Happy Thought for 7 November 2025

 Have a Happy Thought: 

The medical progress just within my lifetime will never cease to amaze me.

The latest entry:

We may now have a blood test for ME/CFS. (That’s Myalgic Encephalomyelitis / Chronic Fatigue Syndrome). This is a syndrome (complex group of symptoms that come from a disease or other mis-working of the body) that has evaded physical testing for a really long time.

And because of that, many people who have ME/CFS have been discounted by their doctors or other medical providers. Or by family, friends, coworkers, bosses, etc.

And with the rise of Long Covid, which is theorised to be very much similar to ME/CFS, any research into this area is much needed.

Enough background, the news:

A group of scientists in England have announced a blood test that is highly sensitive (correctly picks up “positive” cases) and highly specific (correctly identifying “negative” cases). (Obviously, being good at both is best – otherwise you’re either missing a whole bunch of real cases, or you are needlessly worrying a bunch of people who are not actually impacted.)

(Quick disclaimer here: the announcement was of a proof-of-concept test, so it’s not quite going to be available at your GP. Yet.)

The really cool part of this news is that the test relies on looking at the way our DNA is folded inside of our cells!

Huh?

Ok, so we all “know” the basic structure of DNA is the double helix, right?

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Image: Structure of DNA with sugar phosphate backbone and bases, from https://www.genome.gov/genetics-glossary/Phosphate-Backbone. Author: National Human Genome Research Institute

Well, a piece of DNA that carries all of “you”, which is in every cell in your body, is actually about 2m (6.5 ft) long! So it has to fold and twist around just to fit inside of a cell (which is somewhere between 10 and 100 micrometers in diameter). “This means that each of us has enough DNA to go from here to the Sun and back more than 300 times, or around Earth's equator 2.5 million times!”

Turns out that just like protein folding, the way our DNA folds is really important!

We just don’t know all of the ways it’s important, yet.

This is where high-powered technology like machine learning is making a massive difference in our understanding. The best technology we have to image DNA still gives us “pictures” like this (we’re talking about things that are smaller than the wavelength of light here, so actual images are impossible – this is using electron micrographs):

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Image: Electron micrograph of chromatin. Scale bar = 50nm. From Olins, D. E. & Olins, A. L. Chromatin history: our view from the bridge. Nature Reviews Molecular Cell Biology.

Machine learning can take images like that above, and turn them into really useful data that we can then analyse and learn from, like this:​

 ​Image: Output of Deep Predictor of Binding Specificity (DeepPBS), a geometric deep-learning model designed to predict binding specificity from protein–DNA structure.

And it’s advances like these that are leading to us understanding more about how the human body really works – and how it breaks down – meaning we’re able to “see” markers of diseases like ME/CFS, or Alzheimer’s, in ways we never have before.

What a time to be alive!