𝐍𝐓/ Designer cytokine makes paralyzed mice walk again
Neuroscience biweekly vol. 24, 8th January — 22nd January
TL;DR
- Using gene therapy, a research team has succeeded in getting mice to walk again after a complete cross-sectional injury. The nerve cells produced the curative protein themselves.
- Early life experiences can have an outsized effect on brain development and neurobiological health. New research is showing that those effects can be passed down to subsequent generations, reporting that the infant children of mothers who had experienced childhood emotional neglect displayed altered brain circuitry involved in fear responses and anxiety.
- Targeted neuromodulation tailored to individual patients’ distinctive symptoms is an increasingly common way of correcting misfiring brain circuits in people with epilepsy or Parkinson’s disease. Now, scientists have demonstrated a novel personalized neuromodulation approach that — at least in one patient — was able to provide relief from symptoms of severe treatment-resistant depression within minutes.
- Our brains consist of soft matter bathed in watery cerebrospinal fluid inside a hard skull, and in a new article, researchers describe studying another system with the same features, an egg, to search for answers about concussions. Considering that in most concussive brain injuries, the skull does not break, they wanted to find out if it was possible to break or deform the egg yolk without breaking the eggshell.
- When we experience a new event, our brain records a memory of not only what happened, but also the context, including the time and location of the event. A new study from MIT neuroscientists sheds light on how the timing of a memory is encoded in the hippocampus, and suggests that time and space are encoded separately. In a study of mice, the researchers identified a hippocampal circuit that the animals used to store information about the timing of when they should turn left or right in a maze. When this circuit was blocked, the mice were unable to remember which way they were supposed to turn next. However, disrupting the circuit did not appear to impair their memory of where they were in space.
- A recent study by MIT and Boston University neuroscientists finds that the dynamic interplay of different brain wave frequencies, rather than dedicated circuitry, appears to govern the brain’s knack for highlighting what’s surprising and downplaying what’s predictable.
- Anyone who has tried and failed to meditate knows that our minds are rarely still. But where do they roam? New research has come up with a way to track the flow of our internal thought processes and signal whether our minds are focused, fixated or wandering.
- Simple vision tests can predict which people with Parkinson’s disease will develop cognitive impairment and possible dementia 18 months later, according to a new study. In a related study, the researchers also found that structural and functional connections of brain regions become decoupled throughout the entire brain in people with Parkinson’s disease, particularly among people with vision problems.
- Researchers have explained how the regularly structured topographic maps in the visual cortex of the brain could arise spontaneously to efficiently process visual information. This research provides a new framework for understanding functional architectures in the visual cortex during early developmental stages.
- Computer-based artificial intelligence can function more like human intelligence when programmed to use a much faster technique for learning new objects, say two neuroscientists who designed such a model that was designed to mirror human visual learning.
#NT #Neuroscience
https://medium.com/paradigm-fund/nt-designer-cytokine-makes-paralyzed-mice-walk-again-acc53c6e1e8 
