Scientists had a hard time reconstructing how complex molecular parts are being held together. However, that was before SISSA’s Cristian Micheletti and his team studied how the DNA double helix unzips when translocated at high velocity through a nanopore.
DNA Double Helix’s Unzipping
DNA has a double helix structure because it consists of two spiral chains of deoxyribonucleic acid. Its shape is reminiscent of a spiral staircase.
Our brains aren’t limited to producing just one type of brain wave at a time, but usually, one type is dominant, and the type it is can often be linked to your level of alertness: delta waves may dominate when you sleep, while gamma waves might dominate when you concentrate intensely.
The idea: Researchers have previously observed that people with Alzheimer’s — a devastating neurological disease affecting more than 6 million people in the US alone — may have weaker and less in-sync gamma waves than people who don’t have the disease.
In a series of past studies, MIT researchers demonstrated a deceptively simple way to increase the power and synchronization of these waves in mouse models of Alzheimer’s: expose the animals to lights flickering and/or sounds clicking at a frequency of 40 Hz.
Organoids are an incredible tool for research into the brain. Cerebral organoids are created by growing human stem cells in a bioreactor. They might be the key to unlocking the answers to many of our questions about the brain. We explain how they’re made and some of the discoveries they’ve helped with so far!
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Scientists transplanted human cerebral organoids (“minibrains”) into rats, to better study brain disorders. The neurons grown in vivo looked more like mature human brain cells than those grown in vitro, and they made better models of Timothy syndrome. The human minibrains formed deep connections with the rat brains, received sensory information, and drove the rat’s behavior.
More on how minibrains are grown and used, and the issue of organoid consciousness: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6FGq7_t3Eo.
On the topic of organoid sentience and playing pong: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=67r7fDRBlNc.
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Sitcom music by John Bartmann: https://johnbartmann.com
Chapters:
0:00 Intro.
0:43 Growing Organoids.
2:57 Minibrains in Science & Medicine.
4:46 Giving Minibrains Psychedelics.
5:26 Minibrains With Eyes.
6:30 Can Minibrains Feel?
7:22 Looking For Consciousness.
9:03 The Future of Minibrain Research.
10:47 Human Minibrains Grafted Onto Mice.
12:10 What’s Next?
Videography by Island Fox Media.
Sound by Kutan Katas.
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Music.
If a free-floating brain could feel pain or ‘wake up,’ how would we know? That’s an important ethical question — and it’s one we need to ask more often as labs around the world create new organoids, or miniature human organs. To answer it we talked to Jay Gopalakrishnan at his ‘mini brain’ lab for centrosome and cytoskeleton biology in Düsseldorf, Germany.
STUDY: https://www.cell.com/cell-stem-cell/fulltext/S1934-5909(21)00295-2
#brains #organoids #ethics #Germany #India.
More Science unscripted:
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DW science:
