Why do you look so angry? This article hasn’t even begun and already you disapprove. Why can’t I ever win with you? I see it in your face. If this sounds unfamiliar, good for you. You don’t need this. For the rest of us, it may be helpful to know that some people seem to have outsized difficulty with reading neutral faces as neutral, even if they are exceptionally accurate at interpreting other facial expressions. Over the past decade psychologists have been piecing together why this occurs.. .. A study published in March in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships suggests that some people who grew up with parents who fought a lot never learned to properly read those in-between faces, perhaps because they spent so much time watching out for signs of conflict. “Angry interactions could be a cue for them to retreat to their room,” said Alice Schermerhorn, a developmental psychologist at the University of Vermont and the author of the study. “By comparison, neutral interactions might not offer much information, so children may not value them and therefore may not learn to recognize them.” These findings build on previous research indicating that depression, anxiety and irritability can affect how a person perceives other people’s faces. It has also been shown that adults who were exposed to violence, neglect or physical abuse in childhood are more likely to see hostility where there is none. This can create a self-reinforcing cycle. © 2018 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Emotions; Aggression
Link ID: 24895 - Posted: 04.24.2018

An epilepsy drug that can damage unborn babies must no longer be prescribed to girls and women of childbearing age in the UK unless they sign a form to say that they understand the risks. Drug regulator the MHRA says the new measures it's introducing will keep future generations of children safe. Those already on valproate medication should see their GP to have their treatment reviewed. No woman or girl should stop taking it without medical advice though. It is thought about 20,000 children in the UK have been left with disabilities caused by valproate since the drug was introduced in the 1970s. Affected families have called for a public inquiry and compensation. Epilepsy charities say one in five women on sodium valproate are unaware that taking it during pregnancy can harm the development and physical health of an unborn baby. Image caption This warning has been on the outside of valproate pill packets since 2016 in Britain And more than one in four have not been given information about risks for their unborn child. The MHRA has changed the licence for valproate, which means any doctor prescribing it will have to ensure female patients are put on a Pregnancy Prevention Programme, © 2018 BBC

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Epilepsy
Link ID: 24894 - Posted: 04.24.2018

By RUTH MARGALIT Harvey Karp, the pediatrician, parenting expert and inventor-slash-entrepreneur, cuts an unimposing figure. Lean and agile, with wispy dark hair, blue-rimmed glasses and a bounce in his step, Karp hugs like the Angeleno he has become and deadpans like the New Yorker he once was. Gray has infiltrated his beard and his eyes are a little hooded, but he still makes for a young 66. He used to dress only in blue button-up shirts with matching sweater vests and bulbous ties in a seemingly self-conscious take on the Nutty Professor, but he has graduated to a darker navy, with slim-fitting jeans, an occasional blazer and a pair of Converse or laceless Vans: his transformation into a hip West Coast chief executive — Prius included — complete. Karp is the author of “The Happiest Baby on the Block,” the 2002 book on newborn sleeping and soothing techniques that has sold more than a million copies and remains on Amazon’s 10 best-selling parenting books — a “category killer,” in the words of its publisher. An accompanying DVD, released the following year, is the most watched child-rearing DVD ever. These days, Karp, who no longer practices medicine, is hoping to capitalize on the trust he has won from parents and sell them on his new product: a $1,160 robotic bassinet called SNOO that he invented with his wife, Nina Montée, and for which they have raised $30 million in two rounds of funding. One Saturday afternoon last summer, Karp found himself riding an empty elevator to the 10th story of a boxy high-rise on Manhattan’s East Side, on a speaking tour to promote the four-figure bed that he is convinced could prevent postpartum depression by improving babies’ — and parents’ — sleep. © 2018 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 24893 - Posted: 04.24.2018

Allison Aubrey As more states legalize marijuana, there's growing interest in a cannabis extract — cannabidiol, also known as CBD. It's marketed as a compound that can help relieve anxiety — and, perhaps, help ease aches and pains, too. Part of the appeal, at least for people who don't want to get high, is that CBD doesn't have the same mind-altering effects as marijuana, since it does not contain THC, the psychoactive component of the plant. "My customers are buying CBD [for] stress relief," says Richard Ferry, the retail manager of Home Grown Apothecary in Portland, Ore., where recreational marijuana use is legal under state law, with some restrictions. Another rationale Ferry's heard from clients about their CBD use: "Their mother-in-law is in town, and they just want to chill out!" "CBD has gotten a lot of buzz," Ferry says, as he displays an array of CBD products, including capsules and bottles of liquid CBD oil that users dispense under the tongue with a dropper. By one estimate, the CBD industry has doubled in size over the last two years, and is now worth $200 million. But with this popularity the hype may have gotten ahead of the science. © 2018 npr

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Stress
Link ID: 24892 - Posted: 04.24.2018

By Jeremy Rehm Whales can sing, buzz, and even whisper to one another, but one thing has remained unknown about these gregarious giants: how they hear. Given the size of some whales and their ocean home, studying even the basics of these mammals has proved challenging. But two researchers have now developed a way to determine how baleen whales such as humpbacks hear their low-frequency (10- to 200-hertz) chatter, and they found some bone-rattling results. Baleen whales have a maze of ear bones that fuse to their skull, leading scientists to suppose the skull helps whales hear. Under this premise, the researchers used a computerized tomography scanner meant for rockets to scan the preserved bodies of a minke whale calf (Balaenoptera acutorostrata) and a fin whale calf (B. physalus), both of which had stranded themselves along U.S. coasts years before and died during rescue operations. Their preserved bodies were kept as scientific specimens. The researchers used these body scans (an example of which is displayed above) to produce 3D computer models to study how the skull responded to different sound frequencies. The skull acts like an antenna, the scientists reported today in San Diego, California, at the 2018 Experimental Biology conference, vibrating as sound waves impact it and then transmitting those vibrations to the whale’s ears. For ease of viewing, the scientists amplified the vibrations 20,000 times. Whale skulls were especially sensitive to the low-frequency sounds they speak with, the researchers found, but large shipping vessels also produce these frequencies. This new information could now help large-scale shipping industries and policymakers establish regulations to minimize the effects of humanmade noise on these ocean giants. © 2018 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Hearing
Link ID: 24891 - Posted: 04.24.2018

By Jim Daley Male fruit flies enjoy ejaculating, according to research published yesterday (April 20) in Current Biology. The study also found that when fruit flies are denied sex, they consume more alcohol than usual. It is the first study to demonstrate that insects find sex pleasurable. “We wanted to know which part of the mating process entails the rewarding value for flies,” says Galit Shohat-Ophir, a neurobiologist at Bar-Ilan University in Israel, in a statement. “The actions that males perform during courtship? A female’s pheromones? The last step of mating which is sperm and seminal fluid release?” To test if the latter is pleasurable, Shohat-Ophi and her colleagues used genetically engineered male fruit flies whose neurons controlling ejaculation can be activated by red light. These flies spent more time near the red light, presumably because they found ejaculation pleasurable, the authors say in the statement. David Anderson, a neurobiologist at Caltech who was not part of the study, tells National Geographic that it’s possible the pleasure the flies experienced wasn’t from ejaculation, but other reward systems in the brain that the stimulated neurons act upon. Next, the researchers plied the flies with alcoholic and nonalcoholic drinks and observed their response. The flies that had ejaculated preferred nonalcoholic drinks, while those that had not been exposed to the red light chose the alcoholic ones. “Male flies that are sexually deprived have increased motivation to consume alcohol as an alternative reward,” says Shohat-Ophi in the statement. © 1986-2018 The Scientist

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 24890 - Posted: 04.21.2018

By SHEILA KAPLAN WASHINGTON — A Food and Drug Administration advisory panel on Thursday unanimously recommended approval of an epilepsy medication made with an ingredient found in marijuana. If the agency follows the recommendation, as is expected, the drug would be the first cannabis-derived prescription medicine available in the United States. The drug, called Epidiolex, is made by GW Pharmaceuticals, a British company. Its active ingredient, cannabidiol, also called CBD, is one of the chemical compounds found in the cannabis plant, but it does not contain the properties that make people high. That makes it different from the “medical marijuana” allowed by a growing number of states. In those cases, certain patients are legally authorized to smoke or ingest marijuana to treat severe pain, nausea and other ailments. There are already several drugs on the market that are derived from synthetic versions of THC and other chemicals of the cannabis plant, generally used to ease nausea in cancer patients, and to help AIDS patients avoid weight loss. Advocates for development of marijuana-based treatments, and those pushing for better treatments of epilepsy, were pleased with the panel’s recommendation. “This is a very good development, and it basically underscores that there are medicinal properties to some of the cannabinoids,” said Dr. Igor Grant, director of the Center for Medicinal Cannabis Research at the University of California San Diego. “I think there could well be other cannabinoids that are of therapeutic use, but there is just not enough research on them to say.” © 2018 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Epilepsy; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 24889 - Posted: 04.21.2018

BREANNE SEARING, Evergreen reporter As more states have legalized recreational cannabis, it has grown more popular among pregnant women. A WSU undergraduate researcher thinks the scientific community needs to take a closer look at the behavior of adults who were exposed to cannabis while in the womb. Neuroscience senior Collin Warrick has conducted research on the effects of prenatal cannabis vapor on the cognitive flexibility of rats. Warrick said cannabis is the most common illicit drug among pregnant women. Despite this, little to no research has been done on its effects on offspring cognition as they mature. Warrick said the lack of medical warnings on legal cannabis products comes from this lack of research. “I have not come across anything that has been black labeled,” Warrick said, “there is no Surgeon General’s warning against cannabis, I think primarily because there hasn’t been enough studies looking at the negative effects.” Ryan McLaughlin, an assistant professor of integrative physiology and neuroscience who worked with Warrick, said long-term ramifications of cannabis vapor on developing offspring are unknown. “Now that cannabis is legal for the next generation of mothers,” McLaughlin said, “they may see less of a stigma and less of a perceived harm associated with smoking a joint during pregnancy, as they would maybe from having a drink of wine or smoking cigarettes.” © 2018

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 24888 - Posted: 04.21.2018

by Amy Ellis Nutt In a study published this week in the American Journal of Psychiatry, researchers report that an esketamine trial resulted in a “rapid improvement in depressive symptoms” in people with severe, treatment-resistant depression. Forty-nine patients completed the four-week trial. Doses were administered twice weekly, and the esketamine quickly showed an effect. Just four hours after the initial dose, people receiving the drug experienced a significant reduction in depressive symptoms. Carla Canuso, who was one of the lead researchers in the study and works with Johnson & Johnson subsidiary Janssen Pharmaceuticals, called the results “robustly significant.” But a rare editorial signed by the majority of the board of the American Journal of Psychiatry that appeared in the same issue as the study expressed deep concerns about the danger of a drug with a history of abuse. “We felt it was a problem that really needed particular attention [because] it at least has the potential for causing similar problems to the opioids,” said Robert Freedman, editor of the journal. “That was our single overriding concern.” Ketamine was approved as a rapid-onset anesthetic decades ago and was an important battlefield tool for medics during the Vietnam War. During the 1970s and '80s, it became better known as Special-K for its psychedelic properties and later, more notoriously, made headlines as a date-rape drug. © 1996-2018 The Washington Post

Keyword: Depression; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 24887 - Posted: 04.21.2018

By Matt Warren There is no one gene that, when mutated, causes autism. But over the past decade, researchers have identified hundreds of gene variations that seem to affect brain development in ways that increase the risk of autism. However, these scientists mainly searched for variants in the DNA that directly encodes the building blocks of proteins. Now, a new study probing so-called noncoding DNA has found that alterations in regions that regulate gene activity may also contribute to autism. And surprisingly, these variations tended to be inherited from fathers who aren’t autistic. “This is a really good article—it’s somewhat provocative and it makes us think about [autism genetics in a] different way,” says Lucia Peixoto, a neuroscientist and computational biologist at Washington State University in Spokane, who was not involved in the research. “I think it’s a great contribution to the field.” Research into the genetic risk for autism has mainly focused on how mutations that arise spontaneously in an individual’s genome—rather than being inherited from a parent—disrupt protein-coding regions and lead to the condition. That’s because these sporadic mutations have relatively large effects and studies have shown that such mutations, although individually rare, together contribute to about 25% to 30% of cases, says Jonathan Sebat, a geneticist at the University of California, San Diego. But only about 2% of the genome consists of protein-coding areas. Sebat says the large noncoding portion of our DNA—often previously referred to as “junk DNA”—has so far been ignored in autism research. © 2018 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Autism; Epigenetics
Link ID: 24886 - Posted: 04.21.2018

By CEYLAN YEGINSU A new study has shed more light on the revelations that Hans Asperger, the Austrian pediatrician for whom a form of autism is named, had collaborated with the Nazis and actively assisted in the killing of disabled children. Published on Wednesday in the journal Molecular Autism by the medical historian Herwig Czech, the report relies on eight years of research that included the examination of previously unseen Nazi-era documents. The study concludes that though Dr. Asperger was not a member of the Nazi Party, he had participated in the Third Reich’s child-euthanasia program, which aimed to establish a “pure” society by eliminating those deemed a “burden.” Dr. Asperger referred disabled children to the notorious Am Spiegelgrund clinic in Vienna, where hundreds were either drugged or gassed to death from 1940 to 1945. “The picture that emerges is that of a man who managed to further his career under the Nazi regime, despite his apparent political and ideological distance from it,” Mr. Czech, of the University of Vienna, wrote in his study. Asperger syndrome is a lifelong developmental disability associated with autism that affects perception and social interaction. About one in 68 children in the United States have been identified with Autism Spectrum Disorder. © 2018 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Autism
Link ID: 24885 - Posted: 04.21.2018

Jaclyn was diagnosed with myopia, or nearsightedness, at the age of age four. "I was surprised to learn that she needed glasses," recalled her mother, Ellen Rosenberg, in Toronto. Jaclyn wears glasses all the time at school, where they help her to read and write, she said. Her vision isn't so poor that she trips on things when she takes them off to play sports, Rosenberg said. But in a recent study, more than 30 per cent of young Canadian children walked around with fuzzy vision because of myopia that, unlike Jaclyn's, went undiagnosed. Now experts are exploring a simple way to turn the tide on the worsening problem. Myopia is "increasing globally at an alarming rate," according to the World Health Organization. It affects an estimated 1.89 billion people worldwide, and if rates don't change, that could rise to 2.56 billion by 2020 — a third of the population. Research suggests spending time outdoors protects against myopia. (Pond5) In what they call the first study of its kind in Canada, optometrists in Waterloo, Ont., found the rate of myopia was six per cent in children aged 6 to 8. That soared to 28.9 per cent in children aged 11 to 13. In myopia or nearsightedness, the eyeball doesn't get enough light and elongates. The condition isn't innocuous, said study author Debbie Jones, a clinical professor of optometry at the University of Waterloo and a scientist at the Centre for Ocular Research & Education. ©2018 CBC/Radio-Canada.

Keyword: Vision; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 24884 - Posted: 04.21.2018

Bruce Bower Ancient surgeons may have practiced dangerous skull-opening procedures on cows before operating on people. A previously excavated cow skull from a roughly 5,400- to 5,000-year-old settlement in France contains a surgically created hole on the right side, a new study finds. No signs of bone healing, which start several days after an injury, appear around the opening. One or more people may have rehearsed surgical techniques on a dead cow, or may have tried unsuccessfully to save a sick cow’s life in what would be the oldest known case of veterinary surgery, researchers conclude online April 19 in Scientific Reports. Evidence of skull surgery on humans, whether for medical or ritual reasons, goes back about 11,000 years (SN: 5/28/16, p. 12). Ancient surgeons needed to know how and where to scrape away bone without harming brain tissue and blood vessels. So practicing bone removal on cows or other animals is plausible. The ancient cow’s skull opening, shaped almost in a square and framed by scrape marks, resembles two instances of human skull surgery from around the same time in France, say biological anthropologists Fernando Ramirez Rozzi of CNRS in Montrouge, France, and Alain Froment of IRD-Museum of Man in Paris. Microscopic and X-ray analyses found no fractures or splintered bone that would have resulted from goring by another cow’s horn. No damage typical of someone having struck the cow’s head with a club or other weapon appeared, either. |© Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2018. All

Keyword: Brain Injury/Concussion
Link ID: 24883 - Posted: 04.21.2018

Jon Hamilton The words "dog" and "fog" sound pretty similar. Yet even a preschooler knows whether you're talking about a puppy or the weather. Now scientists at Georgetown University Medical Center in Washington, D.C., have identified a two-step process that helps our brains learn to first recognize, then categorize new sounds even when the differences are subtle. And it turns out the process is very similar to the way the human brain categorizes visual information, the Georgetown team reports Wednesday in the journal Neuron. "That's very exciting because it suggests there are general principles at work here of how the brain makes sense of the world," says Maximilian Riesenhuber, an author of the study and a professor in Georgetown University School of Medicine's Department of Neuroscience. The finding also could help explain what goes wrong in disorders like dyslexia, which can impair the brain's ability to make sense of what it sees and hears, Riesenhuber says. The research began as an effort to understand how the brain is able to accomplish feats like recognizing a familiar word, even when it's spoken with an accent or unusual pronunciation. "You hear my voice," says Riesenhuber, who has a slight German accent. "You've probably never heard me before. But you can hopefully recognize what I'm saying." © 2018 npr

Keyword: Animal Communication; Hearing
Link ID: 24882 - Posted: 04.19.2018

Maria Temming There’s a fine line between immersive and unnerving when it comes to touch sensation in virtual reality. More realistic tactile feedback in VR can ruin a user’s feeling of immersion, researchers report online April 18 in Science Robotics. The finding suggests that the “uncanny valley” — a term that describes how humanoid robots that look almost but not quite human are creepier than their more cartoonish counterparts — also applies to virtual touch (SN Online: 11/22/13). Experiment participants wearing VR headsets and gripping a controller in each hand embodied a virtual avatar holding the two ends of a stick. At first, users felt no touch sensation. Then, the hand controllers gave equally strong vibrations every half-second. Finally, the vibrations were finely tuned to create the illusion that the virtual stick was being touched in different spots. For instance, stronger vibrations in the right controller gave the impression that the stick was nudged on that side. Compared with scenarios in which users received either no touch or even buzzing sensations, participants reported feeling far less immersed in the virtual environment when they received the realistic, localized touch. This result demonstrates the existence of a tactile uncanny valley, says study coauthor Mar Gonzalez-Franco, a human-computer interaction researcher at Microsoft Research in Redmond, Washington. |© Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2018.

Keyword: Pain & Touch; Emotions
Link ID: 24881 - Posted: 04.19.2018

/ By Madeline Bodin This winter was a little quieter than usual for the folks at Silver Creek Specialty Meats in Oshkosh, Wisconsin. For generations, winter was when hunters would make regular visits to the low-rise white brick facility near the shore of Lake Winnebago, carrying the odds and ends of the deer they had killed the previous fall so it could be turned into venison sausages. This year, though, no hunters came. “It’s not quite black and white. What do we do in the meantime?” In August, Silver Creek Specialty Meats sent out a letter notifying customers that it would no longer accept venison for processing. “As you are probably aware,” the letter said, “chronic wasting disease in the wild deer population of the State of Wisconsin has been steadily spreading. The disease has now been found in wild deer in 19 counties throughout the state. Due to the spread of the disease it has become extremely difficult to screen out any venison coming from CWD infected areas.” Deer with chronic wasting disease, or CWD, tremble and drool. They often cannot hold their heads up. Eventually, they lose so much weight that they are little more than hide and bone. The disease arises from a particular prion — single-protein infectious agents linked to various neurodegenerative diseases in mammals. And prion diseases are always fatal. Copyright 2018 Undark

Keyword: Prions
Link ID: 24880 - Posted: 04.19.2018

Tor Wager Two soldiers receive similar injuries in battle. One recovers in months; the other endures excruciating pain for years. Why this difference? The question is pressing. One in five people suffers from chronic pain, affecting every aspect of their lives. Although significant gains have been made with anaesthetics and anti-inflammatory medications, the roots and relief of long-term pain are proving harder to find. Pain is also fuelling a global epidemic of opioid addiction and related deaths. In Chasing Men on Fire, neurologist Stephen Waxman provides a compelling portrait of scientific discovery in this area. Waxman, who works in basic research and clinical medicine, offers an insider’s account of the global search for a pain gene, beginning in 1966. He intertwines descriptions of cross-disciplinary neuroscience with portraits of scientists, and the struggles of people with conditions such as erythromelalgia, or ‘man-on-fire syndrome’, characterized by burning pain in hands and feet. Structurally, the book is innovative: 11 research papers are interlaced with the stories behind them. It is thus both a boon for researchers and an engrossing read for nonspecialists. Humans love simplicity. We want the intricate systems in our brains and bodies to ‘just work’. But Waxman shows that biology is complex, and genetic clues can be elusive. Detecting them relies on finding regularities across many people, which can make it seem impossible to pinpoint a key gene, and the rare mutations in it that lead to disease. As he reveals, it took considerable sifting and coordinated effort on three continents by scientists including pharmacologists, electrophysiologists, molecular biologists and geneticists before a ‘master gene’ for pain was isolated. © 2018 Macmillan Publishers Limited

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 24879 - Posted: 04.19.2018

By NICHOLAS BAKALAR A traumatic brain injury, even a mild concussion, increases the risk for Parkinson’s disease, a new study reports. Researchers identified all patients diagnosed with T.B.I. in a Veterans Health Administration database — 162,935 men and women — and matched them with the same number of people with similar health and behavioral characteristics but who had not had a brain injury. The study is in Neurology. Of the T.B.I. cases, half were mild, involving a blow to the head with some subsequent symptoms but with little or no unconsciousness. The rest were moderate to severe, involving extended unconsciousness or long-term symptoms. After controlling for age, race, income and many medical and psychiatric diseases, they found that compared with those who had had no T.B.I., those with a mild T.B.I. had a 56 percent increased risk for Parkinson’s disease; those with moderate to severe T.B.I. had an 83 percent increased risk. “We don’t have brain biopsies, so we don’t know what the underlying biology is,” said the lead author, Dr. Raquel C. Gardner, an assistant professor of neurology at the University of California, San Francisco. “But in Parkinson’s you see abnormal protein accumulation, and there’s some evidence that T.B.I. is linked to deposits of these abnormal proteins.” In any case, she said, “This study provides the most definitive evidence that there is this association.” © 2018 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Brain Injury/Concussion; Parkinsons
Link ID: 24878 - Posted: 04.19.2018

Lynne Peeples Carole Godain remembers a lot of the little details from the clinical trial she took part in nine years ago. There was the blue button she pushed to get her chemotherapy drugs, and the green light that came on to confirm that the medication was dripping into her veins. Then, of course, there was the hour — 10:00 p.m. without fail, for every treatment. By all accounts, Godain’s own time was running short. The first treatment for her colon cancer had failed, and her last body scan had revealed 27 tumours growing inside her liver. So the psychologist from Tours, France, jumped at the opportunity to take part in a trial at Paul Brousse hospital in Villejuif, which aimed to test whether delivering drugs at a specific time of day might make them more effective or reduce their toxic side effects. Ideally, it would accomplish both. “I was interested in increasing my chances of being cured,” says Godain. Today, at the age of 43, she is cancer-free. And Francis Lévi, the oncologist who treated Godain, says that although such an amazing result is anomalous, emerging evidence should encourage more interest in the concept of chronotherapy — scheduling treatments so that they provide the most help and do the least harm. More than four decades of studies describe how accounting for the body’s cycle of daily rhythms — its circadian clock — can influence responses to medications and procedures for everything from asthma to epileptic seizures. Research suggests that the majority of today’s best-selling drugs, including heartburn medications and treatments for erectile dysfunction, work better when taken at specific times of day. “When you give a medication, you always know the dose,” says Lévi, who also now works at Warwick Medical School in Coventry, UK, where he leads a team associated with INSERM, the French national biomedical research agency. “We have found that the timing is sometimes more important than the dose.” © 2018 Macmillan Publishers Limited

Keyword: Biological Rhythms
Link ID: 24877 - Posted: 04.18.2018

By Ashley Yeager Brain organoids, also known as mini-brains, are tiny clumps of brain cells grown from stem cells that researchers are using to investigate the neural underpinnings of autism and other neurological disorders. But the organoids typically grow in culture for only a few months before they die, limiting their usefulness as models of real brains. Transplanting the three-dimensional clumps of human brain tissue into the brains of mice allows the organoids to continue to develop, sprouting life-sustaining blood vessels as well as new neuronal connections, the new study reports. The work takes a step toward using brain organoids to study complexities of human brain development and disease that can’t be investigated with current techniques. Brain organoid transplantation may even one day offer a treatment option for traumatic brain injury or stroke. “Although organoids are a great advance in human neuroscience, they are not perfect. They are missing blood vessels, immune cells and functional connections to other areas of the nervous system,” Jürgen Knoblich, a molecular biologist at the Institute of Molecular Biotechnology in Vienna who was not involved in the study, tells The Scientist by email. “The goal of the transplantation experiments is to show that integration with those other tissues is possible.” Study coauthor Fred “Rusty” Gage, a neuroscientist at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, California, and his colleagues first started thinking about the health of brain organoids a few years ago when they began working with the structures. Many cells in the center of the 3-D clump of tissue would die, Gage tells The Scientist. “Those cells weren’t getting the blood and nutrients they needed to survive.” © 1986-2018 The Scientist

Keyword: Development of the Brain
Link ID: 24876 - Posted: 04.18.2018