In the 1800s French scientist Louis Pasteur first discovered that vinegar-making bacteria make a sort of moist skin swollen gelatinous and slippery--a skin now known as bacterial nanocellulose.
and other nutrients to grow in the huge industrial fermentation tanks that make everything from vinegar and yogurt to insulin and other medicines.
and EU regulationsthe world's first clinical trial to explore the use of the hallucinogenic ingredient in magic mushrooms to treat depression is being delayed due to the UK
and EU rules on the use of illegal drugs in research. Professor David Nutt president of The british Neuroscience Association and Professor of Neuropsychopharmacology at Imperial College London (UK) will tell the BNA's Festival of Neuroscience today (Sunday) that
although the UK's Medical Research Council has awarded a grant for the trial the Government's regulations controlling the licensing of illegal drugs in research
He will tell the meeting at the Barbican in London that his research has shown that psilocybin the psychedelic ingredient in magic mushrooms has the potential to alleviate severe forms of depression in people who have failed to respond fully to other antidepressant treatments.
However psilocybin is illegal in the UK; the United nations 1971 Convention on Psychotropic Substances classifies it as a Schedule 1 drug one that has a high potential for abuse with no recognised medical use
and the UK has classified it as a Class A drug the classification used for the most dangerous drugs.
This means that a special licence has to be obtained to use magic mushrooms in research in the UK
and the manufacture of a synthetic form of psilocybin for use in patients is controlled tightly by EU regulations.
The law for the control of drugs like psilocybin as a Schedule 1 Class A drug makes it almost impossible to use them for research
because finding companies who could manufacture the drug and who are prepared to go through the regulatory hoops to get the licence
The whole situation is bedevilled by this primitive old-fashioned attitude that Schedule 1 drugs could never have therapeutic potential
The knock-on effect is this profound impairment of research. We are the first people ever to have done a psilocybin study in the UK
but we are still hunting for a company that can manufacture the drug to GMP standards for the clinical trial
even though we've been trying for a year to find one. We live in a world of insanity in terms of regulating drugs at present.
The whole field is bogged so down by these intransient regulations so that even if you have a good idea you may never get it into the clinic.
He will say that the regulations need to be changed. Even if I do this study and
I show it's a really useful treatment for some people with depression there's only four hospitals in this country that have a licence to hold this drug
when healthy volunteers are injected with psilocybin the drug switched off a front part of the brain called the anterior cingulate cortex
We found that even in normal people the more that part of the brain was switched off under the influence of the drug the better they felt two weeks later.
and are the targets for a number of existing anti-depressive drugs that aim to improve levels of serotonin--the neurotransmitter 1 that gives people a sense of well-being and happiness.
Psilocybin also acts on these receptors. We have found that people with depression have overactive default mode networks
and what psilocybin is doing is going in and rapidly replacing the missing serotonin switching them back into a mind state where they are less ruminating
The proposed trial will be for patients with depression who have failed two previous treatments for the condition.
Thirty patients will be given a synthetic form of psilocybin and 30 patients will be given a placebo. The drug (or placebo) will be given during two possibly three carefully controlled
and prepared 30-60 minute sessions. The first session will be a low dose to check there are no adverse responses the second session will give a higher therapeutic dose
and then patients can have a third booster dose in a later session if it's considered necessary.
While they are under the influence of the drug the patients will have guided talking therapy to enable them to explore their negative thinking
and issues that are troubling them. The doctors will follow up the patients for at least a year.
What we are trying to do is to tap into the reservoir of under-researched'illegal'drugs to see
if we can find new and beneficial uses for them in people whose lives are affected often severely by illnesses such as depression.
The current legislation is stopping the benefits of these drugs being explored and for the last 40 years we have missed really interesting opportunities to help patients.
Ethical approval for the trial was granted in March and Prof Nutt says he hopes to be able to start the trial within the next six months
--so long as he can find a manufacturer for the drug. 1 Neurotransmitters are chemicals that transmit signals from neurons (nerve cells) to target cells. 2 Funding:
The Beckley Foundation has funded part of Prof Nutt's research and the Medical Research Council has agreed a grant for the proposed clinical trial.
Abstract title: Can we use psychedelic drugs to treat depressions? Symposium: Treating depression with antidepressants: where are we now
and where are we going? Story Source: The above story is provided based on materials by British Neuroscience Association.
Note: Materials may be edited for content and length h
#Researchers help unlock pine beetles Pandoras boxtwenty researchers--more than half of them Simon Fraser University graduates
and/or faculty--could become eastern Canada's knights in shining white lab coats. A paper detailing their newly created sequencing of the mountain pine beetle's (MPB) genome will be gold in the hands of scientists trying to stem the beetle's invasion into eastern forests.
Richard Moore health sciences adjunct professor; Simon Chan (B. Sc. Biol; Pawan Pandoh (B. Sc.
s the new tax regime has performed poorly in regard of the public health objective of reducing tobacco consumption.
Explains Dr. Kobayashi Head of the Experimental Plant Division. The Bd21 Brachypodium distachyon line is an important addition to BRC's wide variety of bioresources
Through these activities the BRC supports studies in a broad range of fields from basic research to the treatment of disease health promotion food production and environmental conservation.
In addition to naming the species after Dr. Chomsky to honour his many accomplishments I also have been a huge fan
and political views for a long time said Dr Cory Sheffield the author of the study. Story Source:
but it's something that almost any animal could do in the right circumstances says Dr Elli Leadbeater from ZSL's Institute for Zoology.
Dr Leadbetter is co-author of the study published this week in Current Biology and joins Queen Mary's School of Biological and Chemical sciences later this year.
For example we might associate Easter with chocolate or injections with fear. This suggests that other species not just bees may also use this logical process when learning from others.
We suggest that bees are using similar logic to a person who might get a headache
and the next day feel very ill. A week later the headache is accompanied back by a nasty rash.
Even though they do not feel ill this time when the rash appears again the following week they start to dread feeling ill again
The flowers were made bitter using quinine--a flavour used in tonic water which bees typically dislike.
If you look at any basic virology textbook it will say that these are categories that distinguish all viruses said lead researcher Stanley M. Lemon MD professor of medicine and a member of UNC Lineberger and the Center for Translational Immunology.
In a paper published online in Nature on March 31 Dr. Lemon's team discovered that Hepatitis a virus does not have an envelope
It steals membranes from the cell as it leaves the cell to cloak itself in this envelope that then protects it from antibodies.
No one has shown that previously for a virus. It really blurs that classic distinction between these two types of viruses said Dr. Lemon.
Dr. Lemon believes the dual nature of Hepatitis a virus allows it to use the advantages of both virus types to enhance its survivability.
but to wrap itself in a membrane to evade neutralizing antibodies and facilitate its spread within the host once it has infected a person said Lemon.
While no other virus has been shown to exhibit this particular behavior Dr. Lemon said that it is likely that Hepatitis a virus is not unique in its dual nature.
Hepatitis a is endemic in developing nations that lack modern sanitation and clean water. The virus is transmitted orally
One major question raised by the finding is why the Hepatitis a vaccine works so well to contain the infection.
The vaccine one of the most effective in use was thought to elicit neutralizing antibodies that attack the virus in the blood.
Since it is known now that the envelope surrounding the virus in the blood prevents this the vaccine cannot work as previously thought.
It makes us rethink completely the mechanism underlying the well-documented efficacy of Hepatitis a vaccine.
I think this is one of the most important things to come out of the study said Dr. Lemon.
The research at UNC was funded by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious diseases. Future studies will investigate the mechanisms behind the vaccine's effectiveness Dr. Lemon said.
While it was thought previously that vaccine-induced antibodies attacked the virus outside of the cell the new findings suggest antibodies may actually be able to restrict viral replication within a cell.
Understanding how this really good vaccine works will help us in the future to develop better vaccines for other viruses that we are having difficulty developing vaccines for said Dr. Lemon.
Story Source: The above story is provided based on materials by University of North carolina School of medicine. Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.
They also transmit such diseases as the tomato spotted wilt virus causing millions of dollars in damage to U s. agricultural crops each year.
and plant pathologist John Sherwood of the University of Georgia. Mutschler-Chu said the collaboration will allow her to test her varieties in different regions
and soils negatively impacting ecological health. Researchers have used now publicly accessible data collected weekly or monthly at numerous monitoring sites during the period from 1980-2010 to track wet deposition of nitrate and sulfate near several U s. and East Asian cities.
#Verifying that sorghum is a new safe grain for people with celiac diseasestrong new biochemical evidence exists showing that the cereal grain sorghum is a safe food for people with celiac disease who must avoid wheat
Their study which includes molecular evidence that sorghum lacks the proteins toxic to people with celiac disease appears in ACS'Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry.
and barley trigger an immune reaction in people with celiac disease that can cause abdominal pain and discomfort constipation diarrhea and other symptoms.
Sorghum they note has emerged as an alternative grain for people with celiac disease. In Western countries sorghum traditionally has been feed an animal.
whether sorghum contains those toxic gluten proteins. They describe evidence from an analysis of the recently published sorghum genome the complete set of genes in the plant
Food-grade sorghums should be considered as an important option for all people especially celiac patients the report concluded.
Published in the journal Environmental Pollution the Pitt study finds that bumblebees are at risk of ingesting toxic amounts of metals like aluminum
Therefore the insects are exposed to toxins before they even sense the presence of metals. Although many metals are required by living organisms in small amounts they can be toxic to both plants
and animals when found in moderate to high concentrations said Tia-Lynn Ashman principal investigator of the study and professor and associate chair in Pitt's Department of Biological sciences in the Kenneth P. Dietrich School of arts and Sciences.
This exposure to the campfire makes chemical analysis of archaeological remains problematic. The forest's environmental and archaeological sites are vulnerable for a number of reasons.
The USGS scientists involved in this study serve as members of a worldwide consortium of researchers examining the health of seagrasses.
#New diagnostic technology may lead to individualized treatments for prostate cancera research team jointly led by scientists from Cedars-Sinai Medical center
and grab circulating tumor cells or CTCS that break away from cancers and enter the blood often leading to the spread of cancer to other parts of the body.
If more studies confirm the technology's effectiveness the Nanovelcro Chip device could enable doctors to access
and identify cancerous cells in the bloodstream which would provide the diagnostic information needed to create individually tailored treatments for patients with prostate cancer.
The researchers believe this technology may function as a liquid biopsy revolutionizing conventional biopsy practices
and significantly advancing the field of personalized medicine. Today's biopsies require the removal of tissue samples through a needle inserted into a solid tumor a procedure that is invasive and sometimes painful.
Biopsies are extremely difficult in metastatic prostate cancer because the disease often spreads to bone where the availability of the tissue is low.
The biggest challenges in the treatment of cancer are that every person's tumor differs greatly
and often mutates over time especially in response to treatment. Researchers hope that by analyzing these CTCS doctors will be able to understand the tumor evolution in each individual.
By monitoring the genetic changes in CTCS and their invasiveness in a tissue culture dish doctors may be able to quickly adjust their treatment plans in response We are optimistic that the use of our Nanovelcro CTC technology will revolutionize prostate cancer treatment.
We know that cancers evolve over time and that every patient's cancer is a unique problem--the'one-size-fits-all'approach is not going to allow us to cure prostate cancer
or any other cancer said Edwin M. Posadas MD medical director of the Urologic Oncology Program at Cedars-Sinai's Samuel Oschin Comprehensive Cancer Institute and senior author
of the article in the March online issue of Advanced Materials. This evolution means that we need to be able to monitor these changes over time
and to ensure a patient's treatment is individualized and optimized. The molecular characterizations of CTCS will provide real-time information allowing us to choose the right treatment for the right patient at the right time.
This improvement will be a great step toward developing personalized medicine he added. The existence of CTCS and their role in cancer metastasis was suspected first more than 140 years ago
and the first test for the routine measurement of CTCS became available in 2004 but earlier methods have produced low capture efficiencies
and limited capability of captured cells to be utilized for later molecular analysis. Our technology is the combination of three state-of-the-art technologies:
the Nanovelcro CTC chip laser capture microdissection and whole exome sequencing said Yi-Tsung Lu MD a postdoctoral scientist at the Cedars-Sinai Samuel Oschin Comprehensive Cancer
Institute and one of the article's first authors. This advancement will in principle allow us to track the genomic evolution of prostate cancer after we initiate a therapy
and will allow us to better understand the mechanism of drug resistance that is common in prostate cancer patients.
We hope the comprehensive understanding of cancer biology at the individual level will ultimately lead to better therapy choice for patients suffering from advanced cancer.
With the new system a patient's blood is pumped through the Nanovelcro Chip--the microvilli protruding from the cancer cells will stick to the nanofiber structures on the device's surface much like Velcro.
This phenomenon facilitates the capture of rare CTCS in the blood stream. Next laser capture microdissection technology allows the scientists to selectively cut out
and pick up the CTCS from the Nanovelcro Chip virtually eliminating any trace of any contamination from white blood cells
which can complicate analysis. Finally the isolated and purified CTCS are subjected to single cell next-generation sequencing
which reveals mutations in the genetic material of the cells and may help doctors personalize therapies to a patient's unique cancer.
To date CTC capture technologies have been able to do little more than count the number of CTCS which is informative but not very useful from a treatment planning perspective.
It is a scientific breakthrough to have the ability to isolate pure CTCS and maintain their integrity for sophisticated genomic and behavioral analyses said Hsian-Rong Tseng Phd associate professor of molecular and medical pharmacology at UCLA and the inventor of the Nanovelcro Chip concept and device.
His enthusiasm is echoed by Leland W. K. Chung Phd director of the Urologic Oncology Research Program at the Cedars-Sinai Samuel Oschin Comprehensive Cancer Institute.
Researchers from the Chinese Academy of Science Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center at UCLA and VA Greater Los angeles Healthcare System Beijing Genomics Institute in China Cytolumina Technologies
Corp. and Fourth Military Medical University in China contributed to the article. Cedars-Sinai researchers were supported by a Young Investigator Award and a Challenge Award from the Prostate Cancer Foundation research grants (P01 CA098912 and R01 CA122602) from the National institutes of health a Department of defense Idea
Award (W81xwh-11-1-0422) and from Spielberg Family Foundation. UCLA researchers were supported by a Creativity Award from the Prostate Cancer Foundation and research grants (R21 CA151159 and R33 CA157396) from the National institutes of health/National Cancer Institute Innovative Molecular Analysis
Technologies (IMAT) Program. Story Source: The above story is provided based on materials by Cedars-Sinai Medical center.
Note: Materials may be edited for content and length. Journal Reference e
#Organic labels bias consumers perceptions through the health halo effectthe word organic can mean many things to consumers.
Even so the power of an organic label can be very strong: studies have shown that this simple label can lead us to think that a food is healthier through
what is known as the'health halo effect'.'But can this bias go further? A study by Cornell University's Food and Brand Lab researchers Wan-chen Jenny Lee Mitsuru Shimizu Kevin M. Kniffin and Brian Wansink set out to answer this question.
Their study shows that an organic label can influence much more than health views: perceptions of taste calories and value can be altered significantly
when a food is labeled organic. Certain people also appear to be more susceptible to this'health halo'effect than others#are you?
115 people were recruited from a local shopping mall in Ithaca New york to participate in this study. Participants were asked to evaluate 3 pairs of products--2 yogurts 2 cookies and 2 potato chip portions.
The nutritional aspects of these foods were biased also greatly by the health halo effect. The organic cookies and yogurt were said to taste'lower in fat'than the regular variety
and those who exhibit pro-environmental behaviors (such as recycling or hiking) are less susceptible to the organic'health halo'effect.
#Multi-toxin biotech crops not silver bullets, scientists warnthe popular new strategy of planting genetically engineered crops that make two
or more toxins to fend off insect pests rests on assumptions that don't always apply UA researchers have discovered.
A strategy widely used to prevent pests from quickly adapting to crop-protecting toxins may fail in some cases
Compared with typical insecticide sprays the Bt toxins produced by genetically engineered crops are much safer for people
Bt crops were grown first widely in 1996 and several pests have already become resistant to plants that produce a single Bt toxin.
each plant produces two or more toxins that kill the same pest. As reported in the study the pyramid strategy has been adopted extensively with two-toxin Bt cotton completely replacing one-toxin Bt cotton
since 2011 in the U s. Most scientists agree that two-toxin plants will be more durable than one-toxin plants.
The extent of the advantage of the pyramid strategy however rests on assumptions that are met not always the study reports.
Redundant killing can be achieved by plants producing two toxins that act in different ways to kill the same pest he said so
if an individual pest has resistance to one toxin the other toxin will kill it.
For their experiments the group collected cotton bollworm--also known as corn earworm or Helicoverpa zea-a species of moth that is a major agricultural pest and selected it for resistance against one of the Bt toxins Cry1ac.
As expected the resistant caterpillars survived after munching on cotton plants producing only that toxin. The surprise came
If the assumption of redundant killing is correct caterpillars resistant to the first toxin should survive on one-toxin plants
but not on two-toxin plants because the second toxin should kill them Carriã re explained.
But on the two-toxin plants the caterpillars selected for resistance to one toxin survived significantly better than caterpillars from a susceptible strain.
These findings show that the crucial assumption of redundant killing does not apply in this case
and may also explain the reports indicating some field populations of cotton bollworm rapidly evolved resistance to both toxins.
and Cry2 toxins occurred in 19 of 21 experiments. Contradicting the concept of redundant killing cross-resistance means that selection with one toxin increases resistance to the other toxin.
According to the study's authors even low levels of cross-resistance can reduce redundant killing
and some other pests that are not highly susceptible to Bt toxins to begin with. The team found violations of other assumptions required for optimal success of the pyramid strategy.
In particular inheritance of resistance to plants producing only Bt toxin Cry1ac was dominant which is expected to reduce the ability of refuges to delay resistance.
Refuges consist of standard plants that do not make Bt toxins and thus allow survival of susceptible pests Under ideal conditions inheritance of resistance is not dominant
According to Tabashnik overly optimistic assumptions have led the EPA to greatly reduce requirements for planting refuges to slow evolution of pest resistance to two-toxin Bt crops.
and to verify that ABCB1 is in fact the gene that controls dwarfism. After Devos and Parvathaneni located the dwarfing gene they tested pearl millet dwarfs from around the world.
Previous research has shown that dietary fiber may help reduce risk factors for stroke including high blood pressure and high blood levels of low-density lipoprotein (LDL) bad cholesterol.
and having high blood pressure said Diane Threapleton M. Sc. lead author of the study and Ph d. candidate at the University of Leeds'School of Food Science & Nutrition in Leeds united Kingdom.
Among survivors the disease is a leading cause of disability. In addition to following a nutritious diet the American Heart Association recommends being physically active
and avoiding tobacco to help prevent stroke and other heart and blood vessel diseases. Co-authors are:
and Victoria J. Burley Ph d. The U k. Department of health for England and Kellogg Marketing and Sales Company (UK) Ltd. funded the study.
or graphene with rather small domains that reduce the stress concentration. Co-authors of the paper are graduate student Zhigong Song and his adviser Zhiping Xu an associate professor of engineering mechanics at Tsinghua.
which cause disease. In the first study to assess the variety of these non-pathogenic bacteria scientists report that these surface bacteria vary depending on the type of produce and cultivation practices.
although such microbes don't necessarily cause disease they may still interact with and perhaps inhibit the growth of disease-causing microbes.
The results of this new research suggest that people may be exposed to substantially different bacteria depending on the types of produce they consume Story Source:
#Poultry probiotic cuts its coat to beat bad bacteriaa strain of probiotic bacteria that can fight harmful bacterial infections in poultry has the ability to change its coat according to new findings from the Institute of Food Research.
The probiotic is currently being taken forward through farm-scale trials to evaluate how well it combats Clostridium perfringens--a cause of necrotic enteritis in poultry and the second most common cause of food poisoning in the UKTHE researchers at IFR
The next step is to understand the regulation of the genes involved in making the coat said Dr Arjan Narbad who led the studies.
whether changing the coat affects the probiotic's fitness to colonise and inhabit the gut.
Understanding the role of the slime capsule coat will inform the commercial development of this strain as a preventative treatment for C. perfringens infection in poultry especially in regard to how the probiotic is stored and produced.
Through the technology transfer company Plant Bioscience Ltd the strain has been patented and is now in large-scale farm trials to assess its efficacy.
and are considered safe for human consumption this probiotic strain could become new way of controlling C. perfringens.
As there is a growing pressure to reduce the use of antibiotics in farming new products are needed to maintain animal welfare standards reduce the huge costs of necrosis in poultry
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