A Sip of Medicine with Every Glass: Engineering Milk Cells to Deliver Drugs
Scientists are engineering goat milk to deliver vaccines and medicines. Research in this technique appears promising, but there are ethical and financial challenges.
Learning Language and The Zebra Finch Factor
Scientists have increased their understanding of early childhood language development by studying the behavior and brain activity of zebra finches.
Looking at Armadillos for a Cure to Blindness
Normally when studying disorders that cause blindness in humans, scientists genetically disable cone-related genes in small animals like mice. Studying nine-banded armadillos would give scientists a much more realistic model to test viable treatment options, such as gene therapy, a method of correcting a genetic disease by replacing defective genes with corrected copies. If gene therapy were able to correct the nine-banded armadillo’s cone-related mutations, it could be adapted to correct forms of human blindness.
Ferreting Out Treatments for SARS
The study of ferrets has been instrumental in the efforts of researchers to uncover viable treatment options for SARS. Due to the similarity of the lung physiology of ferrets and humans, researchers have been using the ferret model for research into the influenza virus. In recent years, scientists have discovered that ferrets are able to contract SARS. The disease is able to replicate efficiently in the respiratory tracts of ferrets just as it does in that of humans.
Listen up! Fruit Flies Key to Hearing Loss Research
Noise-Induced Hearing Loss is largely responsible for irreversible hearing damage. NIHL can be caused by a one-time exposure to a loud sound or continued exposure to high-decibel noises. Researchers at the University of Iowa are now turning to the common fruit fly to study and combat NIHL in humans. The fruit fly is the ideal animal model because the molecular structure of its ear is more similar to humans than that of rats or guinea pigs, meaning tests on fruit flies yield more accurate results.
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