Monthly Archives: May 2021

DNA PLC STOCK EXCHANGE RELEASE 11 MAY 2021 10:00 am (EEST)

Tommy Olenius, CTO at DNA Plc, and a member of the DNA Executive Team, has decided to leave the company by the end of 2021. Until that, Olenius will continue in his position and as a member of the Executive Team.

The search for a new CTO begins immediately.

Tommy has a long career of almost 20 years in DNA, and during that time he has played a key role in building of 3G, 4G and 5G networks. Tommy leaves us with high-end mobile network that our customers can enjoy every day. I thank Tommy warmly for his contribution and I wish him success in all his future endeavours," saysJukka Leinonen, DNA's CEO.

Further information:Jukka Leinonen, CEO, DNA Plc, tel. +358 44 044 1000,jukka.leinonen@dna.fiDNA Corporate Communications, tel. +358 44 044 8000,communications@dna.fi

DNA is one of the leading telecommunications companies in Finland. We want to make our customers' daily lives less complicated. We offer connections, services and devices for homes and workplaces, contributing to the digitalisation of society. DNA's customers are continuously among the world mobile data usage leaders. DNA has about 3.6 million subscriptions in its fixed and mobile communications networks. The company has been awarded numerous times as an excellent employer and family-friendly workplace. In 2020, our total revenue was EUR 934 million and we employ about 1,600 people around Finland. DNA is a part of Telenor Group, a leading telecommunications company across the Nordics. More information: http://www.dna.fi, Twitter @DNA_fi, Facebook @DNA.fi and LinkedIn @DNA-Oyj.

Due to delisting of DNAs share from Nasdaq Helsinki on 3 February 2020, DNA is not subject to reporting obligations as an issuer of shares as set out in the Finnish Securities Markets Act. DNA is still subject to reporting obligations as an issuer of senior unsecured fixed rate notes due in 2025 (ISIN: FI4000312095) listed in Nasdaq Helsinki stock exchange.

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DNA Plc: Change in the DNA Executive Team - GlobeNewswire

Doctors know that we need smarter medicines to target the bad guys only. One hope is that tiny robots on the scale of a billionth of a metre can come to the rescue, delivering drugs directly to rogue cancer cells. To make these nanorobots, researchers in Europe are turning to the basic building blocks of life DNA.

Today robots come in all shapes and sizes. One of the strongest industrial robots can lift cars weighing over two tons. But materials such as silicon are not so suitable at the smallest scales.

While you can make really small patterns in solid silicon, you cant really make it into mechanical devices below 100 nanometres, says Professor Kurt Gothelf, chemist and DNA nanotechnologist at Aarhus University in Denmark. Thats where DNA comes in. The diameter of the DNA helix is only two nanometres, says Prof. Gothelf. A red blood cell is about 6,000 nanometres across.

Lego

Dr Tania Patio, a nanotechnologist at the University of Rome in Italy, says DNA is like Lego. You have these tiny building blocks and you can put them together to create any shape you want, she explained. To continue the analogy, DNA comes in four different coloured blocks and two of the colours pair up opposite one another. This makes them predictable.

Once you string a line of DNA blocks together, another line will pair up opposite. Scientists have learnt how to string DNA together in such a way that they introduce splits and bends. By clever design, you branch out DNA strands so that you now have three dimensions, said Prof Gothelf. It is very easy to predict how it folds.

Dr Patio is developing self-propelled DNA nanorobotics in her project, DNA-Bots. DNA is highly tuneable, she said. We can have software that shows us which sequences produce which shape. This is not possible with other materials at this tiny scale.

While DNA nanorobots are a long way from being used in people, with Prof. Gothelf saying that we wont see any medicines based on this in the next ten years, progress is being made in the lab. Already scientists can obtain a string of DNA from a virus, and then design using software shorter stretches of DNA to pair with and bend the string into a desired shape. This amazing technique is called DNA origami, said Prof. Gothelf. It allows scientists to create 3D bots made from DNA.

In an early breakthrough, Prof. Gothelfs research lab made a DNA box with a lid that opened. Later, another group built a barrel-shaped robot that could open when it recognised cancer proteins, and release antibody fragments. This strategy is being pursued so that one day a DNA robot might approach a tumour, bind to it and release its killer cargo.

With nanorobots we could have more specific delivery to a tumour, said Dr Patio. We dont want our drugs to be delivered to the whole body. She is in the lab of Professor Francesco Ricci, which works on DNA devices for the detection of antibodies and delivery of drugs.

Meanwhile, the network Prof. Gothelf heads up, DNA-Robotics, is training young scientists to make parts for DNA robotics that can perform certain actions. Prof. Gothelf is working on a bolt and cable that resembles a handbrake on a bike, where force in one place makes a change in another part of the DNA robot. A critical idea in the network is to plug and play, meaning that any parts built will be compatible in a future robot.

This has the potential to make a completely new generation of drugs.

Prof. Kurt Gothelf, Aarhus University, Denmark

Bloodstream

As well as carrying out specific functions, most robots can move. DNA robots are too miniscule to swim against our bloodstream, but it is still possible to engineer into them useful little engines using enzymes.

Dr Patio previously developed a DNA nanoswitch that could sense the acidity of its environment. Her DNA device also worked as a self-propelling micromotor thanks to an enzyme that reacted with common urease molecules found in our bodies and acted as a power source. The chemical reaction can produce sufficient energy to generate movement, said Dr Patio.

Movement is important to get nanorobots to where they need to be. We could inject these robots in the bladder and they harvest the chemical energy using urease and move, said Dr Patio. In future such movement will help them to treat a tumour or a disease site with more efficiency that passive nanoparticles, which cannot move. Recently, Patio and others reported that nanoparticles fitted with nanomotors spread out more evenly than immobile particles when injected into the bladder of mice.

Rather than swim through blood, nanobots might be able to pass through barriers in our body. Most problems delivering drugs are due to these biological barriers, such as mucosal layers, notes Dr Patio. The barriers are there to impede germs, but often block drugs. Dr Patios self-propelled DNA robots might change these barriers permeability or simply motor on through them.

Stability

Nanoparticles can be expelled from a patients bladder, but this option isnt as easy elsewhere in the body, where biodegradable robots that self-destruct might be necessary. DNA is an ideal material, as it is easily broken down inside of us. But this can also be a downside, as the body might quickly chew up a DNA bot before it gets the job done. Scientists are working on coating or camouflaging DNA and strengthening chemical bonds to boost stability.

One other potential downside is that naked pieces of DNA can be viewed by the immune system as signs of bacterial or viral foes. This may trigger an inflammatory reaction. As yet, no DNA nanobot has ever been injected into a person. Nonetheless, Prof. Gothelf is confident that scientists can get around these problems.

Indeed, stability and immune reaction were obstacles that the developers of mRNA vaccines - which deliver genetic instructions into the body inside a nanoparticle - had to get over. The Moderna and the Pfizer (BioNTech) vaccines (for Covid-19) have a modified oligonucleotide strand that is formulated in a nano-vesicle, so it is close to being a small nanorobot, said Prof. Gothelf. He foresees a future where DNA nanorobots deliver drugs to exactly where needed. For example, a drug could be attached to a DNA robot with a special linker that gets cut by an enzyme that is only found inside certain cells, thus ensuring that drug is set free at a precise location.

But DNA robotics is not just for nanomedicine. Prof. Gothelf is mixing organic chemistry with DNA nanobots to transmit light along a wire that is just one molecule in width. This could further miniaturise electronics. DNA bots could assist manufacturing at the smallest scales, because they can place molecules at mind bogglingly tiny but precise distances from one another.

For now though, DNA robotics for medicine is what most scientists dream about. You could make structures that are much more intelligent and much more specific than what is possible today, said Prof. Gothelf. This has the potential to make a completely new generation of drugs.

The research in this article was funded by the EU. If you liked this article, please consider sharing it on social media.

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Foldable, organic and easily broken down: Why DNA is the material of choice for nanorobots - Horizon

The Research Brief is a short take about interesting academic work.

We and our colleagues have developed a way to store data using pegs and pegboards made out of DNA and retrieving the data with a microscope a molecular version of the Lite-Brite toy. Our prototype stores information in patterns using DNA strands spaced about 10 nanometers apart. Ten nanometers is more than a thousand times smaller than the diameter of a human hair and about 100 times smaller than the diameter of a bacterium.

We tested our digital nucleic acid memory (dNAM) by storing the statement Data is in our DNA!n. We described the research in a paper published in the journal Nature Communications on April 22, 2021.

Previous methods for retrieving data in DNA require the DNA to be sequenced. Sequencing is the process of reading the genetic code of strands of DNA. Though it is a powerful tool in medicine and biology, it wasnt designed with DNA memory in mind.

Our approach uses a microscope to read the data optically. Because the DNA pegs are positioned closer than half the wavelength of visible light, we used super-resolution microscopy, which circumvents the diffraction limit of light. This provides a way to read the encoded data without sequencing the DNA.

The patterns of DNA strands the pegs light up when fluorescently labeled DNA bind to them. Because the fluorescent strands are short, they rapidly bind and unbind. This causes them to blink, making it easier to separate one peg from another and read the stored information. We use the fluorescent patterns of each pegboard as a code to store chunks of data.

The microscope can image hundreds of thousands of the DNA pegs in a single recording, and our error-correction algorithms ensure we recover all of the data. After accounting for the bits used by the algorithms, our prototype was able to read data at a density of 330 gigabits per square centimeter.

Youre not likely to have a DNA storage device in your phone or computer, at least anytime soon. DNA data storage is promising for archival storage storing large amounts of information for long periods of time. DNA can store a lot of information in a small space. It would be possible to store every tweet, email, photo, song, movie and book ever created in a volume equivalent to a jewelry box. And data stored in DNA could last for centuries, given that the biomolecule has a half-life of over 500 years.

Researchers have been developing methods of storing data in DNA for several decades. Those methods involve the design and synthesis of unique strings of information made from the DNA nucleotides adenine (A), thymine (T), cytosine (C) and guanine (G). This information is recovered by reading the strings using sequencing technology.

From here, our goal is to increase the amount of data that we can store in dNAM, decrease the amount of time it takes to write and read the data, and use the technique to encrypt data.

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DNA 'Lite-Brite' is a promising way to archive data for decades or longer - The Conversation US

The United States of America, land of the free, is home to 5 percent of the world's population but 25 percent of its prisoners. The cost of having so many people in the penal system adds up to $80 billion per year, more than three times the budget for NASA. This massive system exploded in size relatively recently, with the prison population increasing by six-fold in the last four decades.

Ten percent of these prisoners are kept in private prisons, which are owned and operated for the sake of profit by contractors. In theory, these operations cost less than public prisons and jails, and states can save money by contracting them to incarcerate people. They have a long history in the United States and are used in many other countries as well.

However, despite the pervasiveness of private contractors in the American prison system, there is not much research into how well they live up to their promise to provide similar services at a lower cost to the state. The little research that is available often encounters difficulties in trying to compare the costs and benefits of facilities with vastly different operations and occasionally produces results suggesting there are few benefits to privatization.

A new study by Dr. Anita Mukherjee and published in the American Economic Journal: Economic Policy joins the debate with a robust consideration of the costs and benefits of private prisons. Its findings suggest that some private prisons keep people incarcerated longer and save less money than advertised.

The study focuses on prisons in Mississippi. Despite its comparatively high rate of incarceration, Mississippi's prison system is very similar to that of other states that also use private prisons. Demographically, its system is representative of the rest of the U.S. prison system, and its inmates are sentenced for similar amounts of time.

The state attempts to get the most out of its privatization efforts, as a 1994 law requires all contracts for private prisons in Mississippi to provide at least a 10 percent cost savings over public prisons while providing similar services. As a result, the state seeks to maximize its savings by sending prisoners to private institutions first if space if available.

While public and private prisons in Mississippi are quite similar, there are a few differences that allow for the possibility of cost savings by private operators not the least of which is that the guards are paid 30 percent less and have fewer benefits than their publicly employed counterparts.

The graph depicts the likelihood of release for public (dotted line) vs. private (solid line) prison inmates. At every level of time served, public prisoners were more likely to be released than private prisoners.Dr. Anita Mukherjee

The study relied on administrative records of the Mississippi prison system between 1996 and 2013. The data included information on prisoner demographics, the crimes committed, sentence lengths, time served, infractions while incarcerated, and prisoner relocation while in the system, including between public and private jails. For this study, the sample examined was limited to those serving between one and six years and those who served at least a quarter of their sentence. This created a primary sample of 26,563 bookings.

Analysis revealed that prisoners in private prisons were behind bars for four to seven percent longer than those in public prisons, which translates to roughly 85 to 90 extra days per prisoner. This is, in part, because those in private prison serve a greater portion of their sentences (73 percent) than those in public institutions (70 percent).

This in turn might be due to the much higher infraction rate in private prisons compared to public ones. While only 18 percent of prisoners in a public prison commit an infraction, such as disobeying a guard or possessing contraband, the number jumps to 46 percent in a private prison. Infractions can reduce the probability of early release or cause time to be added to a sentence.

It's unclear why there are so many more infractions in private prisons. Dr. Mukherjee suggests it could be the result of "harsher prison conditions in private prisons," better monitoring techniques, incentives to report more of them to the state before contract renewals, or even a lackadaisical attitude on the part of public prison employees.

The extra time served eats 48 percent of the cost savings of keeping prisoners in a private facility. For example, it costs about $135,000 to house a prisoner in a private prison for three years and $150,000 in the public system. But longer stays in private prisons reduce the savings from $15,000 to only $7,800.

As Dr. Mukherjee remarks, this cost is also just the finance. Some things are a little harder to measure:

"There are, of course, other costs that are difficult to quantify e.g., the cost of injustice to society (if private prison inmates systematically serve more time), the inmate's individual value of freedom, and impacts of the additional incarceration on future employment. Abrams and Rohlfs (2011) estimates a prisoner's value of freedom for 90 days at about $1,100 using experimental variation in bail setting. Mueller-Smith (2017) estimates that 90 days of marginal incarceration costs about $15,000 in reduced wages and increased reliance on welfare. If these social costs were to exceed $7,800 in the example stated, private prisons would no longer offer a bargain in terms of welfare-adjusted cost savings."

It is possible that the extra time in jail provides benefits that counter these costs, such as a reduced recidivism rate, but this proved difficult to determine. Though it was not statistically significant, there was some evidence that the added time actually increased the rate of recidivism. If that's true, then private prisons could be counterproductive.

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Want to live 100+ years? You may need unusually good DNA repair - Big Think

Shawn H. Lin 22

Shawn H. Lin 22 is the recipient of a 2021 poster award from the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biologys 25th Annual Undergraduate Poster Competition. Lins poster took the prize in Category 3: DNA, Chromosomes and Gene Regulation.

This is the second poster award Lin has won this year. In March, he was honored with the Biophysical Societys Undergraduate Poster Award for his work titled Elucidation of Interactions Between Integration Host Factor and a DNA Four-Way Junction.

Lin is a Freeman Asian Scholar from Taiwan and is majoring in Molecular Biology and Biochemistry (MB&B). Lin also works in the labs of his advisors, Ishita Mukerji, Fisk Professor of Natural Science and professor of molecular biology and biochemistry,and Candice Etson, assistant professor of physics.

Lin, along with four other students, has recently been inducted into the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology Honor Society.

Tags:biochemistry Class of 2022 student achievements

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Lin '22 Wins Poster Award for Work on DNA, Chromosomes, and Gene Regulation - Wesleyan Connection

Researchers have shown that topoisomerase TOP2A eliminates negative supercoiling, causing an increase in the number of turns of DNA strands and impacting gene expression.

Researchers have shown that the supercoiling characteristic of DNAs structure controls gene expression, rather than being a collateral damage to be solved as had been thought to date. The study was conducted at the Spanish National Cancer Research Centre (CNIO), in collaboration with other researchers.

According to the researchers, the two metres of (stretched) DNA contained in human cells are continuously twisting and untwisting to give access to genetic information. When a gene is expressed to generate a protein, the two strands of DNA are separated to give access to all the machinery necessary for this expression, resulting in an excessive accumulation of coiling that needs to be resolved later.

These results are a first step towards understanding supercoiling as an important regulator of the genome and not only as a problem associated with the metabolism of DNA, said lead researcher Felipe Corts.

The team say that this regulation occurs mainly on specific genes, namely those that are induced very quickly hundreds of times in only a few minutes such as the genes that respond to stress, cell proliferation signals, hormones or those involved in neuronal stimulation.

Topoisomerases are proteins that act on DNA, relaxing this topological stress by eliminating both an excess (positive supercoiling) and a defect (negative supercoiling) in the number of turns of the double helix compared to its normal relaxed structure.

The researchers demonstrated in this study that topoisomerase TOP2A eliminates negative supercoiling at gene promoters, thereby causing an increase in the number of turns of DNA strands in these regions. This hinders the opening of the double helix, preventing the RNA polymerase from advancing and leaving it ready to quickly trigger gene activation when required by the cell.

Topoisomerases are considered gene activation facilitators, although here we demonstrate that topoisomerase TOP2A acts in the promoter regions of genes such as c-FOS [cell proliferation regulator] to keep them repressed, but creating a particular topological context that allows them to be activated quickly in order to provide an immediate response to stimuli, said Corts.

The researchers also suggest the possibility of other functions of DNA supercoiling, such as facilitating a three-dimensional (3D) conformation of the genome favouring interactions between regulatory elements for gene expression.

This new form of genomic regulation through supercoiling highlights its potential involvement in processes that are fundamental to cell function and that require profound changes in gene expression programmes, such as cell differentiation or reprogramming, as well as in tumour transformation and progression.

The paper also opens up the possibility of using topoisomerase inhibitors to modulate these processes and cellular responses and perhaps even as possible antitumour therapies, concluded Corts.

The results are published in Cell Reports.

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Structure of DNA actively involved in genome regulation, study shows - Drug Target Review