Summary: People with cerebral small vessel damage who also had a leaky blood-brain barrier had more tissue damage after two years than those whose blood-brain barrier was intact.
Source: AAN
As people age, changes in the tiniest blood vessels in the brain, a condition called cerebral small vessel disease, can lead to thinking and memory problems and stroke. These changes can also affect the blood-brain barrier, a layer of cells that protect the brain from toxins circulating in the blood.
Using an ordinary light microscope, MIT engineers have devised a technique for imaging biological samples with accuracy at the scale of 10 nanometers — which should enable them to image viruses and potentially even single biomolecules, the researchers say.
The new technique builds on expansion microscopy, an approach that involves embedding biological samples in a hydrogel and then expanding them before imaging them with a microscope. For the latest version of the technique, the researchers developed a new type of hydrogel that maintains a more uniform configuration, allowing for greater accuracy in imaging tiny structures.
This degree of accuracy could open the door to studying the basic molecular interactions that make life possible, says Edward Boyden, the Y. Eva Tan Professor in Neurotechnology, a professor of biological engineering and brain and cognitive sciences at MIT, and a member of MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research and Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research.
The team used artificial intelligence techniques to analyze the pH inside cells and determine if they were cancer cells.
Summary: Mimicking a muscular stress system can provide neuroprotection against aging in both the brain and retina. The signal helps prevent the buildup of misfolded protein aggregates.
Source: St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital.
How do different parts of the body communicate? Scientists at St. Jude are studying how signals sent from skeletal muscle affect the brain.
Welcome to 2021! We left 2020 with COVID-19, yet it continues into the new year; on top of it the virus produced a much more contagious asshole!!!
The evolved strain of COVID-19, known as B.1.1.7, has shown itself in the USA as well as other countries.
Two male members of the Colorado National Guard tested positive for the new strain — referred to as B.1.1.7 or VUI-202012/01 — and neither reported international travel. At least one of the two men is in his 20s.
“The individual is a male in his 20s with no history of travel. The Department is working with the CDC on this investigation,” Florida Department of Health officials announced Thursday.
The more diverse your microbiome, the healthier you are. While diet is often presented to be the deciding factor in your microbiome diversity, the story isn’t so simple. Studies show that nutrition can determine 5%-20% of your gut microbiome, which is enough to concern yourself with, but not enough to rely on as the sole determinant of your microbiome’s health.
Does your gut microbiome have an impact on your longevity? And if so, what can you to live longer? It’s complicated.
Stanford University neurobiologist Sergiu Pașca has been making brain organoids for about 10 years, and his team has learned that some of these tissue blobs can thrive in a dish for years. In the new study, they teamed up with neurogeneticist Daniel Geschwind and colleagues at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), to analyze how the blobs changed over their life spans…
…They noticed that when an organoid reached 250 to 300 days old—roughly 9 months—its gene expression shifted to more closely resemble that of cells from human brains soon after birth. The cells’ patterns of methylation—chemical tags that can affix to DNA and influence gene activity—also corresponded to increasingly mature human brain cells as the organoids aged, the team reports today in Nature Neuroscience.
Organoids develop genetic signatures of postnatal brains, possibly broadening their use as disease models.
Sleep deprivation causes an inflammatory response that results in negative health outcomes.
Summary: Study sheds light on DNA methylation related to sleep deprivation in those with shift-work disorder.
Source: University of Helsinki
Long-term sleep deprivation is detrimental to health, increasing the risk of psychiatric and somatic disorders, such as depression and cardiovascular diseases. And yet, little is known about the molecular biological mechanisms set in motion by sleep deprivation which underlie related adverse health effects.
In a recently published study, the University of Helsinki, the Finnish Institute for Health and Welfare, the Finnish Institute of Occupational Health and the Finnair airline investigated dynamic changes to DNA methylation in shift workers. DNA methylation denotes epigenetic regulation that modifies gene function and regulates gene activity without changing the sequence of bases in the DNA.
Researchers can now control the order in which CAS9 makes edits to cell DNA instead of performing all edits at once.
Researchers from the University of Illinois Chicago have discovered a new gene-editing technique that allows for the programming of sequential cuts—or edits—over time.
CRISPR is a gene-editing tool that allows scientists to change the DNA sequences in cells and sometimes add a desired sequence or genes. CRISPR uses an enzyme called Cas9 that acts like scissors to make a cut precisely at a desired location in the DNA. Once a cut is made, the ways in which cells repair the DNA break can be influenced to result in different changes or edits to the DNA sequence.
The discovery of the gene-editing capabilities of the CRISPR system was described in the early 2010s. In only a few years, scientists became enamored with the ease of guiding CRISPR to target almost any DNA sequence in a cell or to target many different sites in a cell in a single experiment.
