Allen Integrated Cell is a powerful tool for visualizing biology in 3D – TechCrunch

What does a cell look like? If you had to draw one, you’d probably do the usual thing: a sort of fried egg with a nucleus yolk and a couple ribosomes peppered around, maybe a rough endoplasmic reticulum if you’re fancy. But cells are vastly more complicated than that, not to mention 3-dimensional. Allen Integrated Cell is a new tool that lets anyone visualize cells the way they actually exist in the body.

It’s from the Allen Institute for Cell Science, a Seattle research outfit founded by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen. The institute has been doing research in this direction for some time, but today is the first public release of the Integrated Cell program, which you can try on the web right here.

The application is focused on stem cells specifically. The 3D models aren’t just based on theory but on direct recording and observation done in-house. There are dozens of cell types and you can toggle the visibility of numerous proteins and substances that make up the cell.

In addition to observed locations of organelles and proteins, the system has learned to predict those locations by studying other similar cells, so even in cells that haven’t been searched for a given substance, its presence can be inferred by a probabilistic model.

This is important because the process used to select certain substances or organelles to fluoresce and be directly visible to microscopes isn’t good for the cells, and to tag multiple items is to risk cell death. But if the model can figure out where organelle A is based on the presence and shape of membrane B, tagging isn’t necessary.

“This is a new way to see inside living human cells. It’s like seeing the whole cell for the first time,” said the Institute’s executive director, Rick Horwitz, in a press release. “In the future, this will impact drug discovery, disease research and how we frame basic studies involving human cells.”

If you’re not a microbiologist, these will probably just look like poorly painted rocks or modern art. But to someone studying how a certain protein acts in vivo, how it responds to certain medications or hormones, what internal processes govern its distribution, this could be a powerful tool.

Cool read from TC Source Link

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Google’s new Tour Creator lets students make their own VR tours – TechCrunch

Image
Google today launched a new tool for teachers and their students called Tour Creator, which allows anyone to create their own VR tour using imagery from Google’s Street View or their own 360-degree photos. The new app is designed to work with Google Cardboard and Google’s existing VR “field trips” app Expeditions . The goal with Expeditions is to let people virtually travel the world to see far off places they may never have the chance to visit in person – like Antarctica or Machu Picchu, for example. Google says that since Expeditions’ arrival in 2015, over three million students have virtually visited places around the globe. Now, the idea is to let students and teachers themselves build their own VR experiences and stories without needing technical knowledge. Instead, using Tour Creator, anyone can build an immersive 360-degree tour from their computer. To use the service, you click to get started, give the tour a name and upload a cover photo. You can then search through Go
Read more

New malware highjacks your Windows clipboard to change crypto addresses – TechCrunch

Image
In what amounts to be an amazingly nefarious bit of malware, hackers have created an exploit that watches 2.3 million high-value crypto wallets and replaces the addresses in the Windows clipboard with an address associated with the hackers. In other words, you could paste your own wallet address – 3BYpmdzASG7S6WrpmrnzJCX3y8kduF6Kmc, for example – and the malware would subtly (or unsubtly) change it to its own private wallet. Because it happens in the clipboard most people wouldn’t notice the change between copying and pasting. Security researchers at BleepingComputer have found similar hijackers in the wild but this latest version is actively watching valuable wallets and trying grab bitcoin as they enter the accounts. Below is an example of the malware at work. The malware runs a massive, 83MB DLL file that masquerades as a Direct X service. Inside the DLL is a 2.5 million line text file full of bitcoin addresses. In the above test when cutting and pasting from an HTML page into W
Read more

Bitcoin passes $7K bringing all 100 top coins up with it – TechCrunch

Image
Bitcoin is moving up, and it’s taking 99 of its best friends along for the ride. In the last 24 hours, every one of the top 100 coins by market cap was in the green with 84 of them posting gains of over 5 percent. At the time of writing, Bitcoin was sitting at $7,310, up 14 percent in the last 7 days and up almost 10 percent in the last 24 hours. CoinMarketCap Top 100 Bitcoin itself crossed the $7,000 mark for the first time in the last month, an indication but no sure sign that it might be shaking off a summer slump that’s seen prices plunge below $6,000 on more than one occasion. Bitcoin is quickly moving back toward early June norms around $7,500 though may meet resistance at $7,750 . In March, Bitcoin dipped below the $10,000 mark and it’s been unable to mount a rally back above that level in the months since. screenshot via CoinMarketCap They may not last, but mid-July’s gains aren’t just a Bitcoin story. Out of the top 100 coins, 24 coins made double digit gains in the l
Read more