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Category: biotech/medical – Page 136

The brain can selectively recognize glucose, offering clues to treat obesity and diabetes

Starting with the question “How does our brain distinguish glucose from the many nutrients absorbed in the gut?” a KAIST research team has demonstrated that the brain can selectively recognize specific nutrients—particularly glucose—beyond simply detecting total calorie content. Their study, published in Neuron, is expected to offer a new paradigm for appetite control and the treatment of metabolic diseases.

Professor Greg S.B. Suh’s team in the Department of Biological Sciences, in collaboration with Professor Young-Gyun Park’s team (BarNeuro), Professor Seung-Hee Lee’s team (Department of Biological Sciences), and the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, have identified the existence of a gut– circuit that allows animals in a hungry state to selectively detect and prefer glucose in the gut.

Organisms derive energy from various nutrients, including sugars, proteins, and fats. Previous studies have shown that total caloric information in the gut suppresses hunger neurons in the hypothalamus to regulate appetite. However, the existence of a gut–brain circuit that specifically responds to glucose and corresponding brain cells had not been demonstrated until now.

How bacteria grow: Evolutionary differences point to new ways to combat infection

With colleagues from his department as well as the Institut national de la recherche scientifique and Indiana University, Brun’s research team used advanced microscopy techniques and fluorescent probes to track .

The results reveal an unexpected diversity in wall elongation patterns, centered on peptidoglycan synthesis—an important target of several classes of antibiotics, including penicillin.

“What was thought to be a relatively uniform process actually appears to be much more variable, even between very closely related species,” said Brun, the study’s senior author. “This variability may represent new points of fragility that could be exploited to develop new antibiotics.”

Formal guidelines can enable AI to precisely maneuver and position medical needles

Imagine a physician attempting to reach a cancerous nodule deep within a patient’s lung—a target the size of a pea, hidden behind a maze of critical blood vessels and airways that shift with every breath. Straying one millimeter off course could puncture a major artery, and falling short could mean missing the cancer entirely, allowing it to spread untreated.

This is the high-stakes reality physicians face in thousands of procedures daily, where accuracy is critical and the task is complicated by anatomical obstacles that are non-penetrable or sensitive. Can artificial intelligence (AI) and robots help address these challenges and improve patient outcomes?

“A new era of “AI guidance” is dawning in medicine,” says Ron Alterovitz, Lawrence Grossberg Distinguished Professor in the Department of Computer Science. “Robots with advanced AI can assist physicians and automate certain tasks, enabling unprecedented levels of accuracy and making complex procedures safer and more effective.”

Computational models explore how regions of the visual cortex jointly represent visual information

Understanding how the human brain represents the information picked up by the senses is a longstanding objective of neuroscience and psychology studies. Most past studies focusing on the visual cortex, the network of regions in the brain’s outer layer known to process visual information, have focused on the contribution of individual regions, as opposed to their collective representation of visual stimuli.

Researchers at Freie Universität Berlin recently carried out a study aimed at shedding new light on how regions across the human visual cortex collectively encode and process visual information, by simulating their contribution using computational models. Their findings, published in Nature Human Behaviour, highlight specific rules that could govern the relations between these different regions of the visual cortex.

“Most of us take seeing for granted, but the process is surprisingly complex,” Alessandro Gifford, first author of the paper, told Medical Xpress. “When we look at the world, it’s not just our eyes doing the work—it’s our brain, specifically an area at the back called the visual cortex. Think of the visual cortex as a team of specialists. Each member of the team (or brain region) handles a different aspect of what we see—one might focus on shapes, another on motion, another on faces.”

New Chemistry Discovery Promises More Effective Cancer Drugs With Fewer Side Effects

Researchers discovered how to flip the structure of complex drug compounds using a simple reagent, offering a game-changing approach for making better medicines. For the first time, chemists have developed a novel method to manipulate a type of chemical compound that plays a crucial role in many

Cervical function in pregnancy and disease: new insights from single-cell analysis

The uterine cervix plays an essential role in regulating fertility, maintaining pregnancy, remodeling in preparation for parturition, and protecting the reproductive tract from infection. A compromise in cervical function contributes to adverse clinical outcomes. Understanding molecular events that drive the multifunctional and temporally defined roles of the cervix is necessary to effectively treat infertility, reproductive tract infections, preterm birth, labor dystocia, and cervical cancer. The application of single-cell technologies to study cervical pathophysiology, while in its infancy, underscores the potential of these approaches in developing clinically relevant biomarkers of disease and preventative therapies.

Cheap Daily Supplement Appears to Boost Brain Function in Older People

What’s good for your aging gut may also be good for your aging brain. The first study of its kind in twins found that taking daily protein and prebiotic supplements can improve scores on memory tests in people over the age of 60.

Published early last year, the findings are food for thought, especially as the same visual memory and learning test is used to detect early signs of Alzheimer’s disease.

The double-blinded trial involved two cheap plant fiber prebiotics that are available over the counter in numerous nations around the world.

Why some genes are more error-prone: Scientists uncover hidden rule in DNA transcription

Every living cell must interpret its genetic code—a sequence of chemical letters that governs countless cellular functions. A new study by researchers from the Center for Theoretical Biological Physics at Rice University has uncovered the mechanism by which the identity of the letters following a given nucleotide in DNA affects the likelihood of mistakes during transcription, the process by which DNA is copied into RNA. The discovery offers new insight into hidden factors that influence transcription accuracy.

The work is published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The study was authored by Tripti Midha, Anatoly Kolomeisky and Oleg Igoshin. It shows why genetic sequences are not equally prone to errors. Instead, the identity of the two nucleotides immediately downstream of a site significantly alters the error rate during transcription. This discovery builds on prior insights by the same authors on enzymatic proofreading mechanisms, factoring in the effects of distinct kinetics for different nucleotide additions.

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