QT:{{”
Smith’s team knew from imaging and brain-tissue studies that axon fibres from the brains of female rats and humans are slimmer than those from males. They wanted to know more about the differences and what effect they might have on brain injury, so they cultured rat neurons and then damaged them by exposing them to a rapid air blast. In the neurons from female rats, the axons were smaller and the microtubules narrower and more susceptible to damage than in the cells from males. The same was true for cultured human neurons5.
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https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02089-2
Posts Tagged ‘scinews’
Why sports concussions are worse for women
September 4, 2021‘It will change everything’: DeepMind’s AI makes gigantic leap in solving protein structures
December 4, 2020Human speech may have a universal transmission rate: 39 bits per second | Science | AAAS
April 14, 2020QT:{{”
Some languages were clearly faster than others: no surprise there. But when the researchers took their final step—multiplying this rate by the bit rate to find out how much information moved per second—they were shocked by the consistency of their results. No matter how fast or slow, how simple or complex, each language gravitated toward an average rate of 39.15 bits per second, they report today in Science Advances. In comparison, the world’s first computer modem (which came out in 1959) had a transfer rate of 110 bits per second, and the average home internet connection today has a transfer rate of 100 megabits per second (or 100 million bits).
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Alzheimer’s may be caused by haywire immune system eating brain connections
January 28, 2020QT:{{”
“Stevens has spent much of her career studying a normal immune mechanism that prunes weak or unnecessary synapses as the brain matures from the womb through adolescence, allowing more important connections to become stronger. In this process, a protein called C1q sets off a series of chemical reactions that ultimately mark a synapse for destruction. After a synapse has been “tagged,” immune cells called microglia—the brain’s trash disposal service—know to “eat” it, Stevens says. When this system goes awry during the brain’s
development, whether in the womb or later during childhood and into the teen years, it may lead to psychiatric disorders such as schizophrenia, she says.”
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Sent from my iPad
Mystery RNA spawns gene-activating peptides : Nature News
March 2, 2019https://www.nature.com/news/2010/100715/full/news.2010.356.html
QT:[[”
It should be possible to scan the genome for sequences encoding peptides shorter than 100 amino acids, says Mark Gerstein, a computational biologist at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, but sorting through the many ‘hits’ to determine which are functional is likely to be much more difficult.
Meanwhile, Gerstein notes that the polished rice peptides could also have implications for how we view pseudogenes, which have long been thought to be defunct relics of protein-coding genes. Pseudogenes often contain many signals that would stop protein synthesis and, as a result, could only encode short amino-acid chains. “Maybe this would provide a new way for pseudogenes to have some sort of function,” he says.
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Human brain samples yield a genomic trove | Science
December 15, 2018The papers are out!
Using the tag pecrollout for this.
http://science.sciencemag.org/content/362/6420/1227
QT: {{”
The project’s namesake, ENCODE (Encyclopedia of DNA Elements), was a broader quest to map noncoding regions of the human genome. Its initial results, unveiled in 2012, stirred controversy. Scientists disputed the team’s claim that most of the genome was functional and questioned whether the project’s insights would be worth NIH’s $185 million investment (Science, 21 March 2014, p. 1306).
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Human brain samples yield a genomic trove | Science
December 14, 2018The papers are out!
Using the tag pecrollout for this.
http://science.sciencemag.org/content/362/6420/1227
QT: {{”
The project’s namesake, ENCODE (Encyclopedia of DNA Elements), was a broader quest to map noncoding regions of the human genome. Its initial results, unveiled in 2012, stirred controversy. Scientists disputed the team’s claim that most of the genome was functional and questioned whether the project’s insights would be worth NIH’s $185 million investment (Science, 21 March 2014, p. 1306).
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To monitor the health of cities’ residents, look no further than their sewers
June 16, 2018To monitor the health of cities’ residents, look no further than their
sewers https://CEN.ACS.org/environment/water/monitor-health-citiesresidents-look-further/96/i18 Urban metabolism metrology & wastewater-based epidemiology. Big application is measuring illicit drugs. Interesting #privacy issues.
Prehistoric proteins: Raising the dead
June 15, 2018QT:{{”
“The oestrogen receptor achieves this by binding substances that contain a chemical structure called an aromatized A ring. Because oestrogens are the only steroid hormones to have such a ring, that criterion was enough to ensure that the receptor bound only oestrogens for many millions of years. Until, that is, the chemical industry started pumping out hundreds of substances containing such aromatized rings, which the oestrogen receptor unwittingly bound. “The endocrine disrupters are taking advantage, unfortunately, of the promiscuity that is the result of the evolutionary history of receptors,” Thornton says.”
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Prehistoric proteins: Raising the dead
http://www.nature.com/news/prehistoric-proteins-raising-the-dead-1.10261
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