You’re in a bustling café with a friend. The din is making it hard to tune in to the conversation. The scenario might suggest you’d benefit from a hearing aid. On the other hand, new research suggests that speech-perception difficulty might relate to your cognitive ability.

In a study of three groups—individuals with autism, fetal alcohol syndrome and a “neurotypical” control group—researchers found that cognitive ability was significantly associated with how well the participants, all with typical hearing, processed speech in noisy environments.

“The relationship between cognitive ability and speech-perception performance transcended diagnostic categories. That finding was consistent across all three groups,” said the study’s lead investigator, Bonnie Lau. She is a research assistant professor in otolaryngology–head and neck surgery at the University of Washington School of Medicine and directs lab studies of auditory brain development.

Korean researchers have uncovered compelling evidence that oral bacteria, once colonized in the gut, can affect neurons in the brain and potentially trigger Parkinson’s disease.

The joint research team, led by Professor Ara Koh and doctoral candidate Hyunji Park of POSTECH’s Department of Life Sciences, together with Professor Yunjong Lee and doctoral candidate Jiwon Cheon of Sungkyunkwan University School of Medicine, collaborated with Professor Han-Joon Kim of Seoul National University College of Medicine.

They have identified the mechanism by which metabolites produced by oral bacteria in the gut may trigger the development of Parkinson’s disease. The findings were published online in Nature Communications.

Over the past few decades, biomedical researchers and neuroscientists have devised increasingly advanced techniques to study and alter neurophysiological processes. These include CRISPR (Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats), a sophisticated tool to edit specific genes in some animals, including mice, rats, zebrafish and fruit flies.

Researchers at University of California, San Francisco led by Martin Kampmann recently introduced a more precise CRISPR screening platform that can be applied directly in living tissue, enabling the screening of a larger number of genes at once. The new technique, called CRISPR screening by AAV episome sequencing (CrAAVe-seq), was introduced in a paper published in Nature Neuroscience.

“Human cell-based systems are valuable but cannot fully capture the complexity of the brain,” Biswa Ramani, co-first author of the paper, told Medical Xpress. “Mice often remain the most effective model for many neurological diseases because their brains preserve the diversity and organization of cell types that cannot be replicated in a dish.”