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Category: neuroscience – Page 220

Scientists unveil first draft of atlas of the developing brain

The researchers said they have completed a first draft of atlases of the developing human brain and the developing mammalian brain.

The research focused on human and mouse brain cells, with some work in monkey brain cells too. In their initial draft, the scientists mapped the development of different types of brain cells — tracking how they are born, differentiate and mature into various types with unique functions. They also tracked how genes are turned on or off in these cells over time.

The scientists identified key genes controlling brain processes and uncovered some commonalities of brain cell development between human and animal brains, as well as some unique aspects of the human brain, including identifying previously unknown cell types.

Scientists have reached a milestone in an ambitious initiative to chart how the many types of brain cells emerge and mature from the earliest embryonic and fetal stages until adulthood, knowledge that could point to new ways of tackling certain brain-related conditions like autism and schizophrenia.

Scientists discover creature with “all-body brain”

This is the conclusion of an international team of researchers, who found that this nervous system has a genetic organization resembling that of the brain of vertebrates, like humans.

“Our results show that animals without a conventional central nervous system can still develop a brainlike organization,” said paper author and biologist Jack Ullrich-Lüter of the Natural History Museum, Berlin, in a statement.

He added: “This fundamentally changes how we think about the evolution of complex nervous systems.”

Coordinated brain network activity during emotional arousal may explain vivid, lasting memories

Past psychology studies suggest that people tend to remember emotional events, such as their wedding, the birth of a child or traumatic experiences, more vividly than neutral events, such as a routine professional meeting. While this link between emotion and the recollection of past events is well-established, the neural mechanisms via which emotional states strengthen memories remain poorly understood.

Researchers at the University of Chicago and other institutes carried out a study aimed at better understanding these mechanisms. Their findings, published in Nature Human Behaviour, suggest that emotional states facilitate the encoding of memories by increasing communication between networks of brain regions.

“Emotional experiences tend to be ‘sticky,’ meaning that they endure in our memories and shape how we interpret the past, engage with the present, and anticipate the future,” Yuan Chang Leong, senior author of the paper, told Medical Xpress.

Gut-to-brain signaling restricts post-illness protein appetite, researchers discover

When we get sick, with the flu, say, or pneumonia, there can be a period where the major symptoms of our illness have resolved but we still just don’t feel great.

“While this is common, there’s no real way to quantify what’s going on,” says Nikolai Jaschke, MD, Ph.D., who recently completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Yale School of Medicine (YSM) in the lab of Andrew Wang, MD, Ph.D., associate professor of internal medicine (rheumatology). “And unfortunately, we lack therapeutic tools to support people in this state.”

Jaschke noticed this while taking care of patients recovering from acute illnesses and, when he joined Wang’s lab, he began studying what was happening in the body during recovery. Through this work, Jaschke, Wang, and their colleagues uncovered a gut-to-brain signaling pathway in that restricts appetite—specifically for protein—during recovery. They published their findings on Nov. 4 in Cell.

As brain organoids grow increasingly complex, leading scientists and bioethicists call for global oversight

In an effort to address these ethical grey areas, 17 leading scientists and bioethicists from five countries are urging the establishment of an international oversight body to monitor advances in the rapidly expanding field of human neural organoids and to provide ethical and policy guidance as the science continues to evolve. The call to action, published Thursday in Science, comes as U.S. government agencies are making new investments in organoid science aimed at accelerating drug discovery and reducing reliance on animal models of disease.

In September, the National Institutes of Health announced $87 million in initial contracts to establish a new center dedicated to standardizing organoid research. The move followed an earlier pledge by both the NIH and the Food and Drug Administration to reduce, and possibly replace, testing on mice, primates, and other animals with other methods — including organoids and organ-on-a-chip technologies — for developing certain medicines.

Government promotion of human stem cell models more broadly will only increase the recruitment of new researchers into the field of neural organoids, which has seen an explosion from a few dozen labs a decade ago to hundreds around the world now, said Sergiu Pasca, a pioneering neuroscientist and stem cell biologist at Stanford University who co-authored the Science commentary.

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