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Category: neuroscience

Stress restructures the brain by halting the production of crucial ion channel proteins, according to research in mice recently published in JNeurosci.

Stress harms the brain and body in profound ways. One way is by altering astrocytes, the brain’s housekeepers tasked with mopping up neurotransmitters after they’ve been released into the synapse. On the cellular level, stress causes the branches of astrocytes to retract from the synapses they wrap around.

Bender et al. investigated what controlled astrocyte changes after mice experienced exposure to the urine of a fox, their natural predator. This single stressful event caused quick but long-lasting retraction of the astrocyte’s branches. Stress induces this change by halting the production of GluA1, an essential subunit of glutamate receptors. During a stressful event, the stress hormone norepinephrine suppresses a molecular pathway that normally culminates in the protein synthesis of GluA1. Without functional GluA1 or glutamate receptors, neurons and astrocytes lose their ability to communicate with each other.

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Scientists have taken a step forward in their ability to decode what a person is saying just by looking at their brainwaves when they speak.

They trained algorithms to transfer the brain patterns into sentences in real-time and with word error rates as low as 3%.

Previously, these so-called “brain-machine interfaces” have had limited success in decoding neural activity.

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“We are not there yet but we think this could be the basis of a speech prosthesis,” said Dr Joseph Makin, co-author of the research from the University of California, San Francisco.

Writing in the journal Nature Neuroscience, Makin and colleagues reveal how they developed their system by recruiting four participants who had electrode arrays implanted in their brain to monitor epileptic seizures.

These participants were asked to read aloud from 50 set sentences multiple times, including “Tina Turner is a pop singer”, and “Those thieves stole 30 jewels”. The team tracked their neural activity while they were speaking.

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Because of the coronavirus pandemic, most schools and universities around the world have had to close. Institutions have turned to services such as Zoom and Google Classroom, which have skyrocketed to being the most popular ones on the Play Store. Google’s service has become so famous that it just passed 50 million downloads.

AppBrain’s data shows the app was not even in the top 100 most popular at the beginning of the month but has rapidly spiked starting March 10 to reach the top 5 most popular ones in the US last week. In fact, the app is also being downloaded massively all around the world, as it’s amongst the most installed ones in Indonesia, Mexico, Canada, Finland, Italy, and Poland as well.

In times like this, it’s heartwarming to see there are free platforms readily available for teachers and students to keep learning and stay in touch, helping them continue to learn despite being on lockdown.

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His work transformed the mind-set of scientists, launching a new field in the science of aging when he demonstrated that identifying and manipulating genes could lengthen life span.

Although Johnson’s research has led to drug development to slow the effects of age-related diseases, he has yet to find the secret to stop aging. Now the soft-spoken redheaded scientist is running out of time as he confronts his own mortality.

In 1987, scientist Tom Johnson’s team identified the first gene that affects aging. Today, he still works in his lab as he deals with incurable Lewy body dementia.

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Though many negative repercussions of human immunodeficiency virus infection can be mitigated with the use of antiretroviral therapy (ART), one area where medical advances haven’t made as much progress is in the reduction of cognitive impacts. Half of HIV patients have HIV-associated neurocognitive disorders (HAND), which can manifest in a variety of ways, from forgetfulness and confusion to behavior changes and motor deficiencies.

To better understand the mechanisms underlying HAND, researchers from Penn’s School of Dental Medicine and Perelman School of Medicine and from the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) brought together their complementary expertise to create a laboratory model system using three of the types of brain cells thought to be involved. Led by doctoral student Sean Ryan, who was co-mentored by Kelly Jordan-Sciutto of Penn Dental Medicine and Stewart Anderson of CHOP and Penn Medicine, the model recapitulates important features of how HIV infection and ART affect the brain.

“Frankly the models we generally use in the HIV field have a lot of weaknesses,” says Jordan-Sciutto, co-corresponding author on the paper, which appears in the journal Stem Cell Reports. “The power of this system is it allows us to look at the interaction between different cell types of human origin in a way that is more relevant to patients than other models.”

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For the first time, scientists have reprogrammed cells from a 114-year-old woman into induced pluripotent stem cells (iPS cells), a move which they describe as a significant step toward understanding “the underlying mechanisms of extreme longevity and disease resistance.”

iPS cells are adult cells that have been genetically reprogrammed into an embryonic stem cell-like state and are able to give rise to any of the specialized cell types of the body, whether it’s neurons, blood cells, or heart cells.

Until this new project, researchers weren’t even certain whether they could create viable iPS cells from someone so elderly, let alone a supercentenarian. Now they have shown it’s possible to effectively make these aged cells resemble young pluripotent cells, the researchers believe they might have made a step towards the reversal of cellular aging.

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