Lipid nanoparticles, or LNPs, are best known as the delivery vehicle for the COVID-19 mRNA vaccines received by billions of people. But they are now at the center of a much larger medical revolution, as researchers race to use them to ferry therapeutic mRNA into cells for cancer therapies and treatments for inflammatory diseases, as well as delivering CRISPR constructs that can correct disease-causing gene mutations. A stubborn problem has slowed progress on all of these fronts: for LNPs to work therapeutically, they must transfer their cargo into cells by fusing with cell membranes, and they execute this crucial step far more poorly in the human body than in laboratory dishes. Now, a new study by a team of Biohub scientists has discovered a surprisingly simple fix. The researchers found that injecting three common amino acids alongside LNPs can boost mRNA delivery up to 20-fold and lift CRISPR gene editing efficiency from roughly 25 percent to nearly 90 percent in a single dose.

What started out as a response to labor shortages in poultry processing plants during the COVID-19 pandemic has turned into a robotics system that can learn by imitating human movements to handle chickens. Using an advanced imitation learning algorithm and camera perceptions, researchers with the Arkansas Agricultural Experiment Station have developed ChicGrasp, a dual-jaw robotic gripper with pinchers that can grasp a chicken carcass by the legs, lift and hang it on a shackle conveyor to be moved on for further processing. Results of the study behind the development of ChicGrasp were published in Advanced Robotics Research. All computer-aided design files, code and datasets from the project were released as open source, providing what the team describes as a reproducible benchmark for agricultural robotics and robot learning.