By Susan Milius Throughout the world, climate change is causing age-old ecological partners to miss their cues as seasons shift. The trend may be so strong at higher latitudes that researchers now propose that some species’ ranges could actually shrink away from the poles. This idea comes from studying broad-tailed hummingbirds that migrate north from Central America each spring to high-altitude breeding sites in the western United States. With only brief mountain summers to raise chicks, male hummingbirds typically arrive in the region before the first flowers bloom and scout for territories. Around the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory in Gothic, Colo., near the upper limit of the broad-tailed hummingbird breeding range, the gap between the first hummingbird arrival and the first bloom has narrowed by roughly 13 days during the last four decades. Amy McKinney of the University of Maryland in College Park and her colleagues report the discovery online May 14 in Ecology. Glacier lilies start blooming roughly 17 days earlier than they did in the 1970s, but birds haven’t sped up nearly as much. In a few extreme years, lilies have already started blooming before the first hummingbird showed up. Researchers calculate that if the timing trends continue, in about two more decades the males will routinely miss the first flowers. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2012

Keyword: Biological Rhythms; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 16822 - Posted: 05.22.2012

Mo Costandi Birds can master new skills without the gradual improvements that normally occur with training. The improvement is all down to an ancient part of the brain that is present in all vertebrate species. Learning complex motor skills such as speech or dance movements involves imitation and trial and error. Young songbirds, for example, learn to sing by copying an adult tutor, and practising the song thousands of times until they have perfected every syllable. The underlying brain mechanisms are unknown, but one influential model states that structures called the basal ganglia generate a variety of movement patterns that are tried out by the motor cortex, which executes the movements. The basal ganglia then reinforce the best pattern by transmitting a rewarding dopamine signal after receiving feedback on the result of the movement from the motor cortex. But research published today in Nature challenges this view. Jonathan Charlesworth, a neuroscientist at the University of California, San Francisco, and his colleagues trained Bengalese finches (Lonchura striata domestica) to modify the pitch of one song syllable in response to white noise. © 2012 Nature Publishing Group,

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 16821 - Posted: 05.21.2012

By ANAHAD O'CONNOR Two new studies have found that people with sleep apnea, a common disorder that causes snoring, fatigue and dangerous pauses in breathing at night, have a higher risk of cancer. The new research marks the first time that sleep apnea has been linked to cancer in humans. About 28 million Americans have some form of sleep apnea, though many cases go undiagnosed. For sleep doctors, the condition is a top concern because it deprives the body of oxygen at night and often coincides with cardiovascular disease, obesity and diabetes. “This is really big news,” said Dr. Joseph Golish, a professor of sleep medicine with the MetroHealth System in Cleveland who was not involved in the research. “It’s the first time this has been shown, and it looks like a very solid association,” he said. Dr. Golish, the former chief of sleep medicine at the Cleveland Clinic, said that the cancer link may not prove to be as strong as the well-documented relationship between sleep apnea and cardiovascular disease, “but until disproven, it would be one more reason to get your apnea treated or to get it diagnosed if you think you might have it.” In one of the new studies, researchers in Spain followed thousands of patients at sleep clinics and found that those with the most severe forms of sleep apnea had a 65 percent greater risk of developing cancer of any kind. The second study, of about 1,500 government workers in Wisconsin, showed that those with the most breathing abnormalities at night had five times the rate of dying from cancer as people without the sleep disorder. Both research teams only looked at cancer diagnoses and outcomes in general, without focusing on any specific type of cancer. Copyright 2012 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 16820 - Posted: 05.21.2012

Analysis by Sheila Eldred What you eat may affect how you learn, say UCLA researchers in a new study on the effects of high fructose corn syrup and omega-3 fatty acids on the behavior of rats. Rats that were fed only high fructose corn syrup and standard rat chow had more trouble navigating a maze at the end of six weeks than rats who were fed a diet supplemented with omega-3 fatty acids, according to results published in the Journal of Physiology. "Our findings illustrate that what you eat affects how you think," said Fernando Gomez-Pinilla, a professor of neurosurgery and integrative biology and physiology. "Eating a high-fructose diet over the long term alters your brain's ability to learn and remember information. But adding omega-3 fatty acids to your meals can help minimize the damage." The animals trained on a maze with visual landmarks twice daily for five days before starting the experimental diet. Six weeks later, the researchers tested the rats' ability to recall the route and escape the maze. "The second group of rats navigated the maze much faster than the rats that did not receive omega-3 fatty acids," Gomez-Pinilla said. "The DHA-deprived animals were slower, and their brains showed a decline in synaptic activity. Their brain cells had trouble signaling each other, disrupting the rats' ability to think clearly and recall the route they'd learned six weeks earlier." The faster rats received omega-3 fatty acids in the form of flaxseed oil and docosahexaenoic acid (DHA), which protects against damage to the brain's synapses, or chemical connections. The DHA-deprived rats also developed signs of resistance to insulin. © 2012 Discovery Communications, LLC.

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Obesity
Link ID: 16819 - Posted: 05.21.2012

By Jason G. Goldman When is a yawn just a yawn? When is a yawn more than a yawn? Contagious yawning – the increase in likelihood that you will yawn after watching or hearing someone else yawn – has been of particular interest to researchers in fields as varied as primatology, developmental psychology, and psychopathology. At first, scientists thought that yawning was a mechanism designed to keep the brain cool. However, it turns out that there is a correlation between the susceptibility for contagious yawning and self-reported empathy. Humans who performed better at theory of mind tasks (a cognitive building block required for empathy) also yawn contagiously more often (PDF). And two conditions that have been associated with poorer performance on theory of mind tasks are also associated with reduced or absent contagious yawning: schizotypy and autism. In 2008, psychologist Ramiro Joly-Mascheroni and colleagues from the University of London showed, for the first time, that human yawns are contagious for domestic dogs. Dogs’ unique social skills in interacting with humans is probably the result of selection pressures during the domestication process. Therefore, they reasoned, it is possible that as a result of that process, dogs may have developed the capacity of empathy towards humans. And if so, it is further possible that they may yawn when they see and hear humans yawn. In one condition, the experimenter, who was a stranger to the dogs, attracted the dogs’ attention and then initiated a genuine yawn. The yawn was repeated for five minutes after re-establishing eye contact with the dog, which meant that the number of yawns varied between ten and nineteen per individual. In the control condition, the experimenter displayed a fake yawn, which mimicked the mouth opening and closing actions, but not the vocalization or other subtle muscular changes. © 2012 Scientific American,

Keyword: Emotions; Autism
Link ID: 16818 - Posted: 05.19.2012

by Sara Reardon Preventing obesity may be down to timing, in mice, at least. Mice allowed meals only within an 8-hour period were healthier than those that munched freely through the day, even when they consumed more fat. A link between obesity and the time you eat meals makes sense, says Satchidananda Panda of the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California, as food choices generally get less healthy as the day progresses. Breakfast may include healthy fruits and grains, but late-night snacks are more likely to involve high-fat ice cream or high-calorie alcohol. Furthermore, research has shown that our internal clocks are closely tied to our metabolism; disrupting them can cause weight gain and diabetes. Panda and colleagues fed two groups of mice a high-fat diet. One group could snack whenever they liked, the other could only eat during an 8-hour window. Both groups consumed the same number of calories each day. Two other groups were fed a healthy diet under the same conditions. Three months later, the weight of mice on the all-day, high-fat diet had increased by 28 per cent. Their blood sugar levels had gone up – a risk factor for diabetes – and they also had liver damage. In contrast, mice eating a high-fat diet for only 8 hours a day stayed healthy and didn't become obese. They also had better balance than mice on a healthy diet. Journal reference: Cell Metabolism, DOI: 10.1016/j.cmet.2012.04.019 © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 16817 - Posted: 05.19.2012

By BENEDICT CAREY PRINCETON, N.J. — The simple fact was that he had done something wrong, and at the end of a long and revolutionary career it didn’t matter how often he’d been right, how powerful he once was, or what it would mean for his legacy. Dr. Robert L. Spitzer, considered by some to be the father of modern psychiatry, lay awake at 4 o’clock on a recent morning knowing he had to do the one thing that comes least naturally to him. He pushed himself up and staggered into the dark. His desk seemed impossibly far away; Dr. Spitzer, who turns 80 next week, suffers from Parkinson’s disease and has trouble walking, sitting, even holding his head upright. The word he sometimes uses to describe these limitations — pathetic — is the same one that for decades he wielded like an ax to strike down dumb ideas, empty theorizing and junk studies. Now here he was at his computer, ready to recant a study he had done himself, a poorly conceived 2003 investigation that supported the use of so-called reparative therapy to “cure” homosexuality for people strongly motivated to change. What to say? The issue of gay marriage was rocking national politics yet again. The California State Legislature was debating a bill to ban the therapy outright as being dangerous. A magazine writer who had been through the therapy as a teenager recently visited his house, to explain how miserably disorienting the experience was. © 2012 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 16816 - Posted: 05.19.2012

Sandrine Ceurstemont, editor, New Scientist TV Think this animated man is running to the left? Switch your point of view and you may change your mind. Created by Steven Thurman and Hongjing Lu from the University of California, Los Angeles, the animation is most commonly seen as a man running to the left when viewed directly. But by fixing your eyes on the red cross so that it appears in your peripheral vision, the man seems to move to the right. According to the researchers, they manipulated the animation to induce the switch by adjusting features of the discs making up the man's body. Their orientation and drifting speed represent what our brain would expect from a person walking to the right. The illusion was one of the finalists in this year's Best Illusion of the Year Contest. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Vision
Link ID: 16815 - Posted: 05.19.2012

By Daisy Yuhas Thinking of something else is a time-honored method for coping with pain. Indeed, psychologists have demonstrated repeatedly that what you think about can modulate the pain you experience. But what's less clear is how exactly that effect plays out in the body. In a study published today in Current Biology, neuroscientists have found that distraction does more than merely divert your mind; it actually sends signals that bar pain from reaching the central nervous system. "This study connects two important fields of pain research," says lead author Christian Sprenger, a physician and neuroscientist at the University Medical Center Hamburg–Eppendorf in Germany. "There are many studies describing the sensitization processes of the spinal cord. On the other hand, it is well known that certain psychological factors are good predictors of the development of pain." Sprenger and his colleagues told 20 male volunteers they would be participating in an experiment that would study concentration and memory. Each subject, while undergoing functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to map their neural activity, used a computer screen to take a memory test called an "n-back test." In such a test, subjects recall a specific letter either one or two letters back from the end of a series. As initial sessions confirmed, remembering a letter two-back is more challenging than a letter one-back. Researchers gave volunteers either the one- or two-back test so that they could study the nervous system under two levels of cognitive load. © 2012 Scientific American,

Keyword: Pain & Touch; Attention
Link ID: 16814 - Posted: 05.19.2012

by Helen Thomson In 1848, 25-year-old railroad supervisor Phineas Gage was using a 3 foot 7 inch iron rod to pack blasting powder into a rock when he triggered an explosion that shot the rod straight through his left cheek and out of the top of his head. His survival and subsequent change in personality made him one of neuroscience's most famous case studies – one of the first to highlight that specific areas of the brain affect particular aspects of behaviour. Now, for the first time, researchers have reconstructed a model of the damage caused to the pathways that connected regions of Gage's brain. The result not only adds dimension to the historical case but also provides insights into conditions such as Alzheimer's disease that result in similar personality changes. Due to the absence of Gage's original brain tissue and lack of a recorded autopsy, estimating the extent of brain damage has been difficult. In 2001, researchers at Harvard University were the last to be given permission by the Warren Anatomical Museum in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to scan Gage's skull. They used computed tomography – essentially a 3D X-ray – but the scans were lost after the researchers left the university. Through some "persistent cajoling" John Van Horn at the University of California, Los Angeles and colleagues recently unearthed the scans. "I just thought it's an absolute shame that this is one of the most valuable pieces of data in the history of neuroscience and it's lying in someone's desk drawer," says Van Horn. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Emotions; Brain imaging
Link ID: 16813 - Posted: 05.19.2012

Elizabeth Armstrong Moore After a stroke, it is often possible -- with months of therapy and determination -- for the brain to relearn how to control a weakened limb. Finding the resources (therapist, finances, time) can be the bigger hurdle. Enter Circus Challenge, the first in a coming suite of action video games designed by Newcastle University stroke experts and the new company Limbs Alive to provide extra in-home therapy. "Eighty percent of patients do not regain full recovery of arm and hand function and this really limits their independence and ability to return to work," pediatric neuroscience professor Janet Eyre at Newcastle, who set up Limbs Alive to produce the games, said in a news release. "Patients need to be able to use both their arms and hands for most everyday activities such as doing up a zip, making a bed, tying shoe laces, unscrewing a jar. With our video game, people get engrossed in the competition and action of the circus characters and forget that the purpose of the game is therapy." Patients use wireless controllers to learn various circus-related skills, from lion taming and juggling to high diving and trapeze work. As they succeed at various tasks, they go on to more challenging quests that involve greater skill, strength, and coordination. © 2012 CBS Interactive.

Keyword: Stroke; Regeneration
Link ID: 16812 - Posted: 05.19.2012

by Debora MacKenzie OUR core physiology relies on subtle organic timers: disrupt them, and effects range from jet lag to schizophrenia. Exactly how and when life began keeping time is unclear, but a candidate for the original biological clock may solve the mystery. Biological clocks are ubiquitous in nature, so the first clock should pre-date the evolutionary parting of the ways that led to modern groups of organisms. All the clocks found so far are unique to different groups of organisms, though. Not so the clock discovered by Akhilesh Reddy at the University of Cambridge and colleagues. In an enzyme called peroxiredoxin (PRX), they seem to have found a grandfather clock - one that is common to nearly all life. PRX gets rid of poisonous, highly reactive oxygen (ROS), which is produced by oxygen-based metabolism. And the enzyme oscillates: it flits between an active and inactive state, depending on whether oxygen is bound to the active site. Using antibodies that bind only to the oxidised enzyme, the team found that PRX oxidation keeps cycling independently on a 24-hour cycle, even when organisms were kept in constant light or constant dark. Moreover, they found this PRX cycle in mice, fruit flies, a plant, a fungus, an alga, bacteria and even in archaea - the most primitive of all cellular life (Nature, DOI: 10.1038/nature11088). That suggests PRX evolved early in life's history. A gene sequence analysis suggests it did so 2.5 billion years ago, during the Great Oxygenation Event (GOE) - a critical interval when the oxygen released by photosynthesis began to accumulate in the atmosphere. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Biological Rhythms; Evolution
Link ID: 16811 - Posted: 05.17.2012

by Jamie Condliffe Soldiers experience high-pressure shock waves and immense forces during explosions in the field, but research suggests brain trauma is caused merely by the sudden head movements. It has been unclear whether trauma from explosions is caused through high-pressure shock waves penetrating the skull, or through another mechanism. Now a team of researchers from Boston University have performed post mortems on soldiers to establish how traumatic brain injury occurs during explosions. Many blast victims develop symptoms consistent with chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a degenerative brain disease that can cause memory problems, depression and learning difficulties. However, CTE is usually caused by repeated concussions such as those experienced by American football players – not one-off blasts. "The damage in football players has been linked to acceleration forces due to head impact," explains Robin Cleveland, a medical engineer who worked on the project at Boston University before moving to the University of Oxford. "Our goal was to see if the same mechanism was responsible for blast injury." Cleveland and his colleagues performed a post mortem analysis of brains from four soldiers who had experienced blasts. They compared the brains to those of American footballers and a wrestler who all had a history of repetitive concussive injury, as well as with a person with no brain trauma. They found firm evidence of CTE, as indicated by abnormal deposits of the protein tau in the brain of the soldiers, which was indistinguishable from CTE in the athletes. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Brain Injury/Concussion
Link ID: 16810 - Posted: 05.17.2012

by Greg Miller Autopsies of four U.S. military veterans who served in Iraq and Afghanistan reveal features of the same neurodegenerative disease found previously in athletes, researchers report. Experiments with mice suggest that the underlying mechanisms may be similar. In the past 10 years, the widely reported suicides and accidental deaths of professional football players and other athletes—such as that of Junior Seau earlier this month -- have sparked inquiries into whether even seemingly minor blows to the head can cause personality changes, dementia, and brain degeneration later in life. Autopsies of dozens of former players have revealed a condition known as chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE). Its hallmark is the abnormal accumulation of a protein called tau. Many of the athletes diagnosed with CTE on autopsy (currently the only definitive test) had a history of problems with anger, rash and risky decision-making, impairments of memory and attention, and alcohol or drug abuse. Clinicians and researchers working with troops returning from Iraq and Afghanistan have seen similar symptoms. The new study, led by Lee Goldstein, a physician-scientist who focuses on neurodegenerative disease at Boston University, and Ann McKee, a neuropathologist at the Bedford Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Massachusetts, ties these troublesome threads together. McKee examined the brains of four veterans, men between the ages of 22 and 45, who suffered from various combinations of cognitive, emotional, and impulse-control problems before dying from suicide or other causes. © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Stress; Brain Injury/Concussion
Link ID: 16809 - Posted: 05.17.2012

by Peter Aldhous HOW reliable is reliable enough? When it comes to diagnosing mental illness, most people would want the bar set pretty high, which is why the latest revision of psychiatry's diagnostic manual has become mired in controversy - again. Last week, at its annual meeting in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the American Psychiatric Association revealed results from "field trials" of diagnoses proposed for the next edition of the APA's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or DSM-5. Essentially, the trials asked whether doctors would come to the same conclusions when assessing the same patients using the new diagnostic criteria. While for some diagnoses reliability was good, others yielded scores little better than chance. Already, the results have led to two proposed disorders being relegated to the volume's appendix, which lists conditions that require further study. Critics argue that more might have joined them had the APA not adopted a low threshold for what is considered an acceptable score for reliability. The conditions with questionable reliability include subtly altered descriptions of two of the most common diagnoses in psychiatry: major depressive disorder and generalised anxiety disorder. That has opened a can of worms, leaving some mental health professionals wondering about the reliability of even established psychiatric diagnoses. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Depression; OCD - Obsessive Compulsive Disorder
Link ID: 16808 - Posted: 05.17.2012

By Rachel Ehrenberg Directing a robotic arm with her thoughts, a paralyzed woman named Cathy can pick up a bottle of coffee and sip it through a straw, a simple task that she hasn’t done on her own for nearly 15 years. The technology that brought about the feat is a brain-computer interface system: A computer decodes signals from a tiny chip implanted in the woman’s brain, translating her thoughts into actions that are carried out by the robot arm. The seemingly mundane task of bringing a drink to one’s mouth is the first published demonstration that severely paralyzed people can conduct directed movements in three-dimensional space using a brain-controlled robotic device. This latest application of the system, called BrainGate, is described in the May 17 Nature. “Much has been demonstrated in terms of laboratory work and monkeys, but this is the first time showing something that’s going to be useful for patients,” says neuroscientist Andrew Jackson, of Newcastle University in England. A commentary by Jackson on the new developments appears in the same issue of Nature. There’s still a lot of work to do before BrainGate can be used outside a lab. In the current design, the tiny sensor that sits in the patient’s brain is attached to a mini fridge–sized computer via ungainly wires. So making the system wireless is one goal. The researchers hope that within a decade the BrainGate system will be available and affordable for people who are paralyzed or have prosthetic limbs. Eventually, similar technology might restore function to a natural limb that no longer works. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2012

Keyword: Robotics
Link ID: 16807 - Posted: 05.17.2012

Sandrine Ceurstemont, editor, New Scientist TV Brad Pitt may look attractive when seen head on. But an illusion that presents photos viewed in your peripheral vision shows how pretty faces can quickly look ugly. The effect was discovered accidentally by psychology student Sean Murphy from the University of Queensland in Australia while looking at photos for another experiment. He went on to study the illusion with colleagues who discovered that the distortion occurs when the eyes of a series of photos are aligned and presented quickly in succession. The transformation is caused by differences between faces that follow each other, for example big eyes will seem to bulge if preceded by squinting eyes. The illusion was published last year but now the team has created this new video that shows the effect more dramatically. The illusion has won second prize in this year's Best Illusion of the Year contest. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Vision
Link ID: 16806 - Posted: 05.17.2012

By Nathan Seppa It’s the news that coffee addicts have been waiting for: Drinking several cups of coffee every day may help you live longer. A study of more than 400,000 people finds that drinking coffee reduces the risk of death from heart disease, stroke and even infections, researchers report in the May 17 New England Journal of Medicine. Scientists have long puzzled over the notion that a stimulant could provide a health benefit. “There’s been a concern for a long time” that coffee could even be detrimental, says study coauthor Neal Freedman, an epidemiologist at the National Cancer Institute in Bethesda, Md. “Our results might provide some reassurance for long-term coffee drinkers.” Since the study volunteers weren’t randomly assigned to drink coffee or not, the research has the limitations of being observational in nature. But with data from 402,260 participants, the results are “very powerful” and unlikely to be superseded by another coffee study anytime soon, says Roy Ziegelstein, a cardiologist at the Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center. “This might be as good as it gets,” he says. Freedman and his colleagues analyzed data provided by men and women who completed a detailed questionnaire that included information about coffee intake as part of a medical study in the mid-1990s. The researchers excluded people who had previously had cancer, heart disease or some other serious illness and recorded the remaining volunteers’ mortality status through 2008 by checking death records. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2012

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 16805 - Posted: 05.17.2012

Common variants of the ApoE gene are strongly associated with the risk of developing late-onset Alzheimer's disease, but the gene's role in the disease has been unclear. Now, researchers funded by the National Institutes of Health have found that in mice, having the most risky variant of ApoE damages the blood vessels that feed the brain. The researchers found that the high-risk variant, ApoE4, triggers an inflammatory reaction that weakens the blood-brain barrier, a network of cells and other components that lines brain's brain vessels. Normally, this barrier allows nutrients into the brain and keeps harmful substances out. The study appears today in Nature, and was led by Berislav Zlokovic, M.D., Ph.D., director of the Center for Neurodegeneration and Regeneration at the Zilkha Neurogenetic Institute, Keck School of Medicine, University of Southern California, Los Angeles. “Understanding the role of ApoE4 in Alzheimer's disease may be one of the most important avenues to a new therapy," Dr. Zlokovic said. "Our study shows that ApoE4 triggers a cascade of events that damages the brain's vascular system," he said, referring to the system of blood vessels that supply the brain. The ApoE gene encodes a protein that helps regulate the levels and distribution of cholesterol and other lipids in the body. The gene exists in three varieties. ApoE2 is thought to play a protective role against both Alzheimer's and heart disease, ApoE3 is believed to be neutral, and ApoE4 confers a higher risk for both conditions. Outside the brain, the ApoE4 protein appears to be less effective than other versions at clearing away cholesterol; however,inside the brain, exactly how ApoE4 contributes to Alzheimer's disease has been a mystery.

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 16804 - Posted: 05.17.2012

By Laura Sanders Schizophrenia’s elusive genetic roots may finally be within grasp. A new, wide-ranging effort has uncovered a set of DNA signatures that are shared by people with the disease consistently enough that the set can be used to reliably predict whether someone has the disease. If replicated, the results may point out ways to diagnose schizophrenia and suggest new targets for treatment. By analyzing a battery of 542 genetic variants, researchers could predict who had schizophrenia in a group of European Americans and African Americans. The confirmation of the result in people of varying ancestry suggests that the set of genes truly does detect the core features of the disorder, scientists report online May 15 in Molecular Psychiatry. “Genetic studies in psychiatry tend to produce initial excitement but are then not reproduced in independent populations, which is the most important proof that a finding is solid and real,” says study coauthor Alexander Niculescu of the Indiana University School of Medicine in Indianapolis. Niculescu and his colleagues created their gene panel by assessing a slew of earlier studies on schizophrenia: Data from humans and animals on gene variation and gene behavior all fed into the team’s analysis. If a gene popped out of several different datasets, the reasoning went, it is probably important to schizophrenia. Niculescu compares this method — called convergent functional genomics — to an Internet search: “The more links to a web page, the higher it comes up on your search list.” © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2012

Keyword: Schizophrenia; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 16803 - Posted: 05.16.2012