Researchers are increasingly turning to organ-on-a-chip technology for drug testing and other applications.
Category: biotech/medical – Page 252
How the brain decodes changes in the pitch of our speech to shape meaning
To explore how the brain deciphers the melody of speech, researchers worked with the rare group of patients who had electrodes implanted in their brains as part of epilepsy treatment. While these patients actively listened to an audiobook recording of “Alice in Wonderland,” scientists tracked activity in multiple brain regions in real time.
Using the intracerebral recordings from the electrodes deep in the patient’s brain, researchers noted the Heschl’s gyrus section processed subtle changes in voice pitch — not just as sound, but as meaningful linguistic units. The brain encoded pitch accents separately from the sounds that make up words.
The author says the research also revealed that the hidden layer of meaning carried by prosodic contours — the rise and fall of speech — is encoded much earlier in auditory processing than previously thought.
Similar research was conducted in non-human primates, but researchers found those brains lacked this abstraction, despite processing the same acoustic cues.
By unlocking the hidden layer of speech, the team discovered how the brain processes pitch accents, revealing profound implications for various fields.
“Our findings could transform speech rehabilitation, AI-powered voice assistants, and our understanding of what makes human communication unique,” the author said.
Knitted microtissue can accelerate healing
Knitted microtissues, seeded with stem cells and other precursor cells, may soon accelerate the healing process of different soft tissues in humans. The work is led by researchers at the Defense Fabric Discovery Center at MIT Lincoln Laboratory as well as the MIT Department of Mechanical Engineering.
Uncovering the mechanism for polar sequestration of the major bacterial sugar regulator by high-throughput screens and 3D interaction modeling
Professor Kenji Osafune (Department of Cell Growth and Differentiation) and his team of researchers have devised an effective means to grow iPS cell-derived kidney progenitor cells, paving the way for renal regenerative therapies to become a reality. The findings are published in the journal Science Translational Medicine.
Modern medicine continues to be hampered by the lack of effective treatments for acute kidney injury (AKI) and chronic kidney disease (CKD). Regenerative medicine, such as cell replacement therapies, represents a new hope for patients. Yet, such therapeutic approaches require large-scale production of the necessary cells, which had remained a challenge until this discovery.
Using a mouse model of AKI, the research team first demonstrated the therapeutic potential of human iPS cell-derived nephron progenitor cells (hiPSC-NPCs). When these cells were transplanted into the kidneys of AKI mouse models induced by an anti-cancer drug, cisplatin, the animals’ survival was vastly improved by preventing the deterioration of kidney function.
One-year-old infants already display compositional abilities, study finds
To understand complex objects, humans are known to mentally transform them and represent them as a combination of simpler elements. This ability, known as compositionality, was so far assumed to require fluency in language, thus emerging in childhood after humans have learned to speak and understand others.
Researchers at Aix-Marseille University-CNRS and PSL University École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales-CNRS recently explored the possibility that compositionality is based on simple processes and might therefore already be present in infants. Their paper, published in Communications Psychology, provides evidence that infants as young as 1-year-old already possess basic compositional abilities.
“We are generally interested in understanding what is in place before language takes off in an infant’s mind,” Isabelle Dautriche, first author of the paper, told Medical Xpress. “One of the central properties of language is compositionality, which is a long word that simply means the capacity to put words together to understand sentences.
Firefly light gives rise to sensor that detects cellular alterations
The gene encoding an enzyme from a firefly, discovered at the Sorocaba campus of the Federal University of São Carlos (UFSCar) in Brazil, has given rise to a biosensor capable of detecting pH changes in mammalian cells—which could be useful, for example, in studying diseases and assessing the toxicity of a drug candidate.
The luciferase from the species Amydetes vivianii changes color from bluish-green to yellow and red as acidity decreases in fibroblasts, the most common cell type in connective tissue. It does so with great intensity and stability, something that had not been achieved with other luciferases tested by the research group.
The work is published in the journal Biosensors.
Fluorescent biosensor tracks plant RNA in real time for better crops and biosecurity
Scientists at Oak Ridge National Laboratory have developed the first-ever method of detecting ribonucleic acid, or RNA, inside plant cells using a technique that results in a visible fluorescent signal. The technology can help researchers detect and track changes in RNA and gene expression in real time, providing a powerful tool for the development of hardier bioenergy and food crops and for the detection of unwanted plant modifications, pathogens and pests.
RNA is a signaling molecule inside cells that is used to read the deoxyribonucleic, or DNA, code and convert it into functional parts such as proteins that are essential for plant growth and stress response. The ORNL-developed biosensor continuously monitors RNA levels in live plants, replacing a traditional destructive, time-consuming method used by scientists for collecting, processing and analyzing tissue.
“With this biosensor, scientists gain real-time insights into how cells reprogram themselves at a molecular level under changing environmental conditions such as drought or disease,” said Xiaohan Yang, lead for the project at ORNL. The approach streamlines traditional methods used to verify gene expression in modified plants and can better detect plant physiology related to disease or nutrient stress, accelerating the development of better crops.