researchers have found the limit on the number of times that a single mouse can be serially re-cloned — their attempts failed after 58 generations. The cloned mice looked normal and lived as long as normal mice, but accumulated mutations at an unusually high rate, which could be why attempts to clone them were eventually unsuccessful, the team says. The findings suggest that asexual reproduction is ultimately unsustainable for mice, and potentially for other mammals, too.
Nature | 5 min read
Reference: Nature Communications paper
A major artificial-intelligence conference has rejected 497 papers whose authors used AI in their peer reviews of other articles submitted to the meeting. Organizers of the International Conference on Machine Learning hid watermarks in the research papers they distributed for review that would prompt large language models (LLMs) to include telltale phrases in review text. If an author was found to have used an LLM in their review, the paper they submitted was rejected. The organizers hope to “remind the community that as our field changes rapidly, the thing we must protect most actively is our trust in each other,” they said in a blog post.
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