“Life is incredible.” Here’s how a brain implant changed the life of Jon Nelson, who long suffered from severe depression. Now a patient advocate for startup Motif, he spoke to Emily Chang about the hope of using neurotech to treat mental illnesses.
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Advance paves the way for broad applications in medicine and biotech. Researchers from the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering and the University of Rome Tor Vergata in Italy have developed synthetic genes that function like the genes in living cells.
The artificial genes can build intracellular structures through a cascading sequence that builds self-assembling structures piece by piece. The approach is similar to building furniture with modular units, much like those found at IKEA. Using the same parts, one can build many different things and it’s easy to take the set apart and reconstruct the parts for something else. The discovery offers a path toward using a suite of simple building blocks that can be programmed to make complex biomolecular materials, such as nanoscale tubes from DNA tiles. The same components can also be programmed to break up the design for different materials.
The research study was recently published in Nature Communications and led by Elisa Franco, a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering and bioengineering at UCLA Samueli. Daniela Sorrentino, a postdoctoral scholar in Franco’s Dynamic Nucleic Acid Systems lab, is the study’s first author.
The secret to cellular youth may depend on keeping the nucleolus—a condensed structure inside the nucleus of a cell—small, according to Weill Cornell Medicine investigators. The findings were elucidated in yeast, a model organism famous for making bread and beer and yet surprisingly similar to humans on the cellular level.
The study, published Nov. 25 in Nature Aging, may lead to new longevity treatments that could extend human lifespan. It also establishes a mortality timer that reveals how long a cell has left before it dies.
As people get older, they are more likely to develop health conditions, such as cancer, cardiovascular disease and neurodegenerative diseases.
The genome-editing technology can be supercharged by artificial intelligence—and the results are already being felt.
Summary: Researchers have developed a new method to profile gene activity in the living human brain, offering new insights into neurological conditions like epilepsy. By analyzing RNA and DNA collected from electrodes implanted in patients’ brains, the study linked molecular data with electrical recordings of seizures, creating a detailed snapshot of gene activity.
This approach enhances understanding of seizure networks, potentially improving the precision of epilepsy surgeries for patients who don’t respond to medication. Beyond epilepsy, the method could have applications in studying Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and schizophrenia, advancing knowledge of brain disorders at the molecular level.
This is the first symposium of Xapiens at MIT — “The Future of Homo Sapiens”
The future of our species will be majorly influenced by the technical advancements and ethical paradigm shifts over the next several decades. Artificial intelligence, neural enhancement, gene editing, solutions for aging and interplanetary travel, and other emerging technologies are bringing sci-fi’s greatest ideas to reality.
Continue reading “Ed Boyden — The Future of Humanity | Xapiens Symposium” »
A new study describes an exciting discovery that changes the way we understand human bitter taste receptors. The research has revealed a hidden “pocket” inside one of the body’s bitter taste receptors, called TAS2R14.
This breakthrough could help not only understand how our tongue senses bitterness but also investigate the physiological roles of bitter taste receptors that are expressed extraorally. The work is published in Nature Communications, and was led by Prof. Masha Niv from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Dr. Moran Shalev-Benami from the Weizmann Institute, and Dr. Dorothee Weikert from FAU Erlangen.
There are many chemically different molecules that trigger bitter taste sensations, and the body uses a family of 25 receptors to detect them. Interestingly, many drugs also activate this bitter taste system.
The current standard of care for psychosis is a diagnostic interview, but what if it could be diagnosed before the first symptom emerged? Researchers at the Del Monte Institute for Neuroscience at the University of Rochester are pointing toward a potential biomarker in the brain that could lead to more timely interventions and personalized care.
“Establishing such biomarkers could provide a key step in changing how we care for, treat, and offer interventions to people with psychosis,” said Brian Keane, Ph.D., assistant professor of Psychiatry, Center for Visual Science, and Neuroscience at the University of Rochester Medical Center.
Keane recently co-authored an article in Molecular Psychiatry that identifies how MRI scans could reveal brain differences in people with psychosis.
From brain implants that allow paralyzed patients to communicate to the wearable devices enhancing our capabilities, brain-computer interfaces could change the way we use our minds forever.
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In a new work, a team from the University of Pennsylvania tracked the impact of alcohol consumption from the age of 20 on brain health and came to disappointing conclusions.
UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Binge drinking in early adults can lead to long-lasting and potentially permanent dysregulation in the brain, according to a new study in mice, led by researchers at Penn State. They found that neurons, cells that transmit information in the brain via electrical and chemical signals, showed changes following binge drinking were similar in many ways to those seen with cognitive decline.
These findings, published in the journal Neurobiology of Aging, reveal that binge drinking early in life may have lasting impacts that are predictive of future health issues, like Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias, the researchers said. The work could inform the development of therapeutics to help combat these changes — particularly in aging populations who may have given up alcohol decades earlier, according to Nikki Crowley, director of the Penn State Neuroscience Institute at University Park, Huck Early Career Chair in Neurobiology and Neural Engineering, assistant professor of biology in the Eberly College of Science, and the leader of the research team.
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