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Category: neuroscience – Page 52

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.

Why Alzheimer’s patients forget loved ones

Few moments are more heartbreaking for families of Alzheimer’s disease patients than when a loved one no longer recognizes them. New research from the University of Virginia School of Medicine published in Alzheimer’s & Dementia may reveal why that happens and offer hope for prevention.

UVA’s Harald Sontheimer, graduate student Lata Chaunsali and their colleagues found that when protective structures around break down, people may lose the ability to recognize loved ones. In lab studies, keeping these structures intact helped mice remember one another.

“Finding a structural change that explains a specific memory loss in Alzheimer’s is very exciting,” said Sontheimer, chair of UVA’s Department of Neuroscience and member of the UVA Brain Institute. “It is a completely new target, and we already have suitable drug candidates in hand.”

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