and Extra Copies of Disease Gene in Alzheimer s Brain cells The surprise discovery offers a new understanding of Alzheimer s disease.
Scientists at The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) have found diverse genomic changes in single neurons from the brains of Alzheimer s patients pointing to an unexpected factor that may underpin the most common form of the disease.
and Alzheimer s disease#said Jerold Chun professor at TSRI and its Dorris Neuroscience Center and senior author of the new study.
Alzheimer s disease is an irreversible brain disease that tends to strike older people. It is progressive#impairing memory destroying motor skills and eventually causing death.
The U s. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates 5. 3 million Americans currently have Alzheimer s disease
Researchers have known long about disease-related protein accumulations (called amyloid plaques) in the brains of Alzheimer s patients.
They#ve also known that chromosome 21 plays a role in the disease due to Alzheimer s-like symptoms in people with Down syndrome (with three copies of chromosome 21.
Remarkably the researchers found that more than 90 percent of sporadic Alzheimer s disease brains displayed highly significant DNA increases of hundreds of millions more DNA base-pairs compared with control samples showing that genomic mosaicism was altered in the Alzheimer s brain.
The tests showed that neurons from patients with sporadic Alzheimer s disease were four times as likely to contain more than the normal two copies of APP with some Alzheimer s neurons containing up to 12 copies of APP a phenomenon never seen in the controls.#
so to be able to connect it with a disease is really interesting#said Gwen Kaeser a graduate student studying in Chun#s lab and co-first author of the study with former graduate student Diane Bushman.
because the genomic signatures of sporadic Alzheimer s disease occur within individual brain cells. Indeed a majority of major brain diseases are also sporadic.
For example amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) can be linked to a gene in one to two percent of cases
Chun believes genomic mosaicism could possibly have a role in other brain diseases. Future studies in the Chun lab will investigate the relationship between mosaicism
and disease the causes of mosaicism and potential new disease drug targets present in the millions of extra base-pairs found in single Alzheimer s disease neurons.
In addition to Chun Kaeser and Bushman other authors of the study#Genomic mosaicism with increased amyloid precursor protein (APP) gene copy number in single neurons from sporadic Alzheimer s disease brains#were Jurgen
Full open access research for#Genomic mosaicism with increased amyloid precursor protein (APP) gene copy number in single neurons from sporadic Alzheimer s disease brains#by Diane M Bushman
In this study we report altered genomic mosaicism in single sporadic Alzheimer s disease (AD) neurons characterized by increases in DNA content and amyloid precursor protein (APP) gene copy number.
or understand how cancer cells are organized in a metastasizing tumor, or how immune cells are configured in an autoimmune attack,
using an antibody that binds to the chosen targets. This antibody is linked to a fluorescent dye,
as well as a chemical anchor that can attach the dye to the polyacrylate chain. Once the tissue is labeled,
other possible applications for this technique include studying tumor metastasis and angiogenesis (growth of blood vessels to nourish a tumor),
or visualizing how immune cells attack specific organs during autoimmune disease i
#Gene Breakthrough Sparks Fear of Homemade Morphine Scientists on Monday said they had unlocked a pathway for producing opiates from genetically engineered yeast
but feared the discovery could one day be a bonanza for drug lords. Other experts agreed, saying anyone with basic skills could use such a yeast to churn out morphine,
and exude opiates and other therapeutic drugs. The goal is to provide cheaper and possibly less addictive painkillers from a dependable source as compared to the poppy.
as opposed to a medical device, and therefore hasn undergone any testing, except those required by the Underwriter Laboratory to ensure its electrical safety.
and deliver medicines to specific locations. Yes, creepy but also undeniably cool. At the ICRA 2015 conference in Seattle, researchers from MIT and TU Munich presented just such a creation in a presentation titled (cleverly) n Untethered Miniature Origami Robot That Self-folds, Walks, Swims,
it could give future amputees a natural transplant option that doesn require immunosuppressive therapies. The rat limb was grown by a team from the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston.
They used a technique called ecellularization, which basically strips the cellular materials from a limb of a dead rat,
of the MGH Department of Surgery and the Center for Regenerative medicine and senior author of the research paper,
#Facial recognition System Detects Pain It a dilemma that plagued doctors for centuries: When it comes to pain management,
Doctors typically rely on self-reporting, in which patients are asked to rate their pain on a scale of zero to ten.
In a study published this week in the journal Pediatrics, the researchers suggest that the technology can indeed help with accurate pain level assessment.
Nurses might only check on a pediatric patient every few hours whereas a facial recognition system could provide constant monitoring.
The device taking this fantastic electronic voyage may soon be able to zap tumors, repair damaged spinal cords or even connect parts of the brain like an artificial synapse.
and mesh combination is so small and bendy that it doesn cause any damage to the surrounding brain tissue, something that often plagues surgical procedures done with a needle, knife or other type of probe.
Could A Brain Implant Cure Depression? f one is thinking of trying to change the way one does long term brain implants,
it could be a really big deal, said Charles Lieber, chemistry professor at Harvard university and lead author on the new paper published in the journal Nature Nanotechnology. ou can promote a positive interaction
After an injection several centimeters into the brain of a laboratory mouse the scientists were able to monitor electronic brain signals.
Brain-Zapping Implant Could Aid Injured Soldiers The authors of the paper say next step is to use the mesh system to deliver living stem cells that may help repair damaged sections of the brain or perhaps a multifunction electronic device
and manipulate these fields, in a relatively blunt fashion, with implants and wires. But it like working with oven mitts on.
New findings published in the journal Future Medicine suggest that we may have another way forward.
A medical research team at Florida International University in Miami injected 20 billion nanoparticles into the brains of mice
#Brain-Sensing Headband Helps Users Manage Stress Technology and relaxation don always go hand in hand. However, a brain-sensing headband that reads brain waves
and manage stress. The Muse headband is lined with seven EEG sensors that detect the brain electrical activity
Users are asked then to participate in a three-minute guided exercise that aims to reduce stress, calm anxiety and increase focus and concentration.
Hospitals have been on a crisis footing and dedicated heatstroke treatment centres have been set up around the city to treat the tens of thousands affected by heatstroke
Pakistan largest welfare charity and a leading provider of emergency medical care in Karachi, told AFP.
According to figures collected by AFP from hospitals around the city, a total of 1, 079 people have died as a result of the heatwave.
Karachi hospitals have treated nearly 80,000 people for the effects of heatstroke and dehydration, according to medical officials.
Doctor Qaiser Sajjad of the Pakistan Medical Association in Karachi said that a lack of understanding of heatstroke among the public how to spot symptoms
edible barcodes that can be planted right onto medicine to verify that the pills and tablets you might consume are the real deal.
According to Wuh, a medical doctor, this kind of wider recognition is an indication that these bite-size barcodes could play a role in a tech revolution sweeping through medicine. t (Trutag) is really a game-changer
think about public health it impacts all of those areas. We think of this technology as a tremendous way to sort of improve the system. he company ags,
according to statistics from the American Society of Consultant Pharmacists. ay mom is in the hospital
and the nurse comes in with a cup that has seven pills in it. They are out of the package in the cup and there all of these morning pills together,
who also has a Masters of Public health degree from Harvard university, a big component of this company is to empower consumers to understand what they are putting into their bodies,
Imagine someone being treated for diabetes. You want to make sure they have the right medication. n an interconnected world where smartphones
which is used to treat hepatitis. The law enforcement has to ship it by express mail to a lab that then has to process the drug and run a series of tests.
#'Dog Nose'Light Sniffs Out Disease Here a riddle: What kind of light can smell? Answer:
breath for disease. Gold nanoparticles Could Detect Disease: Discovery Newsprevious studies have shown that diseases such as lung and esophageal cancer,
asthma and diabetes can be all be detected in the breath. Using light to smell might be a little counterintuitive,
but stick with us for a moment. Anstie and his team shine the laser onto a sample of gas.
Since each molecule in the universe absorbs light at different optical frequencies, an odor has its own unique signature. ather than sniffing out a variety of smells as a dog would,
Disease Detection Goes Mobilee now have a robust system to be able to detect the presence and concentrations of molecules in a sample,
Dr. Bruce Conklin, a stem cell biologist at the Gladstone Institute of Cardiovascular disease in San francisco, along with colleagues developed these tiny hearts using stem cells derived from skin tissue.
#Lab on a chip turns smart phones into mobile disease clinics Smart phones can pay our bills,
Soon they may become a leading weapon in the global fight against disease. Researchers have designed a cheap,
easy-to-use smart phone attachment (shown above) that can test patients for multiple deadly infectious diseases in 15 minutes.
several detection zones snag any antibodies in the blood that reveal the presence of a particular disease.
The researchers conducted a field test of the device at three Rwandan community clinics, where health care workers rapidly screened 96 patients for HIV
and active and latent forms of syphilis. Compared with gold standard laboratory tests, the dongle was 96%as accurate in detecting infections,
missing just one case of latent syphilis, the team reports online today in Science Translational Medicine.
Despite a 14%false alarm rate, the researchers say the device high sensitivity and ease of use make it a powerful tool for diagnosing these deadly diseases in the field,
particularly among pregnant women. The researchers are now preparing a larger scale trial for the $34 device,
which they hope will let mobile clinics and health workers provide rapid and reliable disease screening in the remotest areas of the world r
#Microbe found in grassy field contains powerful antibiotic For much of the last decade, a team of researchers in Boston has exhumed eagerly
and reburied dirt. It part of a strategy to access an untapped source of new antibioticshe estimated 99%of microbes in the environment that refuse to grow in laboratories.
a previously unknown bacterium that makes a compound with infection-killing abilities. What more, the team claims in a report out today,
it would be needed a much weapon against several increasingly hard-to-treat infections. Many existing antibiotics, including penicillin,
the team let each of them duel in a lab dish with Staphylococcus aureus, a cause of serious skin and respiratory infections.
including many human pathogens. Moreover, these pathogens failed to develop resistance to the compound: There were no surviving individuals that had evolved to withstand its attack.
Resistance usually develops when a small percentage of microbes escape an antibiotic because of a mutation
which the group named teixobactin, was not toxic to human cells in a dish. And it showed other qualities of a good antibiotic,
In mice infected with MRSA, injections of teixobactin led to a 100%survival rate at lower doses than vancomycin.
increasingly feared in hospitals for their resistance to existing drugs. But the authors suggest it could be of great value to people fighting MRSA, tuberculosis,
and infections with rare-but-nasty Enterococcus bacterial strains that aren responding to available drugs.
These results offer hope that other promising agents await discovery in the soil, says Helen Zgurskaya, a biochemist at the University of Oklahoma, Norman,
#'Superspreading event'triggers MERS explosion in South korea SEOULUTHORITIES in South korea are scrambling to contain an outbreak of the deadly Middle Eastern respiratory syndrome (MERS.
Scientists are wondering how a single imported case could have led to so many secondary infections. The outbreak started
He was treated at several clinics before being diagnosed with MERS on 20 may. Several countries have seen such imported cases
but the disease has never spread to more than a few other people, and the general consensus has been that MERS does not spread easily from human to human
But the Korean patient appears to have infected at least 22 family members, health care workers, and fellow patients at a hospital where he was treated from 15 may to 17 may.
The hospital's name has not been revealed. No special precautions were taken during that time, because the patient had not yet been diagnosed.
The early phase of the disease, just after hospitalization and when symptoms are getting worse,
is the time when patients tend to secrete the most virus, says Christian Drosten, a virologist at the University of Bonn in Germany. e know from Saudi arabia that the virus can be transmitted during this time
Yet in similar situations, hundreds of exposed contacts did not develop the disease, says Peter Ben Embarek, the point person on MERS at the World health organization (WHO).
is a lapse in infection control measures at the hospital, Ben Embarek says. The SARS virus,
which is distantly related to MERS, is known to have spread widely in 2003 when tubes were placed in patients'airways for mechanical ventilation,
or Koreans may be more susceptible to the disease than other populations, Ben Embarek says. One important piece of evidence will be the genetic sequence of the virus. Ben Embarek says Korea has agreed to share samples with several labs working on MERS,
and placed him in isolation in Huizhou Municipal Central Hospital on 27 may. He tested positive for MERS on 29 may.
and 27"other contacts"are under medical surveillance. None of those quarantined or under surveillance in Hong kong and China have showed any signs of illness so far.
With reporting by Dennis Normile in Tokyo o
#New test could reveal every virus that's ever infected you Can remember every viral infection youe ever had?
Don worry, your blood can. A new test surveys the antibodies present in a person bloodstream to reveal a history of the viruses theye been infected with throughout their life.
The method could be useful not only for diagnosing current and past illnesses, but for developing vaccines and studying links between viruses and chronic disease. his is really a technical tour de force,
says immunologist Hidde Ploegh of the Massachusetts institute of technology in Cambridge, who was involved not in the new work.
But others point out that it's unclear how many past infections the new technology misses. Now
researchers wondering whether a patient has a particular viral infectionrom herpes and flu to the AIDS virusest blood samples for one pathogen at a time.
Many tests look for antibodies, proteins the immune system produces to recognize invaders, while others hunt for the virus own genetic material.
Some assays can measure the presence or absence of longer-lasting antibodies that can linger for decades after an infection.
Researchers led by biologist Stephen Elledge of Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston and Harvard Medical school wanted to develop a test that could look at every current or past infection in one fell swoop.
They first assembled a library of almost a hundred thousand synthetic protein fragments each of them representing a section of a virus that an antibody might recognize.
When the proteins are added to a drop of blood, antibodies attach to matching fragments; researchers can isolate the antibodies and,
from the fragments they paired up with, determine which viruses someone has been infected with and what antibodies their body generated in response.
The new test, dubbed Virscan, llows scientists to ask questions that just couldn be asked before,
Elledge says. ou can compare groups of peopleoung and old or those with a disease and those withoutnd see whether there a difference in their viral histories.
For instance, Virscan could help determine whether viral infections can trigger diabetes or chronic fatigue syndrome.
Elledge and colleagues used Virscan on more than 500 people from the United states Thailand, South africa, and Peru, some of them infected with HIV.
most people had antibodies for about 10 previous viral infections, although those with HIV and who lived outside the United states averaged more.
Surprisingly, many people had generated the exact same antibodies to infections; researchers believed people's immune responses to be more diverse,
That observation could inform future vaccine development, he says. Whether the test really catches everything is up for debate,
Racaniello points out that Virscan didn identify as many people as he would expect with antibodies for noroviruses and rotaviruses,
which cause large numbers of intestinal infections. This could be because antibodies for these viruses don stick around for
as long as otherslthough researchers have shown that, in general, most antibodies last a lifetimer because of technical caveats of the test.
Elledge admits that, for now, Virscan might miss some viruses, because theye too small or contain certain modifications that the fragment library can include. e know that wee probably missing a little bit,
or pathogens youe fought in your lifetime and what signatures of those infections remain, the results of this paper wouldn be a surprise."
"The technology's real value lies in the new questions scientists can answer, he says."
but Elledge hopes it won't cost much more than existing tests that only look at one pathogen at a time.
if you have any new infections, he says. This could help diagnose viruses like hepatitis C
which people often don know they have u
#Glowing diamonds make great thermometers Diamonds are known for many things: hardness, luster, and their reputation for being a irl best friend.
a cancer biologist at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical center in Dallas. Researchers have used magnets before to levitate whole creatures,
But that would be toxic to living cells. To get around that problem, Demirci group fiddled not with the magnetic properties of the cells themselves,
which could allow clinicians to spot rare circulating tumor cells in a patient sample. The device could also distinguish red blood cells from white blood cells,
and a sign that a patient is prone to infection. Traditional methods for sorting cells rely on fluorescent molecular tags,
Cancer cells are so diverse that certain ones might not bear the antibody to which a molecular label is supposed to attach.
Researchers could identify which individual cellsrom a tumor or a strain of bacteriaurvive a drug treatment and study them further, something that's not possible with current culture-and-stain tests,
says neurologist Dena Dubal of the University of California, San francisco (UCSF), who was involved not in the study. he importance of this work cannot be underestimated as the world population is aging rapidly. ultiple groups of scientists have shown that adding the blood of older mice to younger animalsbodies makes them sluggish, weaker,
ß2 microglobulin (B2m), an immune protein normally involved in distinguishing one own cells from invading pathogens.
B2m has also been found at increased levels in patients with Alzheimer disease and other cognitive disorders.
nearly as good as young animals at completing the water maze, for instance, the scientists report online today in Nature Medicine.
say, within cancerous tumors u
#Eye drops could dissolve cataracts Cataracts cloud the eyes of tens of millions of people around the world and nearly 17.2%of Americans over the age of 40.
Currently, the only treatment is surgeryasers or scalpels cut away the molecular grout that builds in the eye as cataracts develop,
and surgeons sometimes replace the lens. But now, a team of scientists and ophthalmologists has tested a solution in dogs that may be able to dissolve the cataract right out of the eye lens.
And the solution is itself a solution: a steroid-based eye drop. Though scientists don fully understand how cataracts form,
they do know that the ogoften seen by patients is a glob of broken proteins,
stuck together in a malfunctioning clump. When healthy, these proteins, called crystallins, help the eye lens keep its structure and transparency.
causing the signature teamy glassvision that accompanies cataracts. Coming up with a solution other than surgery has been tough.
Scientists have been hunting for years for mutations in crystallin proteins that might offer new insights
and pave the way to an alternate therapy Now, it looks like a team led by University of California (UC), San diego,
Her team came up with the eye drop idea after finding that children with a genetically inherited form of cataracts shared a mutation that stopped the production of lanosterol, an important steroid in the body.
the adults produced lanosterol and had no cataracts. So the researchers wondered: What if lanosterol helped prevent
or reduce cataracts? The team tested a lanosterol-laden solution in three separate experiments. First, they used human lens cells to test how effectively lanosterol shrank lab models of cataracts.
They saw a significant decrease. Then, they progressed to rabbits suffering from cataracts. At the end of the 6-day experiment, 11 of 13 rabbits had gone from having severe or significant cataracts to mild cataracts or no cataracts at all.
Finally, the team moved on to dogs, using a group of seven, including black Labs, Queensland Heelers,
and Miniature pinschers with naturally occurring cataracts. The dogs responded just as the researchers hoped to the lanosterol solution,
which was given in the form of both eye injections and eye drops. The dogslenses showed the same type of dissolving pattern as the human and rabbit lens cells.
The improvement was remarkableesearchers could tell just by looking at the dogseyes that the cataracts had decreased.
But the exact mechanism of how lanosterol manages to disperse the mass of proteins remains unknown. his is a really comprehensive and compelling paperhe strongest
He has been investigating cataract proteins since 2000. hey discovered the phenomena and then followed with all of the experiments that you should dohat as biologically relevant as you can get. uben Abagyan,
That makes them attractive as backup power sources for hospitals and manufacturing plants as well as for producing distributed power systems not connected to the grid.
says immunologist Richard Koup, deputy director of the Vaccine Research center at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious diseases (NIAID) in Bethesda, Maryland,
says immunologist Jake Estes of the Frederick National Laboratory of the National Cancer Institute (a sister of NIAID) in Frederick,
or antiretroviral (ARV) drugs. eservoirsof infected cells that hold latent provirus are a key reason why powerful combinations of ARVS cannot eliminate infections and cure people.
HIV/AIDS researchers working to cure the infection face several obstacles that these new scopes could help overcome.
One is the lack of detectable virus in the blood plasma of patients on effective ARV therapy
whether an intervention aimed at curing the infection is working. Several techniques exist to measure changes in reservoirs,
Conventional MRIS found in hospitals work by inducing a magnetic field gradient across your entire body.
This helps medical technicians localise and examine tissues inside your body but requires bulky equipment.
You'll see new applications in the ER in surgery with telehealth in remote communities and even in ambulances.
#Mini robot space surgeon to climb inside astronauts It could one day answer the prayers of astronauts who need surgery in deep space.
The miniature surgeon slides into the body through an incision in the belly button. Once inside the abdominal cavity which has been filled with inert gas to make room for it to work the robot can remove an ailing appendix, cut pieces from a diseased colon or repair a perforated gastric ulcer.
the surgery bot will perform a set of exercises to demonstrate its dexterity, such as manipulating rubber bands and other inanimate objects.
if you would consider surgery in space, "says team member Shane Farritor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
Medical emergency For now, the only humans in space venture no further than the International space station.
Surgery in space would be extremely difficult. Without gravity, it is easy for bodily fluids like blood to float free
so medical tools need to be relatively light but capable of handling many kinds of situations."
"says Dmitry Oleynikov at the University of Nebraska Medical center.""That difficulty increases logarithmically when you're trying to do complex procedures such as an operation."
The feed relays to a control station, where a human surgeon operates it using joysticks.
Space surgeons Prototypes have performed several dozen procedures in pigs. The team says the next step is to work in human cadavers
"You could imagine situations in the future where you can actually dial in a surgery from the ground
This article will appear in print under the headline"Surgery bot fits in astronaut's gut a
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