Publications by authors named "C B Mast"
Background: Treating obesity may be a pathway to prevent and control hypertension. In the SURMOUNT-1 trial in people with obesity or overweight with weight-related complications, 72-week tirzepatide treatment led to clinically meaningful body weight and blood pressure reduction. Post hoc analyses were conducted to further explore the effects of tirzepatide on the pattern of blood pressure reduction and whether the effects were consistent across various subgroups.
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- Biopolymer building blocks are essential for the origins of life, but their formation typically requires rare feedstocks and complex purification processes.
- A new study suggests that heat flow through thin geological cracks can effectively separate over 50 prebiotically relevant compounds from complex mixtures, enhancing their concentration.
- The method significantly boosts reaction yields, as shown by the increased dimerization of glycine when trimetaphosphate is selectively purified, highlighting the potential role of geological processes in prebiotic chemistry.
Article Synopsis
- - Templated ligation is an efficient method for replicating long RNA strands using a prebiotically available activation, specifically the 2',3'-cyclic phosphate, which forms during RNA breakdown.
- - Research shows that this ligation process can occur in simple conditions (low-salt, alkaline pH, and moderate temperatures) without needing additional catalysts, leading to a 50% increase in canonical linkages compared to past studies.
- - The reaction is sequence-specific with high fidelity rates, enabling the successful creation of longer RNA strands, which may indicate how ribozymes could have assembled on early Earth.
Sequence self-selection by cyclic phase separation.
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A
October 2023
The emergence of functional oligonucleotides on early Earth required a molecular selection mechanism to screen for specific sequences with prebiotic functions. Cyclic processes such as daily temperature oscillations were ubiquitous in this environment and could trigger oligonucleotide phase separation. Here, we propose sequence selection based on phase separation cycles realized through sedimentation in a system subjected to the feeding of oligonucleotides.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWe measure the thermophoresis of polysterene beads over a wide range of temperature gradients and find a pronounced nonlinear phoretic characteristic. The transition to the nonlinear behavior is marked by a drastic slowing down of thermophoretic motion and is characterized by a Péclet number of order unity as corroborated for different particle sizes and salt concentrations. The data follow a single master curve covering the entire nonlinear regime for all system parameters upon proper rescaling of the temperature gradients with the Péclet number.
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