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Category: food

Aspirin reverses diet-driven depression-like behavior in mice

Depression is among the most common psychiatric disorders, estimated to affect between 280 million and 332 million people worldwide. This disorder is characterized by persistent sadness and hopelessness, low energy, a loss of interest in everyday activities and sometimes changes in appetite or sleep.

Several factors can contribute to the onset of depression, including genetics, chronic stress, traumatic or challenging life events and biochemical imbalances in the brain. Recent studies suggest that people’s diets can also sometimes influence their mental health and may play a role in the emergence of depressive symptoms.

Some research findings suggest that the long-term consumption of foods rich in fat is linked to an increased risk of depression. The biological processes underpinning this relationship, however, have not yet been clearly elucidated.

Programmable platform enables on-demand design of plant immune receptors against crop pathogens

Crop production faces threats from plant pathogens. Traditional disease-resistance breeding relies heavily on natural plant resistance genes that encode immune receptors adapted to particular pathogens. However, rapidly evolving pathogens frequently overcome these natural defenses, and the limited diversity of naturally occurring immune receptors makes it difficult to develop crops with durable resistance.

Now, a team led by Professor Gao Caixia at the Institute of Genetics and Developmental Biology (IGDB) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences has developed a programmable platform for the on-demand design of synthetic plant immune receptors (SPIRs) that recognize proteins from diverse plant pathogens.

The study was published online in Science on July 23.

Engineered enzyme erases a stubborn mark of aging by up to 70% in human tissue samples

A biotech company called Revel Pharmaceuticals is looking into ways to reverse aging, and the company’s science team, along with researchers from the company Calico and the University of Colorado, may be a step closer to realizing the so-called fountain of youth. The team recently published their study in Nature Communications detailing how they engineered an enzyme capable of reversing a particular form of age-related damage and demonstrated its competence with test results.

One common sign of aging in the cells of living organisms is a type of protein damage called Nε-carboxymethyl-lysine (CML). CML is part of a group of harmful compounds aptly named “AGEs” (or advanced glycation and lipoxidation end products). Oddly enough, it is also part of the Maillard reaction, known for causing the browning in cooked food that creates rich, savory flavors, complex aromas and golden-brown crusts. In living organisms, CML builds up on long-lived proteins, like those in skin, blood vessels and the eye. This stiffens tissues and can fuel chronic inflammation through an immune-signaling receptor called “RAGE.”

“The engagement of the CML-RAGE axis triggers a signaling cascade that activates NF-κB and stimulates the release of pro-inflammatory cytokines and profibrotic growth factors. In the context of the central nervous system, CML accumulation has been linked to oxidative stress and mitochondrial damage in microglia, further disrupting brain homeostasis during aging,” the authors of the new study explain.

Genome tool places large genetic sequences precisely in rice and tobacco without DNA breaks

Researchers at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) have developed a new way to add large pieces of genetic information to plants, overcoming a challenge that has limited plant biotechnology for decades. The advance could help scientists build more complex traits into plants in the future, supporting research into areas such as crop resilience, sustainable agriculture, biotechnology and the use of plants as scalable platforms for producing therapeutics and biologics.

Published in Nature Biotechnology, the study introduces a new genome engineering approach that allows scientists to place large genes into specific locations within plant genomes. The approach was successfully demonstrated in both tobacco and rice, opening new possibilities for future research in agricultural biotechnology, synthetic biology and plant-based biomanufacturing.

Scientists studying bee brains found clues to how colonies coordinate complex behaviour without a central controller, relying instead on many small individual decisions

Honeybee colonies work in an organised way even though no bee tells the others what to do. Young bees look after the queen and baby bees, older ones build and guard the hive, and the oldest workers fly out to collect food.

Updates on nature, land and biodiversity

Nature is humanity’s lifeline. Human health, food, economies and well-being depend on nature. Yet nature is in crisis. One million of the world’s estimated 8 million species of plants and animals are threatened with extinction. Meanwhile, ecosystem degradation is affecting the well-being of 40 per cent of the global population.

The spotlight on nature and biodiversity highlights updates from around the UN System, from partners and others, helping to call attention to the need for a just, prosperous and sustainable future for all.

Scientists are Teaching Shrimp to Eat in Microgravity for Future Moon Bases

As far as we know, food doesn’t exist naturally in space. We have to bring it with us if we want to explore the final frontier. One of the oldest and most common types of food on planet Earth is seafood, yet we know surprisingly little about how aquatic animals would react to the microgravity environment they would experience in space. A new paper by researchers at Japan’s Okayama University of Science, which was recently published in Microgravity Science and Technology, hopes to tackle that question. It used a novel way to simulate microgravity to watch how crustaceans would react to the space environment, and found that they could likely be good candidates as part of a future space food chain.

Most microgravity experiments on Earth take place in drop chambers or parabolic flights — both of which only offer a few seconds of true “microgravity”, and aren’t suitable for longer duration testing. The International Space Station offers an alternative, but is extremely expensive and has very limited space to run additional experiments. So the researchers turned to an alternative tool — the clinostat.

These specialized chambers rapidly change the orientation their contents are subjected to, varying the gravity field they experience and mimicking at least some of the effects of microgravity. They rotate in such a way that the combination of gravity and centrifugal force will eventually come out to essentially zero over a period of time. These machines work well for single-celled organisms and plants. But they’re not as effective for complex animals.

Oxalate buildup triggers systemic inflammation and cardiac damage, study shows

People with chronic kidney disease (CKD) have a significantly increased risk of death from cardiovascular disease. They also suffer from chronic inflammation, the causes of which are still only partly understood. Oxalic acid (oxalate) has so far been known primarily for its role in the formation of kidney stones. The molecule is a natural metabolic byproduct, is found in certain foods and is normally excreted by the kidneys in urine. However, when kidney function is impaired, oxalate accumulates in the body and can promote inflammatory processes.

The Experimental Biomedicine II department at Würzburg University Hospital (UKW), together with the Experimental and Clinical Research Center (ECRC), a joint institution of Charité—Universitätsmedizin Berlin and the Max Delbrück Center, investigated the immunological mechanisms linking oxalate-induced kidney damage with systemic inflammation and cardiovascular injury.

“In our research project, an oxalate-enriched diet activated the immune system systemically in mice. In other words, inflammatory processes spread throughout the body. This led not only to kidney damage, but also to pathological changes in the heart that reduced cardiac function,” says Dr. Hendrik Bartolomaeus. The scientist, who is part of Professor Alma Zernecke-Madsen’s team at UKW, shares senior authorship of the study with Dr. Nicola Wilck of ECRC. The study was published in Cardiovascular Research. Bartolomaeus previously worked in Wilck’s laboratory.

Nanoparticles could remove harmful immune molecules from blood

The immune system, the body’s defense network against infections and injuries, can sometimes become too active. In these cases, it can produce too many immune mediators, fragments of genetic material or proteins that regulate immune responses.

An excess of these molecules in the bloodstream can cause severe inflammation, sometimes leading to life-threatening medical conditions such as sepsis and acute lung injury. Sepsis is an extreme and life-threatening response to a bacterial, viral or fungal infection. Acute lung injury, on the other hand, occurs when inflammation causes fluid to leak into the lungs, impairing breathing and potentially leading to respiratory failure.

Some biomedical scientists and engineers have been trying to identify promising solutions to remove these excess immune mediators from the bloodstream. Some proposed approaches rely on lysosome-targeting chimeras (LYTACs), molecules that could remove proteins outside or on the surface of cells, directing them to lysosomes (i.e., organelles that dispose of or recycle food particles and other cell waste).

Postnatal Development of Pyramidal Neurons Excitability and Synaptic Inputs in Mouse Gustatory Cortical Circuits

During postnatal development, mammals shift from relying on their mother’s milk to foraging for food. Early experience with feeding independence influences the development of taste preferences (Schiff et al., 2023). While the postnatal development of gustatory cortical circuits is not well studied, there is some experimental evidence for protracted maturation of neuronal morphology and early-life experience-dependent effects on neurons in other regions of the taste system. In mice, taste receptor cells begin to reliably fire action potentials during the third postnatal week (Bigiani et al., 2002) and the refinement of their excitability extends into adulthood (Bigiani et al., 2002; Ohtubo et al., 2012). Postnatal anatomical rewiring was observed in the first central relay in the gustatory system, the nucleus of the solitary tract (NTS) after postnatal day 21 (P21), with the inputs to the NTS reaching adult connectivity by P35 and undergoing additional refinement into adulthood (Hill et al., 1983; Sollars et al., 2006; May et al., 2008; Sun et al., 2017). In the gustatory portion of the parabrachial nucleus, dendritic arborization of multipolar and fusiform cells reach adult morphology by P35 (Lasiter and Kachele, 1988). Together, these studies identify the postnatal window between P15–P21, P21–P35, and P50–P65 as periods of maturation for different circuits in the gustatory system.

In primary visual, auditory, and somatosensory cortices, developmental time windows of heightened sensitivity to changes in sensory inputs extending between the third and fifth postnatal week have been identified (Micheva and Beaulieu, 1995; Antonini et al., 1999; Maffei et al., 2006, 2010; Maffei and Turrigiano, 2008b; Wang et al., 2011; Takesian et al., 2012, 2018; Gainey and Feldman, 2017; Gainey et al., 2018). During these periods, known as critical periods, cortical circuits undergo a maturation process that is shaped by experience and reach their adult properties.

GABAergic inhibitory synapses in particular play a crucial role in postnatal cortical circuit maturation and refinement. Inhibitory cortical circuits themselves undergo extended postnatal maturation (Hensch, 2004; Tatti et al., 2017; Takesian et al., 2018), with increases in GABAergic inhibition opening the critical period for circuit refinement. For instance, in a knock-out mouse in which GABA is severely diminished (GAD-KO), the critical period may never open unless GABA receptors are activated pharmacologically (Fagiolini and Hensch, 2000). Changes in inhibitory circuits during critical periods are primarily ascribed to parvalbumin-expressing interneurons (PV+ INs). Reports show an increase in the number of PV+ INs (Gonchar et al., 2007; Tatti et al., 2017) along with increased perisomatic innervation of pyramidal neurons (Chattopadhyaya et al., 2004). This process is associated with increases in the expression of PV in PV+ INs (Murase et al.

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