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New York, June 24 (IANS) A team of researchers has developed the first scalable method to identify different subtypes of neurons in the human brain.
The research lays the groundwork for "mapping" the gene activity in the human brain and could help provide a better understanding of brain functions and disorders, including Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, schizophrenia and depression.
By isolating and analysing individual human brain cells, researchers identified 16 neuronal subtypes in the cerebral cortex -- the brain's outer layer of neural tissue responsible for cognitive functions including memory, attention and decision making.
"We are providing a unified framework to look at and compare individual neurons, which can help us find out how many unique types of neurons exist," said Kun Zhang, bioengineering professor at University of California-San Diego.
Researchers can use these different neuronal subtypes to build what Zhang calls a "reference map" of the human brain -- a foundation to understand the differences between a healthy brain and a diseased brain.
"In the future, patients with brain disorders or abnormalities could be diagnosed and treated based on how they differ from the reference map. This is analogous to what's being done with the reference human genome map," Zhang noted.
The team, led by University of California-San Diego, The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) and US-based life science research company Illumina, published their findings in the journal Science.
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New York, June 25 (IANS) The US space agency is planning to drive the Curiosity Rover towards water sites on the Martian surface to further investigate the long, seasonally changing dark streaks briny water in the hope of finding evidence of life.
"It is not as simple as driving a rover to a potential site and taking a scoop of soil," said Jim Green, NASA's director of planetary science.
"Not only are these on steep slopes, we need to ensure that planetary protection concerns are met. In other words, how can we search for evidence of life without contaminating the sites with bugs from Earth?," he added in a NASA statement.
After approval of mission extension, NASA's Curiosity Mars rover would continue to climb to higher and younger strata on Mount Sharp -- mountain in Gale crater -- to investigate how the ancient, water-rich environments found till now persisted as the red planet dried out.
A stroll on these destinations would help the one-tonne rover closer to locations where dark streaks are present on slopes and allow it to capture images of the potential water sites from miles away and see if any are the seasonally changing type.
NASA's High-Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) has observed many features of interest. They appear as dark lines that appear to ebb and flow over time.
"Planetary scientists think these gullies or recurring slope lineae (RSLs) may appear seasonally as a form of briny water at or near the surface of the Red Planet under warmer conditions," NASA said.
NASA is also worried about how close could the rover safely get to an RSL?
"In terms of coming much closer, we need to understand well in advance the potential for Earth organisms to come off the rover and that will tell us how far away the rover should stay," said Catharine Conley, NASA's planetary protection officer.
The darkish streaks are considered "special regions" on Mars, where extra precautions must be taken to prevent contamination because of the suspected presence of liquid water, considered a prerequisite for life.
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London, June 25 (IANS) Some individuals appear to be genetically programmed to help others whilst living side-by-side with others who tend to exploit their generosity, say researchers who produced an innovative model of social evolution to understand the concept of genetic polymorphism.
Behaviours of humans are very flexible and they tend to base their perception on what they see after processing information about the world.
"However, some species rely on inherited instructions on what to do - individuals behave differently according to which specific genetic variants they are born with," said one of the researchers Sasha Dall, Senior Lecturer at University of Exeter in Britain.
The findings showed that people are likely to be influenced by conditioning or the surrounding environment rather than what they sense or experience.
The behaviour of individuals can often evolve to be determined by a set of inherited genetic tendencies that accurately predict social relationships, including their likely relatedness to other members of their community, and their surroundings rather than in direct response to what they sense or experience.
The study, published in the journal PLOS Computational Biology, aims to explore why some individuals evolve to be genetically programmed to be nice, while others stay nasty.
The theory of kin selection explains the evolution of helping when relatives interact. It can be used when individuals in a social group have different sexes, ages or phenotypic qualities, but the theory has not been worked out for situations where there is genetic polymorphism in helping, the researchers said.
"Social evolution theory hasn't previously addressed genetic polymorphism. We have developed a model that allows us to explore this within a general framework alongside other behavioural influences,” added lead author Olof Leimar, Professor at Stockholm University.
Thus, for the study, the team used colony-living microbes as inspiration to explore why some individuals are by nature generous and others less so.
Using a mathematical model, they examined the social behaviour in a range of different species to understand the evolution of sociality.
“What we have been able to show is how you can get a situation where you end up with distinct levels of genetically determined niceness coexisting within populations," Dall noted.
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London, June 25 (IANS) Researchers have found that high-tech scans can spare patients suffering from cancer of the lymphatic system of the serious side effects of chemotherapy as well as predict the outcome of treatment.
In the study, using positron emission tomography (PET) -- a type of imaging test that uses a tiny amount of radioactive glucose to look for disease in the body -- the doctors scanned more than 1,200 patients with advanced Hodgkin lymphoma after they had been given two cycles of standard chemotherapy.
Hodgkin lymphoma is a cancer that starts in white blood cells called lymphocytes.
“Personalising treatment based on how well it works is a major development for patients with Hodgkin lymphoma and sets a new standard of care,” said Peter Johnson, Professor at University of Southampton in Britain.
The patients were divided into two groups - the first group that continued chemotherapy with bleomycin -- an important drug used to treat Hodgkin lymphoma -- and the second group had chemotherapy without the drug.
Bleomycin comes with potential risks of severely affecting the lungs leading to serious breathing problems.
The results showed that patients who stopped having bleomycin had the same survival rates as those who continued it. But, importantly, they were spared of the side effects.
"The good news is that the majority of people diagnosed with Hodgkin lymphoma can be cured - in this trial more than 95 per cent of patients are alive after three years,” Johnson added.
Three year progression-free survival was seen in patients who underwent chemotherapy without bleomycin was 84.4 per cent.
Further, 85.7 per cent patients who underwent chemotherapy with bleomycin had three-year progression-free survival
For patients with a good outlook stopping bleomycin did not have any negative effects.
However, patients who had a more resistant form of the disease were given more intense chemotherapy treatment, the study said.
“Getting to know the patients that have a more difficult form of the disease means we can select those who need stronger chemotherapy, while sparing everyone else the severe side effects such as infertility,” Johnson said in the study published in the New England Journal of Medicine.
“This approach, along with a reduction in the need for radiotherapy, should substantially reduce damage to healthy tissues and the risk of second cancers caused by treatments,” he concluded.
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Panama City, June 26 (IANS) The Panama Canal is getting ready for expansion that will take traffic through the inter-oceanic passage to a new level, officials said.
With the expansion of the canal's width and depth, the volume of traffic will double, as Panamax-class vessels will now be able to pass through, carrying up to 14,000 cargo containers, Xinhua news agency reported.
Jorge Luis Quijano, administrator of the Panama Canal, said at a press conference on Saturday that this expansion, which will be inaugurated on Sunday, will open up new opportunities in sectors such as logistics and ship repairs.
The main contractor for the expansion was the consortium Grupo Unidos por el Canal.
Espino de Marotta said the project had gone very smoothly, considering the complexity of the works involved. "The expansion of the Panama Canal is one of those projects that happens once every 100 years," he said.
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New York, June 24 (IANS) An international team of researchers has discovered a simple, accurate new blood test that can predict the chances of Type 2 diabetes in women with gestational diabetes.
Gestational diabetes occurs in three to 13 per cent of all pregnant women and increases a woman's risk of developing Type 2 diabetes by 20 to 50 per cent within five years after pregnancy, the study said.
Using the novel technique called targeted metabolomics, the scientists tested the fasting blood samples of 1,035 women diagnosed with gestational diabetes, within two months after delivery.
Typically, diabetes is diagnosed by measuring blood sugar levels in the form of glucose, an important fuel used by cells in the body.
However, the metabolomics test identified several other metabolites that indicate early changes that signify future diabetes risk long before changes in glucose levels occur.
The method showed 83 per cent accuracy in predicting women who would develop Type 2 diabetes.
Further, the technique predicted the development of Type 2 diabetes significantly better than the conventional methods of a fasting blood test followed by the time-consuming and inconvenient oral glucose tolerance test.
Once diabetes has developed, it's very difficult to reverse, thus "early prevention is the key to minimising the devastating effects of diabetes on health outcomes," said Erica Gunderson, Research Scientist with the Kaiser Permanente - a health care company, in the US.
"By identifying women soon after delivery, we can focus our resources on those at greatest risk who may benefit most from concerted early prevention efforts," Gunderson added.
The new method may also be able to predict individuals who may develop Type 2 diabetes in the general population, the authors noted.
The findings, published in the journal Diabetes, would allow health care providers to identify women at greatest risk and help motivate women to make early lifestyle changes and follow other strategies that could prevent them from developing the disease later in life.
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London, June 24 (IANS) Scientists from University of Bristol have found a new bio-ink for 3D printing with stem cells that allows printing of living tissue known as bio-printing.
The new bio-ink contains two different polymer components: a natural polymer extracted from seaweed and a sacrificial synthetic polymer used in the medical industry.
"Designing the new bio-ink was extremely challenging. You need a material that is printable, strong enough to maintain its shape when immersed in nutrients and that is not harmful to the cells. We managed to do this," said lead researcher Adam Perriman from school of cellular and molecular medicine.
The synthetic polymer causes the bio-ink to change from liquid to solid when the temperature is raised and the seaweed polymer provides structural support when the cell nutrients are introduced.
"The special bio-ink formulation was extruded from a retrofitted benchtop 3D printer, as a liquid that transformed to a gel at 37 degrees Celsius, which allowed construction of complex living 3D architectures," Perriman added.
The findings, published in the journal Advanced Healthcare Materials, could help printing complex tissues using the patient's own stem cells for surgical bone or cartilage implants, which could be used in knee and hip surgeries.
The team was able to differentiate the stem cells into osteoblasts -- a cell that secretes the substance of bone cells that have secreted the matrix of cartilage and become embedded in it -- to engineer 3D printed tissue structures over five weeks, including a full-size tracheal cartilage ring.
"What was really astonishing for us was when the cell nutrients were introduced, the synthetic polymer was completely expelled from the 3D structure, leaving only the stem cells and the natural seaweed polymer," Perriman noted.
This created microscopic pores in the structure which provided more effective nutrient access for the stem cells.
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New York, June 24 (IANS) A team of researchers has created a "virtual heart" that could help medical researchers study new drug therapies.
Researchers from the University of California - San Diego have created a detailed computer model of the electrophysiology of congestive heart failure -- a leading cause of death -- that can simulate subtle changes from the cellular and tissue levels of the heart then show the results of the associated electrocardiogram (ECG).
According to the results, published in the journal PLOS Computational Biology, the model can show what happens to the heart when the levels and flow of calcium, potassium and sodium ions are changed.
At the organ level, the researchers created an anatomically detailed model of the heart which shows the big picture of what happens when various critical chemicals and electrophysiologic components of a healthy working heart are tweaked.
The team also found that ventricular fibrillation, where the waves of excitation that pump blood out of the heart become fragmented and discoordinated, can be caused by a heart failure-related slowdown in cellular processes at the top (basal) region of heart.
The researchers also used their model to plan a new drug strategy against this heart failure form of fibrillation.
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London, June 22 (IANS) Children who focus more on physical activities, especially outdoor games, will have improved academic successes and reduced obesity level in an early age, new research says.
The findings showed that the physical activity levels of children are continuing to fall well short of recommended levels, which can harm their health as well as academic attainment.
They are spending far more time in front of the screens than the maximum recommendation of only two hours a day, which needs to be reduced, the study said.
"The amount of time children spend in front of screens has had an impact on their wellbeing for many years. The popularity of computer games and the emergence of the internet, smartphones and social media have contributed further to this problem,” said lead author John Reilly, Professor at University Of Strathclyde in Scotland.
Strategies to promote physical activity and reduce screen time should place a higher emphasis on playing actively outdoors, something children could potentially do 365 days a year, the researchers suggested.
"Playing benefits children in helping them to develop socially and emotionally, so promoting active outdoor play would have many benefits in addition to improving physical activity, improving academic attainment and reducing obesity," Reilly noted.
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Stockholm, June 23 (IANS) Sweden on Wednesday inaugurated a test stretch of an electric road, making it one of the first countries in the world to conduct tests with electric power for heavy transports on public roads.
The test will be conducted on parts of road E16, and involves a current collector on the roof of the truck cab feeding the current down to a hybrid electric motor in the truck, according to a press release from the country's transport administration Trafikverket, Xinhua reported.
"Electric roads will bring us one step closer to fossil fuel-free transports, and has the potential to achieve zero carbon dioxide emissions. This is one way of developing environmentally smart transports in the existing road network. It could be a good supplement to todays road and rail network," said Lena Erixon, director general of Trafikverket.
"Electric roads are one more piece of the puzzle in the transport system of the future, especially for making the heavy transport section fossil fuel-free over the long term. This project also shows the importance of all the actors in the field cooperating," said Erik Brandsma, director general of the Swedish Energy Agency.
The tests will continue up through 2018. They will provide knowledge of how electric roads work in practice, and whether the technology can be used in the future. The experiment is based on the governments goal of energy efficiency and a fossil fuel-free vehicle fleet by 2030, and will contribute to strengthening Swedens competitiveness.
Three government agencies, Swedish Transport Administration, Swedish Energy Agency, and the country's innovation agency Vinnova, are partially funding the project, while the participants are paying for the rest.