Tag: functional

A team of scientists from the Leibniz Institute for Food Systems Biology at the Technical University of Munich has now discovered that the odorant receptor OR5K1 is specialized to recognize pyrazines in both humans and domesticated animals. These are volatile substances that contribute to the typical odor of many vegetables or are formed when food

In a large-scale study of electronic health records, Vanderbilt University Medical Center investigators have determined the prevalence of functional seizures and characterized comorbidities associated with them. Functional seizures are sudden attacks or spasms that look like epileptic seizures but do not have the aberrant brain electrical patterns of epilepsy. The research team, headed by Lea

Employing advanced technologies that allow whole brain imaging at single-cell resolution, researchers at University of California San Diego School of Medicine report that in an alcohol-dependent mouse model, the rodent brain’s functional architecture is substantially remodeled. But when deprived of alcohol, the mice displayed increased coordinated brain activity and reduced modularity compared to nondrinker or

A new gene therapy turns glial cells—abundant support cells in the brain—into neurons, repairing damage that results from stroke and significantly improving motor function in mice. A paper describing the new therapy, which uses the NeuroD1 gene, appears online in the journal Molecular Therapy. Once further developed, this NeuroD1-based gene therapy could potentially be used

An investigation led by a team of researchers from the Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) departments of Neurology, Psychiatry and Radiology has found altered connectivity among brain regions that handle sensorimotor, emotional and cognitive signaling in patients with functional neurological disorder, a common condition involving neurologic symptoms that have no readily apparent physical cause. Their report

Over 2 million people receive haemodialysis treatment worldwide. Their physical condition is affected by hours of forced physical inactivity while they receive the treatment several times a week, exacerbated by muscular atrophy derived from chronic kidney disease. This affects activities such as walking or standing up from a chair. Several studies have shown the efficacy

The underlying structure-function relationship of living tissues depends on structural and hierarchical anisotropy. Clinical exploitation of the interplay between cells and their immediate microenvironment has rarely used macroscale, three-dimensional (3-D) constructs. Biomechanical robustness is an important biomimetic factor that is compromised during biofabrication, limiting the relevance of such scaffolds in translational medicine. In a recent

Stroke is the most common cause of adult disability. This is due not only to the high incidence of stroke, but also because spontaneous recovery is often incomplete and no drugs are available that hasten recovery. Mesencephalic astrocyte-derived neurotrophic factor MANF is neuroprotective when administered before experimental stroke in rats. A massive immune response mediated

Our ability to remember past events develops rapidly in the first couple of years of life, but it’s not clear exactly how this happens. Researchers at the Center for Mind and Brain at the University of California, Davis have now been able to carry out functional MRI brain scans of sleeping toddlers, and show for

Human immune cells in blood can be converted directly into functional neurons in the laboratory in about three weeks with the addition of just four proteins, researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine have found. The dramatic transformation does not require the cells to first enter a state called pluripotency but instead occurs through