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Category: biotech/medical – Page 263

First-of-Its-Kind Treatment Boosts Vision in Human Trial, Scientists Report

Taking a photo of a friend? You’ve probably got their face centered and focused. Driving down a highway? Eyes on the road.

But for millions of adults with age-related macular degeneration, that crucial, central field of sight is blurred beyond recognition. Current treatments can only slow its progression or augment vision, but the blur will usually continue to worsen.

A recent clinical trial of a treatment based on stem cell transplants has found the procedure may be able to safely reverse the cumulative damage to the hard-working macula – that part of the retina responsible for all you see directly in front of you.

The fate of pyruvate dictates cell growth by modulating cellular redox potential

This ‘fundamental’ study uncovers how directing pyruvate into mitochondria can shrink cells by shifting their metabolism away from building amino acids and proteins.

This fundamental work demonstrates that compartmentalized cellular metabolism is a dominant input into cell size control in a variety of mammalian cell types and in Drosophila. The authors show that increased pyruvate import into the mitochondria in liver-like cells and in primary hepatocytes drives gluconeogenesis but reduces cellular amino acid production, suppressing protein synthesis. The evidence supporting the conclusions is compelling, with a variety of genetic and pharmacologic assays rigorously testing each step of the proposed mechanism. This work will be of interest to cell biologists, physiologists, and researchers interested in cell metabolism, and is significant because stem cells and many cancers exhibit metabolic rewiring of pyruvate metabolism.

Programmable metamaterial can morph into more configurations than there are atoms in the universe

The Wave Engineering for eXtreme and Intelligent maTErials (We-Xite) lab, led by engineering assistant professor Osama R. Bilal, has developed a reconfigurable metamaterial that can control sound waves—bending them, dampening them, or focusing them—while encoding real-time tuning with almost infinite possible shapes.

Their work is now published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“Metamaterials are artificial materials that can achieve extraordinary properties not easily found in nature,” explains Ph.D. candidate Melanie Keogh ‘22 (ENG), the first author of the study. In this case, the research team wanted to develop a material that could control sound waves, while being adjustable in both frequency and function, with potential applications ranging from medical imaging to soundproofing.

Study reveals unexpected link between dopamine and serotonin in the brain

Researchers at Karolinska Institutet, Columbia University and the University of San Francisco, have uncovered a previously unknown mechanism by which dopamine, a key brain chemical vital for movement and motivation, can affect brain activity indirectly by boosting serotonin. The study was published in Science Advances.

Dopamine is a key chemical messenger that supports many essential brain functions, including motivation, movement, and learning. Although dopamine acts throughout the brain, it plays an especially central role in the basal ganglia, a network of interconnected regions responsible for selecting which behaviors we express.

The basal ganglia and dopamine are deeply involved in neuropsychiatric and neurodegenerative diseases, and many widely used medications target this network.

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