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Category: neuroscience – Page 22

Pain-sensing neurons kick-start immune responses that drive allergies and asthma

Pain-sensing neurons in the gut kindle inflammatory immune responses that cause allergies and asthma, according to a new study by Weill Cornell Medicine. The findings, published in Nature, suggest that current drugs may not be as effective because they only address the immune component of these conditions, overlooking the contribution of neurons.

“Today’s blockbuster biologics are sometimes only 50% effective and when the treatments do work, they sometimes lose their efficacy over time,” said senior author Dr. David Artis, director of the Jill Roberts Institute for Research in Inflammatory Bowel Disease and the Michael Kors Professor in Immunology at Weill Cornell.

While the idea may be new to the field, Dr. Artis has been thinking about the role the nervous system may play in allergies and asthma for about two decades. For example, many of the symptoms that characterize these conditions, like itching and wheezing, are known to be neuronally controlled. “That was one of the clues that prompted us to look closer for a connection,” Dr. Artis said.

Prenatal caffeine exposure induces autism-like behaviors in offspring under a high-fat diet via the gut microbiota-IL-17A-brain axis

This recently published research is compelling. “Microbiota-IL-17A-brain axis… induced ASD” both in and out of the womb has been our focus in learning about injury. ‘’ https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0147651323013015 Interesting to see differences related to sex given much higher ASD rates in males, though that ratio has changed over the years.

You may be able to guess what kinds of things can affect microbiota-IL-17A-brain axis in infants, leading to neutrophil activity and brain inflammation in context of gut dysbiosis, a microbial predisposition to adverse reaction and injury. No research is published on this dynamic. Zero. microbiomevaccinesafetyproject Note: this is also the pathway explaining fever reducing symptoms in autism, a double-edged sword. https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1C3ZjUoV8k/

Prenatal caffeine exposure (PCE) is a significant contributor to intrauterine growth retardation (IUGR) in offspring, which has been linked to an increased susceptibility to autism spectrum disorder (ASD) later in life. Additionally, a high-fat diet (HFD) has been shown to exacerbate ASD-like behaviors, but the underlying mechanisms remain unclear. In this study, we first noted in the rat model of IUGR induced by PCE that male PCE offspring exhibited typical ASD-like behaviors post-birth, in contrast to their female counterparts. The female PCE offspring demonstrated only reduced abilities in free exploration and spatial memory. Importantly, both male and female PCE offspring displayed ASD-like behaviors when exposed to HFD.

Algorithm matches drugs to glioblastoma’s diverse cell types, offering hope for individualized therapies

Researchers have developed a new computational approach that uncovers possible drugs for specific cellular targets for treating glioblastoma, a lethal brain tumor. This approach enabled them to predict more effective treatment combinations to fight the disease on an individualized basis.

This laboratory and computational research effort was led by scientists at Georgetown’s Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center.

“The cellular targets we identified could be key to effectively fighting a disease that has seen only one new targeted drug approved in the last two decades,” says Nagi G. Ayad, Ph.D., senior author, associate director for translational research, and professor of oncology at Georgetown Lombardi.

A stress-related chemical could initiate symptoms of depression

Depression, one of the most prevalent mental health disorders worldwide, is characterized by persistent feelings of sadness, impaired daily functioning and a loss of interest in daily activities, often along with altered sleeping and eating patterns. Past research findings suggest that stress can play a key role in the emergence of depressive symptoms, yet the biological processes via which it might increase the risk of depression remain poorly understood.

Researchers at Wenzhou Medical University, Capital Medical University and other institutes in China recently carried out a study investigating the biological processes that could link stress to the onset of depression. Their results, published in Molecular Psychiatry, suggest that stress influences the levels of a chemical known as formaldehyde (FA) in specific parts of the brain, which could in turn disrupt their normal functioning, contributing to the emergence of depression.

Humans may be predisposed to understanding the complexities of music

There is a long-standing debate in the field of music cognition about the impact of musical training and whether formal training is needed to pick up higher-order tonal structures—the overarching harmonic framework of a piece of music.

New research from the University of Rochester, published in Psychological Science, offers fresh insight into that discussion. The findings suggest that nonmusicians have a surprisingly sophisticated ear when it comes to music.

“Formal training in music—including music theory—fine-tunes the ear to pick up tonal patterns in music, like tonic, dominant, and cadences,” says Elise Piazza, an assistant professor in the Departments of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and Neuroscience and the senior author of the study. “But it turns out that with zero training, people are actually picking up on those structures just from listening to music over the lifespan.”

Worms as particle sweepers: How simple movement, not intelligence, drives environmental order

When observing small worms under a microscope, one might observe something very surprising: the worms appear to make a sweeping motion to clean their own environment. Physicists at the University of Amsterdam, Georgia Tech and Sorbonne Université/CNRS have now discovered the reason for this unexpected behavior.

When centimeter-long aquatic worms, such as T. tubifex or Lumbriculus variegatus, are placed in a Petri dish filled with sub-millimeter-sized sand particles, something surprising happens. Over time, the worms begin to spontaneously clean up their surroundings. They sweep particles into compact clusters, gradually reshaping and organizing their environment.

In a study that was published in Physical Review X this week, a team of researchers show that this remarkable sweeping behavior does not require a brain, or any kind of complex interaction between the worms and the particles. Instead, it emerges from the natural undulating motion and flexibility that the worms possess.

Mathematics uncovers shifting brain connectivity in autism and aging

It is a central question in neuroscience to understand how different regions of the brain interact, how strongly they “talk” to each other. Researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in the Sciences Leipzig, Germany, the Institute of Mathematical Sciences in Chennai, India, and colleagues demonstrate how mathematical techniques from topological data analysis (TDA) can provide a new, multiscale perspective on brain connectivity. The study was published in the journal Patterns.

With the rise of large neuroimaging datasets, scientists now work with detailed maps of brain connectivity—network representations that show how hundreds of brain regions fluctuate and coordinate their activity over time. But making sense of these enormous networks poses a challenge: What patterns matter? Which changes signal healthy aging, and which reflect differences associated with autism spectrum disorder (ASD)?

The study introduces a mathematical innovation that helps answer precisely these questions. Researchers applied persistent homology, a tool from topological data analysis (TDA), to detect how brain connectivity reorganizes during healthy aging and in ASD.

Dissecting surveying behavior of reactive microglia under chronic neurodegeneration

eLife Assessment

This fundamental study provides new evidence of a change in how microglia survey neurons during the chronic phase of neurodegeneration, which researchers studying neuroinflammation and its role in neurodegenerative disease should find interesting. In this research, using time-lapse imaging of acute brain slices from prion-affected mice, the researchers show that, unlike in healthy brains, microglia become reactive, lose their territorial boundaries, and become highly mobile, exhibiting “kiss-and-ride” behavior, migrating into brain tissue and forming reversible, transient body-to-body contact with neurons. The evidence is compelling, with well-executed time-lapse imaging, good quantitative analysis across several disease stages, pharmacological validation of P2Y6 involvement, and the very surprising finding that this mobile behavior persists after microglia are removed from the brain.

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