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Summary: Researchers have identified a previously unknown form of neural communication. They report the findings could help better the understanding of neural activity associated with specific brain processing and neurological disorders.

Source: Case Western Reserve University.

Biomedical engineering researchers at Case Western Reserve University say they have identified a previously unidentified form of neural communication, a discovery that could help scientists better understand neural activity surrounding specific brain processes and brain disorders.

Circa 2015

The first successful vaccination of deer against chronic wasting disease is reported in the journal Vaccine, (Vaccine 2015;38:726–33), posted online in advance of print Dec. 21, 2014.

Researchers say the breakthrough may not only protect U.S. livestock against CWD but may also shed new light on human diseases suspected of being caused by prion infections, such as Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, kuru, familial insomnia, and variably protease-sensitive prionopathy. Some studies also have associated prionlike infections with Alzheimer’s disease.

Continue reading “First successful CWD vaccine tested in deer” »

It is the first such research to be undertaken at the university.

IBRO is the global federation of neuroscience organizations that aims to promote and support neuroscience around the world through training, teaching, collaborative research, outreach and advocacy.

The research will be carried out at Sahu’s Cell Biology and Molecular metabolism lab at the Vikram Sarabhai Institute of Cell and Molecular Biology, which is headed by Professor Sarita Gupta.

Continue reading “Ahmedabad: MSU researcher gets global grant for vesicular trafficking study” »

Most people have at some point echoed Macbeth’s complaint about the loss of “sleep that knits up the ravelled sleeve of care”. Sleep disorders, such as obstructive sleep apnoea (when breathing temporarily stops, causing both sleep disruption and lack of oxygen in blood) and sleep deprivation, have been associated with an increased risk of atherosclerosis and its harmful cardiovascular effects^,. Atherosclerosis is characterized by the formation of ‘plaques’ in arteries, as white blood cells enter the artery wall, take up cholesterol and other substances from the blood and trigger an inflammatory response. However, the mechanisms linking sleep disruption and atherosclerosis have been largely unknown. Writing in Nature, McAlpine et al. show that persistent sleep disruption causes the brain to signal the bone marrow to increase the production of white blood cells.

McAlpine et al. studied mice that were prone to developing atherosclerosis. The authors induced sleep fragmentation by moving a bar intermittently across the bottom of the animals’ cages during their sleep period (Fig. 1), and compared these animals with animals that slept normally. They found that mice with sleep fragmentation had more-severe atherosclerosis, which was paralleled by increases in the production of white blood cells in the bone marrow and in the numbers of monocytes and neutrophils — two types of white blood cell — in the blood. These effects were absent if the bar was moved when the mice were fully awake. Stress activates the sympathetic nervous system (which is associated with the ‘fight-or-flight’ response), and such activation increases the production of white blood cells and atherosclerosis in other experimental settings. However, the authors did not find evidence for a role of sympathetic activation in their setting.

Scientists think they’ve identified a previously unknown form of neural communication that self-propagates across brain tissue, and can leap wirelessly from neurons in one section of brain tissue to another – even if they’ve been surgically severed.

The discovery offers some radical new insights about the way neurons might be talking to one another, via a mysterious process unrelated to conventionally understood mechanisms, such as synaptic transmission, axonal transport, and gap junction connections.

“We don’t know yet the ‘So what?’ part of this discovery entirely,” says neural and biomedical engineer Dominique Durand from Case Western Reserve University.

Continue reading “Neuroscientists Say They’ve Found an Entirely New Form of Neural Communication” »

Deep-learning neural networks have come a long way in the past several years—we now have systems that are capable of beating people at complex games such as shogi, Go and chess. But is the progress of such systems limited by their basic architecture? Shimon Ullman, with the Weizmann Institute of Science, addresses this question in a Perspectives piece in the journal Science and suggests some ways computer scientists might reach beyond simple AI systems to create artificial general intelligence (AGI) systems.

Deep learning networks are able to learn because they have been programmed to create artificial neurons and the connections between them. As they encounter new data, new neurons and communication paths between them are formed—very much like the way the human brain operates. But such systems require extensive training (and a feedback system) before they are able to do anything useful, which stands in stark contrast to the way that humans learn. We do not need to watch thousands of people in action to learn to follow someone’s gaze, for example, or to figure out that a smile is something positive.

Ullman suggests this is because humans are born with what he describes as preexisting network structures that are encoded into our neural circuitry. Such structures, he explains, provide growing infants with an understanding of the physical world in which they exist—a base upon which they can build more complex structures that lead to general intelligence. If computers had similar structures, they, too, might develop physical and social skills without the need for thousands of examples.

There are a lot of people who like to claim themselves as “supremely logical.” The ones who insist that their every thought is controlled by reason and not emotions. Of course, this is incorrect. Outside of people with certain kinds of brain damage, people are not logical beings. Especially since there’s no definition of logic that fits the definition of what lot’s of people refer to as logic.

Why so many men online love to use “logic” to win an argument, and then disappear before they can find out they’re wrong.

The brain can’t directly encode the passage of time, but recent work hints at a workaround for putting timestamps on memories of events.

Genetic, epidemiologic, and biochemical evidence suggests that predisposition to Alzheimer’s disease (AD) may arise from altered cholesterol metabolism, although the molecular pathways that may link cholesterol to AD phenotypes are only partially understood. Here, we perform a phenotypic screen for pTau accumulation in AD-patient iPSC-derived neurons and identify cholesteryl esters (CE), the storage product of excess cholesterol, as upstream regulators of Tau early during AD development. Using isogenic induced pluripotent stem cell (iPSC) lines carrying mutations in the cholesterol-binding domain of APP or APP null alleles, we found that while CE also regulate Aβ secretion, the effects of CE on Tau and Aβ are mediated independent pathways. Efficacy and toxicity screening in iPSC- derived astrocytes and neurons showed that allosteric activation of CYP46A1 lowers CE specifically in neurons and is well tolerated by astrocytes. These data reveal that CE independently regulate Tau and Aβ and identify a druggable CYP46A1-CE-Tau axis in AD.

Van der Kant et al. performed a repurposing drug screen in iPSC-derived AD neurons and identified compounds that reduce aberrant accumulation of phosphorylated Tau (pTau). Reduction of cholesteryl ester levels or allosteric activation of CYP46A1 by lead compounds enhanced pTau degradation independently of APP and Aβ.