There’s something special about the APOE2 variant of the APOE (apolipoprotein E) gene: People who carry it tend to live longer, and they have a lower risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease.
Scientists are still trying to figure out why, and now, they have a new lead.
A team led by researchers at the Buck Institute for Research on Aging in the US set out to answer that question using human stem cell-derived neurons and mouse studies.
Scientists at the Max Planck Florida Institute for Neuroscience (MPFI), in collaboration with ZEISS and MetaCell, have developed a powerful new imaging pipeline called Neuroplex. As described in a paper published in eLife, the technique allows simultaneous monitoring of the activity of up to nine distinct neuronal populations in freely moving mice, dramatically accelerating the pace of scientific exploration into how the brain controls behavior.
For years, neuroscientists linking brain activity to behavior have faced a fundamental limitation: Miniscopes, the tiny head-mounted microscopes used to observe neural activity in behaving animals, could capture neural activity, but couldn’t reliably distinguish more than two different types of brain cells at a time.
“To understand the brain, we need to link patterns of activity in specific neurons to behavior,” stated lead author Dr. Mary Phillips. “We can readily use labels to color-code different populations of neurons, but when using miniscopes to correlate neural activity to behavior, we couldn’t distinguish more than two of these populations. This made it difficult to compare the activity across multiple cell types and circuits to understand how specific circuits regulate behavior.”
The emergence of effective immunotherapies has revolutionized therapies for many types of cancer. However, current immunotherapy has limited efficacy in certain patient populations and displays therapeutic resistance after a period of treatment. To address these challenges, a growing number of immunotherapy drugs have been investigated in clinical and preclinical applications. The diverse functionality of peptides has made them attractive as a therapeutic modality, and the global market for peptide-based therapeutics is witnessing significant growth. Peptides can act as immunotherapeutic agents for the treatment of many malignant cancers. However, a systematic understanding of the interactions between different peptides and the host’s immune system remains unclear.
WASHINGTON — Commercial space station developer Vast is moving into satellite manufacturing with a line of high-power satellite buses.
The company announced May 19 Vast Satellite, a product line that uses the technologies Vast developed for commercial space stations to make satellite buses designed for applications ranging from broadband communications to orbital data centers.
The first product is a bus that provides 15 kilowatts of power. The flat-panel bus, with primary dimensions of 2.2 by 3.6 meters, has a dry mass of 700 kilograms and can host payloads of at least 350 kilograms. Designed for initial use in low Earth orbit, the bus has an electric propulsion system that provides more than 500 meters per second of delta-v, or change in velocity.
Scientists at the University of Cambridge have achieved what was once considered impossible by electrically powering insulating nanoparticles to create a completely new kind of LED. Using tiny organic “molecular antennas,” the team found a way to funnel energy into materials that normally cannot conduct electricity, producing ultra pure near infrared light with remarkable efficiency.