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Summary: Researchers have identified a network of genes in Zebrafish that regulate the process of determining whether certain neurons will regenerate.
Source: University of Notre Dame
The death of neurons, whether in the brain or the eye, can result in a number of human neurodegenerative disorders, from blindness to Parkinson’s disease. Current treatments for these disorders can only slow the progression of the illness, because once a neuron dies, it cannot be replaced.
A newly identified genetic factor allows adult skin to repair itself like the skin of a newborn babe. The discovery by Washington State University researchers has implications for better skin wound treatment as well as preventing some of the aging process in skin.
In a study, published in the journal eLife on September 29, 2020, the researchers identified a factor that acts like a molecular switch in the skin of baby mice that controls the formation of hair follicles as they develop during the first week of life. The switch is mostly turned off after skin forms and remains off in adult tissue. When it was activated in specialized cells in adult mice, their skin was able to heal wounds without scarring. The reformed skin even included fur and could make goosebumps, an ability that is lost in adult human scars.
“We were able to take the innate ability of young, neonatal skin to regenerate and transfer that ability to old skin,” said Ryan Driskell, an assistant professor in WSU’s School of Molecular Biosciences. “We have shown in principle that this kind of regeneration is possible.”
When the brain forms a memory of a new experience, neurons called engram cells encode the details of the memory and are later reactivated whenever we recall it. A new MIT study reveals that this process is controlled by large-scale remodeling of cells’ chromatin.
This remodeling, which allows specific genes involved in storing memories to become more active, takes place in multiple stages spread out over several days. Changes to the density and arrangement of chromatin, a highly compressed structure consisting of DNA and proteins called histones, can control how active specific genes are within a given cell.
“This paper is the first to really reveal this very mysterious process of how different waves of genes become activated, and what is the epigenetic mechanism underlying these different waves of gene expression,” says Li-Huei Tsai, the director of MIT’s Picower Institute for Learning and Memory and the senior author of the study.
Circa 2010
The pit organs of pit vipers, pythons, and boas are remarkable sensory devices that allow these snakes to detect infrared radiation emitted by warm-blooded prey. It has been theorized that this capacity reflects the pit organ’s exceptional sensitivity to subtle fluctuations in temperature, but the molecules responsible for this extreme thermal resolution have been unknown. New evidence shows that pit organs respond to temperature using the warmth-activated cation channel TRPA1 (transient receptor potential ankyrin 1), a finding that provides a first glimpse of the underlying molecular hardware. The properties of these snake TRPA1s raise intriguing questions about the mechanisms responsible for the exceptional sensitivity of many biological thermoreceptors and about the evolutionary origins of these warmth-activated TRP channels.
Microfluidic chips that simulate human tissue enable us to conduct medical experiments in ways that could not have been even imagined only a few years ago. Two leading Israeli researchers report from the turbulent Israeli front line of the global ‘organ-on-a-chip’ sector.
For many, getting older can unfortunately mean an increased risk of illness from cardiovascular disease to cancer. University of Michigan scientists are actively researching the biological underpinnings of aging with the aim of developing interventions that could potentially help people live longer, healthier lives.
A new paper in the journal Science Advances describes the discovery of several promising small molecules that appear to reduce cellular stress in mouse skin cells and could lengthen life.
“Cellular stress resistance appears to be a common feature of long-lived organisms, such as invertebrates and mice,” says the paper’s lead author David Lombard, M.D., Ph.D., associate professor of pathology. Lombard is part of a multidisciplinary group at U-M’s Paul F. Glenn Center for Aging. Recent research from colleague and fellow study author Richard Miller, M.D., Ph.D., found several promising drugs, including rapamycin, a cancer drug, and acarbose, a diabetes drug, that extended life in mice.
The virus is a major cause of liver cancer and can lead to people needing a liver transplant.
Circa 2015
A NEW LASER sensor that monitors blood glucose levels without puncturing the skin could transform the lives of millions of diabetics by providing a pain-free way of monitoring blood glucose levels.
Summary: A patient who suffered brain injury can temporarily walk, talk, and recognize family members thanks to the sleep medication Zolpidem.
Source: Radboud University
A patient who could not move and talk spontaneously for eight years started to do so again after being administered a sleeping pill. The spectacular but temporary effect was visualized with brain scans, giving researchers from Radboud university medical center and Amsterdam UMC a better understanding of this disorder’s underlying neurophysiological processes. The article has been published in Cortex.