Lifeboat Foundation

Researchers led by a team at UT Southwestern Medical Center have developed a device that can isolate blood flow to the brain, keeping the organ alive and functioning independent from the rest of the body for several hours.

The device, tested using a pig brain model and described in Scientific Reports, could lead to new ways to study the human brain without influence from other bodily functions. It also could inform the design of machines for cardiopulmonary bypass that better replicate natural blood flow to the brain. The findings build on previous research by study leader Juan Pascual, M.D., Ph.D., and his colleagues.

This novel method enables research that focuses on the brain independent… More.

Using nanoparticles administered directly into the cerebrospinal fluid (CSF), a research team has developed a treatment that may overcome significant challenges in treating a particularly deadly brain cancer.

The researchers, led by professors Mark Saltzman and Ranjit Bindra, administered to mice with medulloblastoma a treatment that features specially designed drug-carrying nanoparticles. The study, published in Science Translational Medicine, showed that mice who received this treatment lived significantly longer than mice in the control group.

Medulloblastoma, a brain cancer that predominantly affects children, often begins with a tumor deep inside the brain. The cancer is prone to spread along two protective membranes known as the leptomeninges throughout the central nervous system, particularly the surface of the brain and the CSF.

Identifying therapeutic targets for neurodegenerative conditions is often challenging due to the limited accessibility of reproducible, scalable in vitro cell models. Genome-level CRISPR screens are useful for these studies but performing screens that include the necessary replicates requires billions of cells. Human iPSC-derived cells can provide the needed scale, however, the complex process of directed differentiation is time-consuming, resource-intensive, and rarely feasible. Furthermore, delivering ribonucleases by transfection or transduction is inefficient in human iPSC-derived cells, especially delicate cell types like neurons. As a result, scientists often rely on immortalized cell lines, which do not accurately represent human biology or disease states, to run large-scale CRISPR screens.

In this GEN webinar, two experts will discuss solutions for running large-scale CRISPR screens to identify therapeutic targets for neurodegenerative diseases. They will present ioCRISPR-Ready Cells™: human iPSC-derived cells precision reprogrammed with opti-ox™, that constitutively express Cas9 nuclease, which are built for rapidly generating gene knockouts and CRISPR screens. During the webinar, you’ll learn about two peer-reviewed studies that performed large scale CRISPR knockout screens using opti-ox powered glutamatergic neurons with stable Cas9 expression. The first study demonstrates a loss-of-function genetic screen using a human druggable genome library. The second study investigated possible regulators of the RNA binding motif 3 protein, whose enhanced expression is highly neuroprotective both in vitro and in vivo.

Metabolites called nucleotides are the building blocks of DNA and can impact cancer’s sensitivity or resistance to chemotherapy and radiation in brain cancer. Findings from researchers at the University of Michigan Health Rogel Cancer Center, published in Cancer Discovery, show how a specific nucleotide metabolite, called GTP, controls responses to radiation and chemotherapy in an unexpected way.

“We learned that if you increase a cell’s GTP levels, it makes it really resistant to radiation or chemotherapy. Lowering GTP levels, the cell becomes much more sensitive,” said Daniel Wahl, M.D., Ph.D., associate professor of radiation oncology at Michigan Medicine and senior author of this paper.

Researchers have long known that levels of nucleotides like GTP control how fast DNA damage is repaired, which in turn controls sensitivity to therapies.

As long as people have been alive, they’ve wanted to stay alive. For centuries, explorers have searched for the fountain of youth. And today, scientists are hard at work researching technology that can extend the human lifespan, stop or reverse aging; and even preserve a terminally ill person indefinitely, until a cure for their disease is discovered. But what if — instead of preserving our *bodies* — we could preserve our *consciousness*; by uploading it to a powerful computer. This is called *mind uploading*. And one startup has developed a procedure to do exactly this. It’s scientifically sound, there’s a waiting list to participate, and the procedure — is one hundred percent fatal. Let’s find out why.〰
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You’ve probably heard of CRISPR, the revolutionary technology that allows us to edit the DNA in living organisms. Biochemist and 2023 Audacious Project grantee Jennifer Doudna earned the Nobel Prize for her groundbreaking work in this field — and now she’s here to tell us about its next world-changing advancement. She explains how her team at the Innovative Genomics Institute is pioneering a brand new field of science — precision microbiome editing — that uses CRISPR in an effort to solve seemingly insurmountable problems like asthma, Alzheimer’s and climate change.
This ambitious idea is part of the Audacious Project, TED’s initiative to inspire and fund global change.

If you love watching TED Talks like this one, become a TED Member to support our mission of spreading ideas: https://ted.com/membership.

Continue reading “CRISPR’s Next Advance Is Bigger Than You Think” »

How are synapses formed, those points of contact that allow the transmission of information from one neuron to the other? Working with an international team, researchers from the Leibniz-Forschungsinstitut für Molekulare Pharmakologie (FMP) have now uncovered a crucial mechanism and elucidated the identity of the axonal transport vesicles that generates synapses. The findings provide an important basis for promoting the regeneration of nerve cells and counteracting the aging process in the future. The results have just been published in the journal Science.

Whether in the brain or in the muscles, wherever there are nerve cells, there are synapses. These contact points between neurons form the basis for the transmission of excitation, i.e. communication between neurons. As in any communication process, there is a sender and a receiver: Nerve cell processes called axons generate and transmit electrical signals thereby acting as signal senders. Synapses are points of contact between axonal nerve terminals (the pre-synapse) and post-synaptic neurons. At these synapses, the electrical impulse is converted into chemical messengers that are received and sensed by the post-synapses of the neighboring neuron. The messengers are released from special membrane sacs called synaptic vesicles.

Year 2020 face_with_colon_three

Ah, Memories! They can be some of our best assets or our most painful tormentors. Good memories give us a sensation of warmth and hope for better times, but bad memories can cause serious trauma.

In this study we aimed to detect epigenetic and genetic loci associated with PTSD in a homogeneous cohort of traumatized police officers. Both a genome-wide and hypothesis-driven replication approach did not result in DMPs between PTSD patients and trauma-exposed controls. GSE analysis on the top 100 DMPs showed, however, a plausible association of the dopaminergic neurogenesis pathway with PTSD. Furthermore, we observed one DMR located at the PAX8 gene suggesting consistent hypermethylation in PTSD patients. Genetic analyses yielded three CpG-SNPs significantly associated with PTSD. Of these, one CpG-SNP, located at the CACNA1C locus, was also significantly associated with PTSD in an independent replication sample of trauma-exposed children. Notably, this result shows that the Illumina 450K array is not restricted to epigenetic surveys but can provide informative genetic data as well.

Although our sample was small, it was highly homogenous as all participants were former or current police officers, and cases and controls were matched for sex, age, education, and years of police service. All participants reported multiple prior traumatic events, without significant group differences in reported types of traumatic experiences. PTSD patients fulfilled current diagnostic criteria for PTSD, while our trauma-exposed controls had minimal PTSD symptoms and did not report lifetime PTSD or other trauma-related psychiatric disorders. Thus our controls were apparently resilient to adverse mental health outcome of trauma. This study design, including extreme phenotypes following similar trauma load, was considered to favor detection of PTSD-associated loci, as also suggested by others [22]. Nevertheless, our genome-wide survey clearly remains limited in statistical power.