The 2022 Nobel Prize in chemistry was awarded to Carolyn Bertozzi of Stanford University, to Morten Meldal of the University of Copenhagen, and – for the second time – to Barry Sharpless of The Scripps Research Institute “for the development of click chemistry and bioorthogonal
chemistry.”
Click chemistry, the Nobel Committee’s Olof Ramström told reporters while announcing the prize, “is almost like it sounds – it’s all about linking different molecules.”
He likened click chemistry to a seatbelt buckle, whose interlocking parts can be attached to many different materials, linking them by snapping the two parts of the buckle together.
“The problem was to find good chemical buckles,” Ramström said – chemicals that “will easily snap together, and importantly, they won’t snap with anything else.”
The 2022 Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award has been awarded to Richard Hynes, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Erkki Ruoslahti, of the Sanford Burnham Prebys Medical Discovery Institute, and Timothy Springer, of Harvard Medical School.
The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2022 was awarded to Svante Pääbo today "for his discoveries concerning the genomes of extinct hominins and human evolution." Pääbo, who is currently the director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, and his colleagues overcame extreme technical challenges to sequence the DNA of ancient hominids – because after tens of thousands of years, there is no such thing as aging well for DNA.
The 2022 Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award has been awarded to Richard Hynes, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Erkki Ruoslahti, of the Sanford Burnham Prebys Medical Discovery Institute, and Timothy Springer, of Harvard Medical School “for discoveries concerning the integrins, key mediators of cell-matrix and cell-cell adhesion in physiology and disease.”
In a study comparing the antibody repertoire of individuals with severe myalgic encephalopathy/ chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS) to that of healthy controls, the majority of individuals with CFS showed antibody responses to specific microbiome proteins. Such responses were largely absent in healthy controls, implicating immune reactions to the microbiome in the development of ME/CFS.
Variants in a newly discovered microprotein affected the risk of Alzheimer’s disease more than any other known risk variant besides ApoE. The protein, dubbed SHMOOSE by its discoverers, was identified in a mitochondrial-wide association study (miWAS). The researchers reported their findings in the Sept. 21, 2022, issue of Molecular Psychiatry. The newly identified variant is not rare – it occurs in about a quarter of the Caucasian population, slightly more than the ApoE4 allele. Its effects are also not subtle – in their paper, the team estimated that those with the high-risk variant SHMOOSED47N were roughly 30% more likely to develop AD than those without.
Investigators at Washington State University (WSU) have identified a set of eight proteins that were expressed in the serum of Ursus arctos horribilis, better known as the grizzly bear, specifically during their hibernation period. In addition to reporting new basic insights into hibernation, the study, which was published in the Sept. 21, 2022, issue of iScience, could also give clues to insulin resistance and its relationship to body fat.
Pancreatic β cells are the only cells in the body that produce insulin, and are the cells whose malfunctioning is the proximate cause of diabetes. Consequently, repairing or replacing β cells is one of the major goals of diabetes research. In type I diabetes, where the immune system destroys β cells, need to be replaced outright. In type II diabetes, β cells “disappear” in another way. There is ample evidence that under conditions of chronic high blood sugar, such cells dedifferentiate, becoming less β cell-like over time.
As therapeutics development in Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is broadening its search for therapeutic targets, one of the alternatives to amyloid-β, or at least to its direct targeting by monoclonal antibodies, that is coming into focus is triggering receptor expressed on myeloid cells 2 (TREM2). From a drug development standpoint, amyloid-β remains a mystery. Scientific evidence clearly suggests that amyloid misprocessing is an underlying factor in the development of AD, and it is certainly a reasonable hypothesis that reducing amyloid plaque should fight the disease.
Pathogen-associated molecular patterns (PAMPs) are by themselves not enough to set off a full innate immune response to viral infection. Instead, structural changes to the actin cytoskeleton primed the activation of RIG-I-like receptors (RLRs), a family of intracellular RNA sensors that detect many types of viral RNA. When primed RLRs then encountered viral RNA, they set off an innate immune response that led to the production of interferons.
