Khartoum.

Talent on loan from God.

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1. A tool that functions like a Google for DNA has demonstrated its promise for making all of the world’s biological sequence data cheaply and easily searchable, according to the Swiss team that developed it. In a proof of principle study, the researchers say they successfully indexed 10% of the world’s known DNA, RNA, and protein sequences—and the same method could be used to do the rest. The advance, posted last month on bioRxiv, used a computational tool the group recently developed called MetaGraph to organize and compress publicly available sequence data into a searchable format—much as internet search engines do for web pages and their content. The resulting indexes, available for download and via a web portal, allow users to scan sequences comprising trillions of base pairs and billions of amino acids. (Source: science.org, italics mine)

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2. Researchers have discovered a major driver of inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) and several other immune disorders that affect the spine, liver and arteries, raising hopes for millions of people worldwide. The breakthrough is particularly exciting because the newly found biological pathway can be targeted by drugs that are already used, with work under way to adapt them to patients with IBD and other conditions. “What we have found is one of the very central pathways that goes wrong when people get inflammatory bowel disease and this has been something of a holy grail,” said Dr James Lee, the group leader of the genetic mechanisms of disease laboratory at the Francis Crick Institute in London. Lee added: “Even for pure, fundamental immunology this is a really exciting discovery. But to show this is dysregulated in people who get disease not only gives us a better understanding of the disease, it tells us this is something we can treat.” (Sources: theguardian.com, crick.ac.uk)

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3. Growing investment income and household wealth have joined near-full employment and rising wages to keep millions of Americans spending their way through price hikes. The economy’s charge through higher interest rates is putting unprecedented sums into consumers’ pockets, pushing U.S. asset values to records and helping many high earners avoid the withering effects of inflation. Americans in the first quarter earned about $3.7 trillion from interest and dividends at a seasonally adjusted annual rate, according to the Commerce Department, up roughly $770 billion from four years earlier. In the last quarter of 2023, wealth held in stocks, real estate and other assets such as pensions reached the highest level ever observed by the Federal Reserve. (Source: wsj.com, italics/bold mine)