Lifeboat Foundation

Neurochemicals such as serotonin and dopamine play crucial roles in cognitive and emotional functions of our brain. Vesicular monoamine transporter 1 (VMAT1) is one of the genes responsible for transporting neurotransmitters and regulating neuronal signaling. A research team led by Tohoku University has reconstructed ancestral VMAT1 proteins, revealing the functional changes in neurotransmitter uptake of VMAT1 throughout the course of human evolution.

Human bodies are made up of millions of cells. Each individual contains a specific set of instruction of codes that make up all of a living thing’s genetic material. These instructions are known as genomes. PhD candidate Daiki Sato and Professor Masakado Kawata of the Graduate School of Life Sciences at Tohoku University, and two of the authors involved in the current study, previously discovered VMAT1 to be one of the genes that had evolved throughout human lineage.

VMAT 1 contains two human-specific mutations, or where the genomes changed, with the change being represented as 130Glu to 130Gly and from 136Asn to 136Thr. Previous studies have shown that having the new 130Gly/136Thr variant decreases the uptake of neurotransmitters and is associated with higher depression and/or anxiety. In this study, Sato, Kawata and their colleagues revealed the evolutionary changes in neurotransmitter uptake of VMAT1 by reconstructing ancestral VMAT1 proteins. First they applied a fluorescent substrate to visualize and quantify the neurotransmitter uptake of each genotype. The ancestral (130Glu/136Asn) VMAT1 protein exhibited an increased uptake of neurotransmitters compared to a derived (130Gly/136Thr) genotype. Given that the derived (130Gly/136Thr) genotype is shown to be associated with depression and/or anxiety in modern human populations. “This results of our study reveal that our ancestors may have been able to withstand higher levels of anxiety or depression,” noted the authors.

Continue reading “Evolutionary Changes in Brain Potentially Make us More Prone to Anxiety” »

Researchers at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center have identified a tenacious subset of immune macrophages that thwart treatment of glioblastoma with anti-PD-1 checkpoint blockade, elevating a new potential target for treating the almost uniformly lethal brain tumor.

Their findings, reported in Nature Medicine, identify macrophages that express high levels of CD73, a surface enzyme that’s a vital piece of an immunosuppressive molecular pathway. The strong presence of the CD73 macrophages was unique to glioblastoma among five tumor types analyzed by the researchers.

“By studying the immune microenvironments across tumor types, we’ve identified a rational combination therapy for glioblastoma,” says first author Sangeeta Goswami, M.D., Ph.D., assistant professor of Genitourinary Medical Oncology.

Researchers led by the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Heidelberg and the Center for Bioinformatics at Saarland University in Saarbrücken, Germany, have developed a cheaper and faster method to check for genetic differences in individual cells. It outperforms existing techniques with respect to the information received. This new method could become a new standard in single-cell research, and potentially for clinical diagnosis in disease genetics, including cancer. The results have been published in Nature Biotechnology.

“Our new method to study genetic variations in individual cells could transform the field of mutation detection,” says Ashley Sanders, one of the lead authors of the study, working at EMBL Heidelberg, Germany. The method she and her colleagues developed, termed single cell tri-channel processing (scTRIP), allows them to study genetic variations within the DNA of a single cell and measure genetic variations directly as they form in new cells. In contrast to existing methods that were able to detect only large-scale changes in the genome, scTRIP can detect small-scale changes along with many types of genetic variations that were invisible using other single-cell methods.

The researchers tested their method in patient-derived leukemia cells. In their sample, the team found four times more variants in the patient than were detected by standard clinical diagnostics. These included a missed clinically relevant translocation that drove the overexpression of a cancer-causing gene. They also observed a catastrophic chromosome rearrangement that was missed in the initial leukemia diagnosis. It probably occurred when a single chromosome shattered and was then glued back together in a rearranged order.

The best way to avoid baldness is to stop hair from falling out in the first place. Now, researchers say a new hair growth discovery might help men keep their locks for a lifetime.

The new insight involves a structure lying within the hair follicle.

“Our major discovery is a previously unknown smooth muscle that surrounds hair follicles and is called the dermal sheath,” explained lead researcher Dr. Michael Rendl. He’s associate director of the Black Family Stem Cell Institute at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, in New York City.

Nearly a quarter of patients, 23.7%, treated with adoptive cell transfer tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes for metastatic melanoma have experienced complete and durable responses, according to data presented at ASCO Annual Meeting.

The trial (NCT01174121), conducted by the NCI, has been enrolling patients since 2010, and the subset of patients with metastatic melanoma have shown impressive responses to the therapy over time, with only two complete responders experiencing disease recurrence that resulted in death.

“We have a group of 44 patients with melanoma that are likely cured. They have had no other treatment since their TIL and have been free of disease for more than 5 years,” Stephanie L. Goff, MD, FACS, an associate research physician with the surgery branch at the NCI, told Cell Therapy Next.

Getting sick is the worst. But if you’re trying to lure customers who are reluctant or unable to leave home, the virus can be an ally.

Paul Westerman was just 44 when he developed the blood clot that almost killed him after suffering a knee injury while playing tennis.

Eight days after he fell, part of the clot — which had formed in a vein in his calf — travelled to his heart and lungs, with catastrophic results.

Continue reading “Man who nearly died from blood clot launches preventative device” »

Consuming a diet high in sugar and fat is a known risk factor for a number of health problems, including obesity and type-2 diabetes. A new study from the University of Illinois has found that consuming caffeine from coffee, tea, and other sources may help protect against some of the health consequences often resulting from poor dietary habits. Similar benefits were also associated with consuming synthetic caffeine.

Methylation clocks are far and away the most accurate markers of a person’s age, and so are a promising tool for evaluating anti-aging interventions, but they are a bit of a black box. We know from statistics that certain places on chromosomes become steadily methylated ( or demethylated ) with age, but we often don’t know what effect that has on expression of particular genes.

For the first time, a clock has been devised based on proteins in the blood that is comparable in accuracy to the best methylation clocks. This has the advantage of being downstream of epigenetics, so it is less of a black box. What can we learn from the proteins that are increased ( and decreased ) with age?

I’ve written often and enthusiastically about the utility of methylation clocks for evaluation of anti-aging interventions [ blog, blog, blog, journal article ]. This technology offers a way to promptly identify small age-reversal successes (perhaps not in individuals, but averaged over a cohort of ~50 to 100 subjects). Before these tests were available, we had no choice but to wait — usually 10 years or more — for enough experimental subjects to die that we could be sure the intervention we were evaluating affected life expectancy. (This is the plan of the worthy but ridiculously expensive TAME trial promoted by Nir Barzilai.)