The findings suggest that vitamin B3 may help strengthen and restore a weakened immune system.
Category: neuroscience – Page 3
Brain Disease Decades Later? Study Links Childhood Surgery to Amyloid Build-Up
A new report describes two unusually young patients who developed cerebral amyloid angiopathy decades after childhood cardiac surgery. Researchers suspect amyloid-beta may have been inadvertently transmitted through cadaver-derived surgical material used at the time. The finding does not mean Alzheimer’s is contagious in everyday life, but it does add to evidence that rare past medical exposures may seed abnormal brain protein buildup years later.
Reference #18.45a42617.1774897640.756bc240
https://errors.edgesuite.net/18.45a42617.1774897640.756bc240
Newly discovered recessive neurodevelopmental disorder may be most prevalent ever
Researchers at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York have identified and described a previously unknown recessive neurodevelopmental disorder (NDD) that appears to be the most prevalent ever discovered. The condition is caused by changes in a small noncoding gene called RNU2-2. It is estimated to affect thousands of individuals in the United States and account for about 10% of all recessive NDD cases with a known genetic cause.
The work was done in collaboration with U.S. collaborators in the Undiagnosed Diseases Network led by colleagues at Stanford University and international collaborators in the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Italy. The findings, published in the March 30 issue of Nature Genetics, provide long-awaited answers for many families and may inform future drug development.
The team found that the disorder is caused by a near-complete absence of a molecule called U2-2 RNA, which is produced by the RNU2-2 gene. Children with the condition typically inherit one altered copy of the gene from each parent, although sometimes changes arise spontaneously by genetic mutation. While the parents are unaffected, the combined effect on both copies of the gene in their children leads to disrupted brain development in their child.
This tiny implant, smaller than a grain of salt, can read your brain
A new neural implant is so small it can rest on a grain of salt, yet it can track and wirelessly transmit brain activity for over a year. It’s powered by laser light that safely passes through tissue and communicates using tiny infrared signals. This ultra-miniature device could transform how scientists study the brain without invasive wiring.
Epigenetic regulation of serine biosynthesis by PHF8 during neurogenesis
Linking epigenetics and metabolism in neurogenesis!
Epigenetic regulation and metabolism are tightly coordinated during progenitor cell growth but the processes linking this crosstalk is not well understood.
The researchers examined in neural stem cells the role of PHF8, a histone demethylase whose mutations are linked to Siderius-Hamel syndrome, a rare neurodevelopmental disorder.
The authors show that PHF8 regulates neural progenitor proliferation by coordinating epigenetic and metabolic programs and drives serine biosynthesis by maintaining chromatin accessibility of serine synthesis genes.
They also demonstrate that loss of PHF8 disrupts metabolism, autophagy, and vesicle formation and its deficiency leads to DNA damage and halts neurogenesis in vivo. sciencenewshighlights ScienceMission https://sciencemission.com/Epigenetic-regulation-of-serine-biosynthesis
Progenitor proliferation during neurodevelopment requires tight coordination of epigenetic regulation and metabolism. However, the crosstalk between these processes remains poorly understood. To investigate this, we examine in neural stem cells the role of PHF8, a histone demethylase whose mutations are linked to Siderius-Hamel syndrome, a rare neurodevelopmental disorder. Through an integrated multi-omics approach — combining transcriptomics, epigenomics, and metabolomics — we identify PHF8 as a key driver of the serine biosynthesis pathway, safeguarding the intracellular serine pool essential for neural progenitor proliferation. PHF8 fine-tunes chromatin accessibility at promoters of metabolic genes, ensuring their activation during development. Loss of PHF8 disrupts amino acid metabolism, blocks autophagy, and hinders vesicle formation.
Nasal swab test spots early Alzheimer’s signals
Schwann cell-derived exosomes are powerful promoters of nerve repair, capable of enhancing axon regrowth, remyelination, and functional recovery in numerous models. These effects are mediated via multifactorial cargo (miRNAs, mRNAs, proteins) that modulate neurons, glia, endothelial, and immune cells. Importantly, what began as a novel biological insight is now rapidly moving toward therapeutic innovation. Schwann cell-derived exosomes thus represent both a novel mode of glia–neuron communication and a promising avenue for next-generation therapies for nerve regeneration.
JSPS Transformative Area (A) 2023–2028
Summary: Establishing Qualia Structure Paradigm
Do subjective conscious experience and objective brain matters belong to completely different worlds? How are qualia, the contents of consciousness, related to the brain? The question of consciousness and the brain is not only of scientific interest, but it is also directly related to the problems associated with difficulties in understanding human feelings in the real world. Because qualia are difficult to even define in objective terms, conventional studies of consciousness have attempted to explore their neural correlates by fixing perceptual stimuli and reducing experience to binary judgments, such as seen vs. not seen. Recently, we have established a new paradigm to characterize the structure of qualia by measuring the similarity between visual qualia on a large scale, and to reveal their neural correlates and their information structure.
Natural competition between brain circuits may boost information processing
Over the past decades, neuroscience studies have painted an increasingly detailed picture of the human brain, its organization and how it supports various functions. To plan and execute desired behaviors in changing circumstances, networks of neurons in the brain can either work together or suppress each other, thus employing both cooperative and competitive interaction strategies.
Researchers at University of Oxford, University of Cambridge, McGill University, University of Aarhus and Pompeu Fabra University recently set out to better understand the mammalian brain’s underlying dynamics, specifically how its underlying architecture balances cooperative and competitive interactions between neural circuits. Their paper, published in Nature Neuroscience, offers new insight that could both improve the understanding of the brain and inform the development of brain-inspired computational models.
“Building models of the brain is an important part of modern neuroscience,” Andrea Luppi, first author of the paper, told Medical Xpress. “As Nobel winner Reichard Feynman said, ‘what I cannot create, I do not understand.’ Most current models, however, share a limitation. Everyday experience, from focusing attention or switching between tasks, also reveals that brain systems must compete for limited resources.