Simona Cristea

for anybody visiting France for >1 hour, it’s plain obvious why:
- food is fresh and real
- people walk a lot
- people enjoy life

why is that?

If you’re having a bad science day, remember that Victor Ambros was denied tenure at Harvard only one year after discovering microRNAs - for which he was ultimately awarded the Nobel Prize.

thank you!

100 🦋 followes 🎊🙏🙏

This paper looks at single cell DNA seq data from normal & cancer tissues and computes how evolution is changing within each tissue.

In most cancers and half of normal tissues, the paper rejects a constant evolutionary rate - potentially explainable by mutations in driver genes.

t.co/P3LgFWbHMG

Contrary to what was thought - that immune cells cannot infiltrate the brain - anticancer active T cells do exist in the brain, specifically inside the bone marrow in the skull.

These exact cells might be the future of immune therapies against brain cancers.

www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Dad’s microbiome can affect offspring’s health — in mice Hear the biggest stories from the world of science | 1 May 2024

there’s also a podcast about this super cool study:

www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Nature News & Views of this study:

www-nature-com.ezp-prod1.hul.harvard.edu/articles/d41...

However, it is important to keep in mind that people in different parts of the world do have different genetic make-ups. So, it might be that the difference in risk is not entirely environmentally-driven. Future studies will for sure look into this aspect specifically.

They found a mutational signature (aka a specific pattern of mutations) more common in locations associated with a higher risk of kidney cancer than in those with a lower risk. This might indicate that these higher-risk locations are associated with a higher exposure to an unknown mutagen.

In other words, how much of this risk can we potentially modulate? Also, what exactly in the environment is causing less/more risk for a cancer type?

A recent study did exactly this. The authors looked at 900 kidney tumors from different parts of the world.

What if we looked at the correlation between somatic mutation composition and tumor incidence from cancers in different parts of the world?

Then we can get an idea of what fraction of cancer incidence is driven by the exact environment we live in.

Investing in sequencing tumors from multiple parts of the world is not wasting money. In fact, it benefits everybody

Here’s why: in practice, we have no idea why/when cells in our body mutate, either healthy aging or malignant shifts

How much does the environment contribute?

i think this is one of the smaller problems of peer-review 😄

why? is it known by how much they can deviate from individual baseline?

🙋🏻‍♀️

Hi Blusesky people, any advice how to quickly change my feed to less nature/animal photos and more science content? Like how can nudge this algo so it learns what to show?

wonderfully put! it’s an unbelievable time for medical progress

congrats! my first like/comment on here 😅