Mind the gaps: The holes in your brain…make you smart
https://www.NewScientist.com/article/mg23331180-300-mind-the-gaps-the-holes-in-your-brain-that-make-you-smart/ Contrasts connectivity from graphs vs large-scale topology
Posts Tagged ‘brain’
Mind the gaps: The holes in your brain that make you smart
June 10, 2017Intersection of diverse neuronal genomes and neuropsychiatric disease: The Brain Somatic Mosaicism Network | Science
May 15, 2017The #Brain #Somatic Mosaicism Network
http://science.ScienceMag.org/content/356/6336/eaal1641 Long lifespan of neurons accentuates impact of individual somatic mutations
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Neuropsychiatric disorders have a complex genetic architecture. Human genetic population-based studies have identified numerous heritable sequence and structural genomic variants associated with
susceptibility to neuropsychiatric disease. However, these germline variants do not fully account for disease risk. During brain development, progenitor cells undergo billions of cell divisions to generate the ~80 billion neurons in the brain. The failure to accurately repair DNA damage arising during replication,
transcription, and cellular metabolism amid this dramatic cellular expansion can lead to somatic mutations. Somatic mutations that alter subsets of neuronal transcriptomes and proteomes can, in turn, affect cell proliferation and survival and lead to neurodevelopmental disorders. The long life span of individual neurons and the direct relationship between neural circuits and behavior suggest that somatic mutations in small populations of neurons can significantly affect individual neurodevelopment. The Brain Somatic Mosaicism Network has been founded to study somatic mosaicism both in neurotypical human brains and in the context of complex neuropsychiatric disorders.” “}}
New Brain Insights from Cochlear Implants » American Scientist
March 5, 2017#Brain Insights from Cochlear Implants
http://www.americanscientist.org/blog/pub/new-brain-insights-from-cochlear-implants Soundtracks simulating the voice of implant based on 1 sided deaf patients
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An additional insight provided by single-sided deaf patients is that they allow us, for the first time, to objectively determine the “voice” of an implant. That’s because these patients can compare how speech sounds through their cochlear implant with what they hear in their normal-hearing ear.”
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Building a Brain in the Lab – Scientific American
January 30, 2017Building a Brain in the Lab
https://www.ScientificAmerican.com/article/building-a-brain-in-the-lab/ Nice summary of the development of organoids & their promise for personalized treatments
The Brain That Couldn’t Remember – The New York Times
August 13, 2016The #Brain That Couldn’t Remember
http://www.NYTimes.com/2016/08/07/magazine/the-brain-that-couldnt-remember.html Fight over the ownership of HM’s highlights issues in consent HT @FearLoathingBTX
Cell lineage analysis in human brain using endogenous retroelements. – PubMed – NCBI
May 7, 2016Cell-lineage analysis in human #brain using endogenous retroelements http://www.cell.com/neuron/abstract/S0896-6273(14)01137-4 Tracing L1 insertions w/ #singlecell sequencing
Using single cell WGS of 16 neuronal cells the authors investigated two somatic insertions of L1Hs elements in an adult human brain. Using these results the authors infer that L1 somatic insertions are infrequent and ALUs and SVAs somatic retrotransposition are extremely rare. Assessing two L1Hs insertions in 32 samples across different regions of this same adult brain, they found that while one insertion was spatially restricted (2x1cm region), the other was found across all samples of the adult brain (but not found in other tissues such as Heart, Lung, etc.). The more restricted one (L1Hs#1) is inferred to have happened during the Fetal stage (first trimester) while the broader one happened earlier, approximately 2 weeks
post-fertilization. Overall the paper is clear, concise, and simple. It answers an interesting biological question: Can retrotransposition be used as a marker of cell clonal expansion? It does, although the retrotransposition frequency is very small and SNVs might support better results for the same analysis due to their higher frequency..
Bacteria on the Brain – The New Yorker
May 2, 2016Bacteria on the #Brain
http://www.NewYorker.com/magazine/2015/12/07/bacteria-on-the-brainNice #bioethics discussion of greater allowance for risk in innovative treatment vs research
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…Schrot sent an e-mail to Robert Nelson, a pediatric ethicist and oncologist at the F.D.A., describing the procedure and asking for advice. Nelson replied quickly. “If the product”—Enterobacter—“you plan to use is available to you,” he wrote, in part, “I would suggest you proceed under the strategy of innovative treatment rather than research.”
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Understanding multicellular function and disease with human tissue-specific networks : Nature Genetics : Nature Publishing Group
November 28, 2015Human tissue-specific #networks by @TroyanskayaLab
http://www.nature.com/ng/journal/v47/n6/full/ng.3259.html
Brain-specific ones & NetWAS approach for combining #GWAS genes
access all tissue networks including the brain-specific
networks at giant.princeton.edu
A Dying Young Woman’s Hope in Cryonics and a Future
September 15, 2015A Dying Young Woman’s Hope in Cryonics & a Future http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/13/us/cancer-immortality-cryogenics.html Glioma sufferer opts for $80K Alcor crowdfunded, brain preservation
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“If the $80,000 fee for neuropreservation seemed steep, they learned that about a third of it pays for medical personnel to be on call for death, while another third is placed in a trust for future revival. The investment income from the trust also pays for storage in liquid nitrogen, which is so cold that it can prevent decay in biological tissue for millenniums.
Some of what they found out gave them pause. Alcor’s antifreeze, once pumped through the blood vessels, transitions into a glassy substance before ice can form and do damage. The process, called vitrification, is similar to that used to store sperm, eggs and embryos for fertility treatments. But that glassy substance has been known to crack, likely causing damage of a different kind.
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His brain, her brain?
May 13, 2015His brain, her brain? http://www.sciencemag.org/content/346/6212/915.summary Neurosexism potentially results from multiple testing & only publishing positives
linkstream2 microblog 