Sea anemones could be the key to treating hearing loss

Sea anemones could soon do a lot to help those of us living above the water. Researchers have discovered that proteins used by starlet sea anemones to repair their cells also repair the sound-sensing cells in mice and other mammals. If you bathe cells in those proteins for long enough (the team tried for an hour), they rapidly restore molecular links that bundle hearing-related hair cells together. In theory, you could reverse hearing damage among cells that haven’t been permanently lost — that exceptionally loud concert might not permanently limit your listening enjoyment.

 

Read at Journal of Experimental Biology

Science Weekly podcast: the synthetic biology revolution

With this month’s news of a breakthrough in synthetic biology –extending the genetic code – we repeat a special edition of Science Weekly from July 2013, our report from the sixth international meeting on the subject at Imperial College London. Alok Jha met leading researchers to discuss the extraordinary promise and potential problems of this new field of biology.

Alok spoke to Prof Paul Freemont and Professor Richard Kitney, co-directors of the EPSRC Centre for Synthetic Biology and Innovation at Imperial, as they explained why synthetic biology has become so important for industry in such a short time.

 

The Guardian