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Category: neuroscience – Page 139

Researchers have discovered that individuals who live to be 100 years old and remain cognitively healthy possess genetic variations that may protect against Alzheimer’s disease. These “protective alleles” are significantly more prevalent among centenarians compared to Alzheimer’s patients and even middle-aged individuals without the disease. This finding could pave the way for new approaches in preventing and treating Alzheimer’s, particularly by focusing on enhancing these protective genetic mechanisms.

The new findings have been published in the journal Alzheimer’s & Dementia.

Alzheimer’s disease is a progressive neurological disorder that predominantly affects older adults, leading to a decline in cognitive functions such as memory and reasoning. Over time, this can result in a complete loss of independence and eventually death. The risk of developing Alzheimer’s increases significantly with age, and while it is not an inevitable part of aging, it is one of the most common causes of dementia among seniors.

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Researchers at the University of California San Diego have developed a neural implant that provides information about activity deep inside the brain while sitting on its surface. The implant is made up of a thin, transparent and flexible polymer strip that is packed with a dense array of graphene electrodes. The technology, tested in transgenic mice, brings the researchers a step closer to building a minimally invasive brain-computer interface (BCI) that provides high-resolution data about deep neural activity by using recordings from the brain surface.

The work was published on Jan. 11 in Nature Nanotechnology.

“We are expanding the spatial reach of neural recordings with this technology,” said study senior author Duygu Kuzum, a professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering. “Even though our implant resides on the brain’s surface, its design goes beyond the limits of physical sensing in that it can infer neural activity from deeper layers.”

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Bursts of brain rhythms with “beta” frequencies control where and when neurons in the cortex process sensory information and plan responses. Studying these bursts would improve understanding of cognition and clinical disorders, researchers argue in a new review.

The brain processes information on many scales. Individual cells electrochemically transmit signals in circuits but at the large scale required to produce cognition, millions of cells act in concert, driven by rhythmic signals at varying frequencies. Studying one frequency range in particular, beta rhythms between about 14–30 Hz, holds the key to understanding how the brain controls cognitive processes — or loses control in some disorders — a team of neuroscientists argues in a new review article.

Drawing on experimental data, mathematical modeling and theory, the scientists make the case that bursts of beta rhythms control cognition in the brain by regulating where and when higher gamma frequency waves can coordinate neurons to incorporate new information from the senses or formulate plans of action. Beta bursts, they argue, quickly establish flexible but controlled patterns of neural activity for implementing intentional thought.

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Scientists have found a way to restore brain cells impaired by a rare and life-threatening genetic disorder called Timothy syndrome.

A type of drug known as an antisense oligonucleotide allowed clusters of human neurons to develop normally even though they carried the mutation responsible for…

A therapy that restores brain cells impaired by a rare genetic disorder may offer a strategy for treating conditions like autism, epilepsy, and schizophrenia.

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MIT researchers have developed a computational approach that makes it easier to predict mutations that will lead to optimized proteins, based on a relatively small amount of data. Credit: MIT News; iStock.

MIT researchers plan to search for proteins that could be used to measure electrical activity in the brain.

To engineer proteins with useful functions, researchers usually begin with a natural protein that has a desirable function, such as emitting fluorescent light, and put it through many rounds of random mutation that eventually generate an optimized version of the protein.

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Researchers identified a subcortical brain network that is thought to combine arousal and awareness, playing a key role in human consciousness.

A study recently published in Science Translational Medicine by researchers from Massachusetts General Hospital and Boston Children’s Hospital, both part of the Mass General Brigham healthcare system, introduces a connectivity map of a brain network. This map, the researchers suggest, is essential for maintaining human consciousness.

The study involved high-resolution scans that enabled the researchers to visualize brain connections at submillimeter spatial resolution. This technical advance allowed them to identify previously unseen pathways connecting the brainstem, thalamus, hypothalamus, basal forebrain, and cerebral cortex.

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