including the heart, skeletal muscle, and brain. They are devastating diseases and there is no cure, so our findings about their transmission are very important.
and the severe problems associated with reconstructive surgery says team leader Francesca Mariani assistant professor of cell and neurobiology and principal investigator in the Eli and Edythe Broad Center for Regenerative medicine and Stem Cell Research at University
and that others influence brain development in young mice says Argonne National Laboratory microbiologist Jack Gilbert who led the study.
Lead researcher Kaye Morgan from Monash University says the imaging method allows doctors to look at soft tissue structures for example the brain airways
The new imaging method which was developed using a synchrotron x-ray source may also open up possibilities in assessing how effective treatments were for other lung heart and brain diseases.
and spread in the brain. Instead they found that when they blocked cancer cells from making galectin-1,
because glioma researchers everywhere had assumed the extra protein had more to do with the insidious ability of gliomas to invade the brain,
The tiny tendrils of tumor that extend into brain tissue from a glioma are what make them so dangerous.
The new research suggests that in the brain unique environment, galectin-1 creates an immunosuppressive effect immediately around tumor cells.
The brain cancer cells seem to have evolved the ability to express their galectin-1 genes far more than normal
#Glucose control switch links both types of diabetes Scientists have linked a mechanism in the brain that senses glucose levels in the blood
and kick starts the body insulin response to both type 1 and type 2 diabetes. ee discovered that the prolyl endopeptidase enzymeocated in a part of the hypothalamus known as the ventromedial nucleusets a series of steps
To understand the role of prolyl endopeptidase in this part of the brain the team used mice that were engineered genetically with low levels of this enzyme.
because it makes the neurons in this part of the brain sensitive to glucose. The neurons sense the increase in glucose levels
and then tell the pancreas to release insulin, which is the hormone that maintains a steady level of glucose in the blood,
the neurons were no longer sensitive to increased glucose levels and could not control the release of insulin from the pancreas,
who is also a member of the Yale Program in Integrative Cell Signaling and Neurobiology of Metabolism.
Diano says the next step in this research is to identify the targets of this enzyme by understanding how the enzyme makes the neurons sense changes in glucose levels. f we succeed in doing this
#See into living brain with lasers and nanotubes By injecting carbon nanotubes into the bloodstream, scientists can use near-infrared lasers to see blood flow in a living animal brain.
The new technique, which is almost completely noninvasive, was developed for mice, but could offer insight into human ailments, such as strokes, migraines,
Some of the most damaging brain diseases can be traced to irregular blood delivery in the brain.
or activity of the brain or even stimulate an immune response. Meanwhile noninvasive techniques such as CT SCANS or MRI visualize function best at the whole-organ level,
but can visualize individual vessels or groups of neurons. The first step of the new technique, called near infrared-IIA imaging,
Furthermore, it does not appear to have any adverse affect on innate brain functions. he NIR-IIA light can pass through intact scalp skin
and skull and penetrate millimeters into the brain, allowing us to see vasculature in an almost noninvasive way,
First, the light penetration depth needs to be increased to pass deep into the human brain. Second, injecting carbon nanotubes needs approval for clinical application;
and Parkinson diseases might elicitr be caused in part byhanges in blood flow to certain parts of the brain.
Hong says. e could also label different neuron types in the brain with bio-markers
and use this to monitor how each neuron performs. Eventually we might be able to use NIR-IIA to learn how each neuron functions inside of the brain.
Other coauthors of the study are from Stanford, Massachusetts General Hospital, and Harvard Medical school a
This same gene mutation has been associated with the formation of plaque-like lesions in the brains of people with Alzheimer disease,
especially if you look to map long axons or sparse cell populations such as stem cells or tumor cells,
and her collaborators to create a transparent whole-brain specimen. With the CLARITY method, a rodent brain is infused with a solution of lipid-dissolving detergents
and hydrogel water-based polymer gel that provides structural supporthus learingthe tissue but leaving its three-dimensional architecture intact for study.
so that it can be used to clear other organs besides the brain, and even whole organisms.
For example, the neurons of the peripheral nervous system could be mapped throughout a whole body, as could the distribution of viruses, such as HIV, in an animal model.
or fine axons you want to seeithout slicing and realigning individual sectionst frees up the time of the researcher.
They permanently bond to neurotransmitters in the brain, interfering with their ability to function and causing irreversible damage.
Clomid works by traveling to the brain, where it partially blocks estrogen receptors. This triggers the brain to send a signal to the ovaries to produce more estrogen,
which causes ovulation. Letrozole is prescribed to prevent recurrence of breast cancer in women by shutting off an enzyme that converts circulating testosterone to estrogen.
The brain sees this drop in estrogen and tells the ovaries to make more estrogen, which triggers ovulation,
#These mutant worms can t get drunk Neuroscientists have used human molecules to create mutant worms that don get drunk on alcohol. his is the first example of altering a human alcohol target to prevent intoxication in an animal,
including activity of neurons, blood vessels, the respiratory tract, and bladder. The alcohol-insensitive mutation does not disrupt these functions at all. e got pretty lucky and found a way to make the channel insensitive to alcohol without affecting its normal function,
who is corresponding author of the study published in the Journal of Neuroscience. The research has potential applications for treating people addicted to alcohol,
which has a specific target in the nervous system, the effects of alcohol on the body are complex
and have many targets across the brain. The various other aspects of alcohol addiction, such as tolerance, craving,
Researchers performed special brain scans of the visual cortex, which showed marked improvements in brain activities in patients who also improved in field size and acuity.
More research will now be conducted to learn more about the retinal function in blind people in relation to dosage and methodology.
#Fly-through brain images could unravel how we think Scientists have improved on a new imaging technology that provides spectacular fly-through views of the brain
and has been used by laboratories around the world to better understand the brain wiring. However two technological fixes could make it even more broadly adopted,
Second, the most commonly available microscopy methods were designed not to image the whole transparent brain. here have been a number of remarkable results described using CLARITY
and Li Ye and graduate student Brian Hsueh, anticipate that even more scientists will now be able to take advantage of the technique to better understand the brain at a fundamental level,
and also to probe the origins of brain diseases. CLEARING OUT THE FAT When you look at the brain
what you see is the fatty outer covering of the nerve cells within, which blocks microscopes from taking images of the intricate connections between deep brain cells.
The idea behind CLARITY was to eliminate that fatty covering while keeping the brain intact, complete with all its intricate inner wiring.
The way Deisseroth and his team eliminated the fat was to build a gel within the intact brain that held all the structures and proteins in place.
They then used an electric field to pull out the fat layer that had been dissolved in an electrically charged detergent
leaving behind all the brain structures embedded in the firm water-based gel, or hydrogel. This is called electrophoretic CLARITY.
The electric field aspect was a challenge for some labs. bout half the people who tried it got it working right away,
the team devised an alternate way of pulling out the fat from the hydrogel-embedded brain technique they call passive CLARITY.
and for some tissues, Deisseroth says. ut passive CLARITY is a crucial advance for the community, especially for neuroscience.
Many groups have begun to apply CLARITY to probe brains donated from people who had diseases like epilepsy or autism
which might have left clues in the brain to help scientists understand and eventually treat the disease.
these colorful structures become visible throughout the entire brain, since no fat remains to block the light.
But to get a high-resolution image of an entire brain, the whole tissue is bathed in light throughout the time it takes to image it point by point.
This approach bleaches out the probes before the entire brain can be imaged at high resolution.
making it easier to image the entire brain without bleaching the probes. e can now scan an entire plane at one time instead of a point,
and can now see fine wiring structures deep within an intact adult brain, Deisseroth says.
and may pose threats to brain development during gestation potentially resulting in developmental delay or autism.
because the developing fetal brain may be more vulnerable than it is in adults. Because these pesticides are neurotoxic in utero exposures during early development may distort the complex processes of structural development
##In that early developmental gestational period the brain is developing synapses the spaces between neurons where electrical impulses are turned into neurotransmitting chemicals that leap from one neuron to another to pass messages along##Â#Hertz
a group of diseases that damage the eye optic nerve and can cause blindness. Right now there are two ways to check eye pressure,
If the pressure in the eye is too high for the optic nerve to function, however, damage to the eye can begin, often with no pain or warning signs.
#These neurons order stem cells to crank out new neurons Is it possible that your brain can repair itself from within?
The discovery of a new type of neuron that tells stem cells to make new neurons opens that tantalizing possibility.
Neuroscientists have suspected for some time that the brain has some capacity to direct the manufacturing of new neurons,
explains Chay Kuo, an assistant professor of cell biology, neurobiology and pediatrics at Duke university. In a study with mice, his team found a previously unknown population of neurons within the subventricular zone (SVZ) neurogenic niche of the adult brain, adjacent to the striatum.
These neurons expressed the choline acetyltransferase (Chat) enzyme which is required to make the neurotransmitter acetylcholine.
With optogenetic tools that allowed the team to tune the firing frequency of these Chat+neurons up and down with laser light,
they were able to see clear changes in neural stem cell proliferation in the brain. The findings are detailed in an article published in the journal Nature Neuroscience.
REGIONS OF THE HUMAN BRAIN The mature Chat+neuron population is just one part of an undescribed neural circuit that apparently talks to stem cells
and tells them to increase new neuron production, Kuo says. Researchers don know all the parts of the circuit yet
nor the code it using, but by controlling Chat+neuronssignals Kuo and his colleagues have established that these neurons are necessary and sufficient to control the production of new neurons from the SVZ niche. e have been working to determine how neurogenesis is sustained in the adult brain.
It is unexpected very and exciting to uncover this hidden gateway, a neural circuit that can directly instruct the stem cells to make more immature neurons,
says Kuo. t has been this fascinating treasure hunt that appeared to deadend on multiple occasions! Kuo says this project was initiated more than five years ago when lead author Patricia Paez-Gonzalez,
a postdoctoral fellow, came across neuronal processes contacting neural stem cells while studying how the SVZ niche was assembled.
The young neurons produced by these signals were destined for the olfactory bulb in rodents, as the mouse has a large amount of its brain devoted to process the sense of smell and needs these new neurons to support learning.
But in humans, with a much less impressive olfactory bulb, Kuo says it possible new neurons are produced for other brain regions.
One such region may be the striatum which mediates motor and cognitive controls between the cortex
and the complex basal ganglia. he brain gives up prime real estate around the lateral ventricles for the SVZ niche housing these stem cells,
Kuo says. s it some kind of factory taking orders? Postdoctoral fellow Brent Asrican made a key observation that orders from the novel Chat+neurons were heard clearly by SVZ stem cells.
Studies of stroke injury in rodents have noted SVZ cells apparently migrating into the neighboring striatum.
And just last month in the journal Cell, a Swedish team observed newly made control neurons called interneurons in the human striatum for the first time.
They reported that interestingly in Huntington disease patients, this area seems to lack the newborn interneurons. his is a very important and relevant cell population that is controlling those stem cells,
says Sally Temple, director of the Neural stem cell Institute of Rensselaer, New york, who was involved not in this research. t really interesting to see how innervations are coming into play now in the subventricular zone.
ORGEOUS NICHEKUO team found this system by following cholinergic signaling, but other groups are arriving in the same niche by following dopaminergic and serotonergic signals,
Temple explains. t a really hot area because it a beautiful stem cell niche to study.
It this gorgeous niche where you can observe cell-to-cell interactions. These emerging threads have Kuo hopeful researchers will eventually be able to find the way to ngage certain circuits of the brain to lead to a hardware upgrade.
Wouldn it be nice if you could upgrade the brain hardware to keep up with the new software?
He says perhaps there will be a way to combine behavioral therapy and stem cell treatments after a brain injury to rebuild some of the damage.
The questions ahead are both upstream from the new Chat+neurons and downstream, Kuo says.
Upstream, what brain signals tell Chat+neurons to start asking the stem cells for more young neurons?
a practice that parts of the brain might normally resist. think that some neural circuits welcome new members,
#LED scanner safely peeks inside your brain New brain-scanning technology that shines dozens of tiny LED LIGHTS on the head works as well as more traditional methods without radiation exposure and bulky magnets.
and deep brain stimulators that are used to treat Parkinson disease. The magnetic fields in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) often disrupt either the function or safety of implanted electrical devices.
but the method had been limited to small regions of the brain. The new DOT instrument covers two-thirds of the head
and for the first time can image brain processes taking place in multiple regions and brain networks such as those involved in language processing
and self-reflection (daydreaming). hen the neuronal activity of a region in the brain increases, highly oxygenated blood flows to the parts of the brain doing more work,
and we can detect that, says senior author Joseph Culver, associate professor of radiology at Washington University in St louis. t roughly akin to spotting the rush of blood to someone cheeks
and capturing the dynamic changes in the colors of the brain tissue. Although DOT technology is used now in research settings,
the most commonly used imaging method for mapping human brain function. Functional MRI also tracks activity in the brain via changes in blood flow.
In addition to greatly adding to our understanding of the human brain, fmri is used to diagnose and monitor brain disease and therapy.
Portable scans Another commonly used method for mapping brain function is positron emission tomography (PET), which involves radiation exposure.
Because DOT technology does not use radiation, multiple scans performed over time could be used to monitor the progress of patients treated for brain injuries, developmental disorders such as autism,
neurodegenerative disorders such as Parkinson, and other diseases. Unlike fmri and PET, DOT technology is designed to be portable,
including learning more about how deep brain stimulation helps Parkinson patients, imaging the brain during social interactions,
and studying what happens to the brain during general anesthesia and when the heart is stopped temporarily during cardiac surgery.
Better image quality For the current study, published online in Nature Photonics, the researchers validated the performance of DOT by comparing its results to fmri scans.
a key area of the frontal lobe used for language and speech production. The overlap between the brain region identified as Broca area by DOT data
and by fmri scans was about 75 percent. In a second set of tests researchers used DOT and fmri to detect brain networks that are active
when subjects are resting or daydreaming. Researchersinterests in these networks have grown enormously over the past decade as the networks have been tied to many different aspects of brain health and sickness, such as schizophrenia, autism and Alzheimer disease.
In these studies, the DOT data also showed remarkable similarity to fmriicking out the same cluster of three regions in both hemispheres. ith the improved image quality of the new DOT system,
While DOT doesn let scientists peer very deeply into the brain, researchers can get reliable data to a depth of about one centimeter of tissue.
That centimeter contains some of the brain most important and interesting areas with many higher brain functions, such as memory, language and self-awareness, represented.
and a Mcdonnell Centre for Systems neuroscience grant funded the research s
#How an app might help screen kids for autism A new video analysis tool may help spot early signs of autism.
and these chemicals cause pain by acting on an equally diverse group of receptors on the surface of pain-sensing neurons. big problem in our field is that it is impractical to block each of these receptors with a mixture of drugs,
how do we alter PIP2 levels in the neurons that sense pain? Zylka says. f we could lower the level of PIP2,
The researchers then used a mouse model to show that PIP5K1C was responsible for generating at least half of all PIP2 in these neurons.
Wright is first author of the paper that is published in the journal Neuron. hat told us that a 50 percent reduction in the levels of PIP5K1C was sufficient to reduce PIP2 levels in the tissue we were interested inhere pain-sensing neurons are located,
which will suffer potentially lethal brain bleeding. Researchers used standard magnetic resonance imaging as part of a new method to measure stroke damage to the blood-brain barrier.
that medicine could seep out of the bloodstream and into the brain, causing major damage.
has leaked into brain tissue from surrounding blood vessels. By quantifying this damage in 75 stroke patients, Leigh identified a threshold for determining how much leakage is dangerous.
if it could predict who had suffered a brain hemorrhage and who had not. The new test correctly predicted the outcome with 95 percent accuracy.
The blood-brain barrier limits the passage of molecules from the bloodstream into the brain. Without it
the brain is open to infection, inflammation, and hemorrhage. Ischemic stroke patients are at risk of bleeding into the brain
when there is damage to the barrier. TIMING IS EVERYTHING In an ischemic stroke, a blood clot is stuck in a vessel, cutting off blood flow to a portion of the brain,
which begins to die if the clot remains. When patients come to the hospital within a few hours of suffering an ischemic stroke,
however, there is already too much damage to the blood-brain barrier and the drug causes bleeding in the brain, severe injury,
or by directly injecting tpa into the brain. MRI FOR EVERY STROKE PATIENT Typically, physicians do a CT SCAN of a stroke victim to see
electrostimulators to change neural signals in the brain; and drug delivery systems to apply medicines directly to affected areas,
says William Newsome, professor of neurobiology and director of the Stanford Neurosciences Institute. Newsome, who was involved not in Poon experiments
because electroceutical approaches would use implantable devices to directly modulate activity in specific brain circuits.
act globally throughout the brain. o make electroceuticals practical, devices must be miniaturized, and ways must be found to power them wirelessly, deep in the brain, many centimeters from the surface,
he says. he Poon lab has solved a significant piece of the puzzle for safely powering implantable microdevices,
we can safely transmit power to tiny implants in organs like the heart or brain,
The researchers coaxed human embryonic stem cells to turn into working spinal cord cells more efficiently by growing the cells on a soft,
softer micropost carpets turned into nerve cells much faster and more often than those they grew on the stiffer surfaces.
After 23 days, the colonies of spinal cord cellsotor neurons that control how muscles movehat grew on the softer micropost carpets were four times more pure and 10 times larger than those growing on either traditional plates
It paralyzes patients as it kills motor neurons in the brain and spinal cord. Researchers like Feldman believe stem cell therapiesoth from embryonic and adult varietiesight help patients grow new nerve cells.
She using Fu technique to try to make fresh neurons from patientsown cells. At this point, theye examining how
and whether the process could work, and they hope to try it in humans in the future. rofessor Fu
and colleagues have developed an innovative method of generating high-yield and high-purity motor neurons from stem cells,
The researchers verified that the new motor neurons they obtained on soft micropost carpets showed electrical behaviors comparable to those of neurons in the human body.
a process where nerve cells become specialized for their specific functions based on their physical location in the body,
and restore some lost brain cell function in young mice with a rodent version of the illness,
The compound, called FRAX486, appears to halt an out-of-control biological runingprocess in the schizophrenic brain that unnecessarily destroys important connections among brain cells,
and still make a difference in restoring brain function in these mice is intriguing. FRAX486 is a PAK inhibitor,
Working with mice that mimic schizophrenia and related disorders, the researchers were able to partially restore disabled neurons
so they could connect to other nerve cells. The findings in adolescent mice are an especially promising step in efforts to develop better therapies for schizophrenia in humans,
as it is called, makes a protein that appears to regulate neurons in the cerebral cortex responsible for igher-orderfunctions, like information processing.
In studies of rodent brain cells, the researchers found that a DISC1 deficit caused deterioration of vital parts of the neuron called spines
which help neurons communicate with one another. Reduced amounts of DISC1 protein also impact the development of a protein called Kalirin-7 (KAL7),
The scientists were able to see this by peering into the brains of the mice with DISC1 mutations on the 35th and 60th day of their lives, the equivalent of adolescence and young adulthood.
Sawa cautions that it has not yet been shown that PAK is elevated in the brains of people with schizophrenia.
Grants from the National institutes of health, the Stanley Foundation, the RUSK Foundation, the S-R Foundation, the National Alliance for Research on Schizophrenia and Depression, Johns Hopkins Medicine Brain science Institute, the Maryland
and ultimately turned them into neurons. The team then compared those neurons to cells taken from people without bipolar.
The comparison revealed very specific differences in how these neurons behave and communicate with each other,
and identified striking differences in how the neurons respond to lithium, the most common treatment for bipolar disorder.
The team used a type of stem cell called induced pluripotent stem cells, or ipscs.
With further coaxing, the cells became neurons. his gives us a model that we can use to examine how cells behave as they develop into neurons.
how they differentiate into neurons, how they communicate, and how they respond to lithium, says Sue Ohea,
WHAT DIFFERENT ABOUT BIPOLAR NEURONS? The skin samples were used to derive the 42 ipsc lines.
and then reevaluated the cells once they had become neurons, very specific differences emerged between the cells derived from bipolar disorder patients and those without the condition.
Specifically, the bipolar neurons expressed more genes for membrane receptors and ion channels than non-bipolar cells,
Calcium signals are known already to be crucial to neuron development and function. So the new findings support the idea that genetic differences expressed early during brain development may have a lot to do with the development of bipolar disorder symptomsnd other mental health conditions that arise later in life, especially in the teen and young adult years.
Meanwhile, the cellssignaling patterns changed in different ways when the researchers introduced lithium, which many bipolar patients take to regulate their moods,
the neurons made from bipolar disorder patients also differed in how they were ddressedduring development for delivery to certain areas of the brain.
This may have an impact on brain development, too. The researchers also found differences in microrna expression in bipolar cellsiny fragments of RNA that play key roles in the eadingof genes.
and obtain mature neurons that can be studied. They will share their cell lines with other researchers via the Prechter Repository.
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