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Fighting fat with fat The key to losing weight may lie in the amount of brown fat that is present in your body. It is actually brown in colour and burns calories rapidly—nature’s furnace that exists within each of us. It was earlier thought that brown fat was only present in rodents that could not shiver, and used the brown fat within them to burn calories and keep warm. It is also present in human infants for the same reason but it is less needed in adults as they can shiver to keep warm.
Later, it was found that it is also present in certain parts of the body in adults. A recent study by Canadian scientists led by Dr André Carpentier at the University of Sherbrooke in Quebec has shown that when the body gets cold, the brown fat present sucks away normal white fat and burns it to keep warm. On average, it was found that the brown fat burned about 250 calories over a three-hour period. It is thought that the key regulator of the conversion of white fat to brown fat is a special protein (named PRDM 16).
The researchers hope to discover safe new drugs that can regulate the production of brown fat, thereby allowing persons to burn far more calories with this “calorie-burning good brown fat”. Bruce Spiegelman, professor of cell biology and medicine at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute has reported that in mice exercise can turn ordinary white fat into brown fat.
The days are not far when you will be able to feed on chocolates and fatty foods as you will be armed with large energy-burning brown fat—fighting fat with fat.
Growing human eye tissues—from blood Therapy based on stem cells is a rapidly growing field. Previously stem cells were produced by harvesting them from embryos (a highly controversial process) or from the bone marrow of patients. However, now a special kind of stem cells (induced pluripotent stem cells) can be produced from normal cells taken from the blood or skin. These special stem cells can then be converted into heart, kidney or other types of tissue.
A major cause of blindness in adults is the onset of diseases that affect the retina (macular degeneration and retinitis pigmentosa). There are some medicines that can lead to the slowing down of the degeneration process but a complete cure is still not in sight. One answer to the problem could be to grow brand new retinal tissue. While this may appear far-fetched, scientists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in USA have now succeeded in growing human retinal tissue from stem cells.
The stem cells needed were prepared from the white blood cells taken from the blood of human patients. These were then “reprogrammed” (by using a plasmid containing the reprogramming proteins to infect the white blood cell). The result of this procedure was to produce a special kind of stem cell (induced pluripotent stem cell). This could then be coaxed into producing human retinal tissue. This opens the door for retinal tissue transplants for the future, where the damaged retinal parts could be replaced by disease-free retinal tissue produced from the blood of the same patient.
Fighting anthrax—with silk Anthrax is a disease caused by a bacterium Bacillus anthracis that normally affects goats, cows, sheep and horses. Anthrax has also been used in bioterrorism that drew a lot of international attention. It can cause ugly sores on the skin, and if ingested it can lead to internal infections that can cause death. If inhaled, it can migrate to lymph glands in the chest where it can proliferate and cause death. In the dormant form anthrax spores can form a tough outer coating that protects them from antibiotics, radiation and heat. In one case it was reported that such spores survived for 250 million years.
Scientists working at the Air Force Research Laboratory at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio, USA, have discovered a novel way to kill such resistant spores—by using a chlorinated form of common silk. They found that when silk cloth was dipped in diluted bleach and dried, the resulting fabric was highly toxic to E.coli bacteria, killing all within 10 minutes. Similar activity was observed when bacteria closely related to Anthrax were exposed to the silk. It has been proposed that chlorinated silk could be used as a defense against terrorist attacks in the form of protective clothing or protecting areas of buildings with such silk materials (ACS Appl. Mater. Interfaces, Article ASAP, DOI: 10.1021/am2018496).
