bioinformatics

A team in the United States has developed an open-source tool that enables the analysis of health data related to the menstrual cycle. So far, after analyzing 5,674 non-reproductive cycles recorded by 753 participants, they have found correlations between cycle variability, basal body temperature, and aging. According to the authors, who published the results in Science Advances, the algorithm could help advance the discovery of digital biomarkers, and they note that “most attention in menstrual health focuses exclusively on the reproductive aspect and fails to leverage these non-reproductive menstrual cycles (99%) as health indicators.” 

A multidisciplinary team of researchers in the United States has implanted a paralysed person with a brain-computer interface capable of detecting and decoding finger movements. The system achieved a degree of accuracy that allowed him to play a video game. The results are published in the journal Nature Medicine.

According to a study published in Nature Medicine, deep brain stimulation of the lateral hypothalamus improves walking and promotes recovery in humans and rodents with spinal cord injuries. In humans, the authors tested this technique on two patients who relied on assistive devices and had difficulty walking; both showed improved performance in the ten-meter and six-minute walking tests. Combined with rehabilitation, the patients experienced recovery that persisted even after the deep brain stimulation was turned off.

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2024 on the one hand to David Baker for computational protein design, which makes it possible to construct proteins with functions not present in nature. On the other hand, jointly to Demis Hassabis and John M. Jumper of Google DeepMind, for the development of AlphaFold2, which allows the structure of the 200 million known proteins to be predicted at high speed. 

A clinical trial involving 60 people with upper and lower body paralysis showed that a non-invasive electrical spinal cord stimulation device - called ARCEX - helps improve hand and arm function in quadriplegic patients. The study, the results of which are published in Nature Medicine, showed that 43 of the people with paralysis experienced improved arm and hand strength and function after receiving electrical stimulation along with rehabilitation exercises.  

Meta has applied language modelling to predict the structure of a large collection of proteins. The model, called ESMFold, is being presented this week in the journal Science after being published on the bioRxiv preprint article server in December 2022. EMSFold is faster than similar models such as AlphaFold, developed by Google's DeepMind and EMBL's European Bioinformatics Institute. The sequences of more than 617 million proteins - of which more than a third are predicted with a high degree of confidence - are published in open access in the ESM Metagenomic Atlas.