brain – GOLLYGEE!

04.17.2013

creating oligodendrocytes

Popular Science covers two papers that appear in Nature Biotechnology on the topic of creating new brain cells. Researchers have developed a method to take skin cells from mice and rats and turn them into oligodendrocytes, which are the type of cells damaged by multiple sclerosis and other disorders.

From Popular Science:

The type of cell that the researchers made is a young, immature version of an oligodendrocyte. Oligodendrocytes normally wrap the nerve fibers of the brain and spinal cord in a protective coating called myelin. With certain diseases, though, people lose that coating or suffer damage to it, which can lead to severe symptoms, such as losing control of the arms and legs.

One major idea researchers have for curing such diseases is adding myelin back by transplanting young, immature oligodendrocytes into the patient. The cells are then supposed to mature and wrap themselves around exposed nerve fibers they find. (Older, more mature oligodendrocytes don’t seem as prone to finding and sheathing exposed nerve fibers.) The idea has worked in lab animals genetically engineered to not have myelin—wohoo!—but there’s a drawback. Until now, researchers generally made oligodendrocytes from stem cells taken from embryos. That’s fine for mice and rats, but it’s difficult to harvest and grow enough embryonic human stem cells for transplants in people.

04.12.2013

the see through brain

A mouse brain imaged using the CLARITY technique.

Brain research has been getting lots of press since President Barack Obama announced his BRAIN initiative to map the human brain. Earlier this week, Nature published a paper by a group of Stanford researchers or a new technique called CLARITY. This technique allows the researchers to make whole organs transparent. They can then use different chemical compounds to label and highlight specific cells or features of the organ. They were able to demonstrate on brain tissue. From Popular Science:

Making these images is an eight-day process. The Stanford researchers started by infusing a mouse brain with a hydrogel solution. They then put the gel and brain into an incubator to set. (Like making Jell-O! Except that the setting, in this case, required a higher temperature rather than a lower one.)

The set gel bound to and physically supported most of the things in the brain. The gel didn’t bind to lipids, or fats, in the brain, however. Such fat is opaque and surrounds each cell. When researchers extracted this unbound fat, they were left with a clear view of everything else, frozen in place. For example, proteins that were originally embedded in cell membranes and the little spines that come off of neurons both remained.

At this point, the researchers could add different molecules to color the parts of the brain they want to study and look at the whole thing under a light microscope.

11.29.2012

eating meat helped our brains evolve

From Christopher Wanjek in the Washington Post:

At the core of this research is the understanding that the modern human brain consumes 20 percent of the body’s energy at rest, twice that of other primates. Meat and cooked foods were needed to provide the necessary calorie boost to feed a growing brain.

One study, published last month in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, examined the brain size of several primates. For the most part, larger bodies have larger brains across species. Yet humans have exceptionally large, neuron-rich brains for our body size, while gorillas — three times as massive as humans — have smaller brains with one-third the neurons. Why?

The answer, it seems, is the gorillas’ raw, vegan diet (devoid of animal protein), which requires hours upon hours of eating to provide enough calories to support their mass.

Researchers from Brazil, led by Suzana Herculano-Houzel, a neuroscientist at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, calculated that adding neurons to the primate brain comes at a fixed cost of approximately six calories per billion neurons.

For gorillas to evolve a humanlike brain, they would need an additional 733 calories a day, which would require two more hours of feeding, the authors wrote. A gorilla already spends as much as 80 percent of the tropics’ 12 hours of daylight eating.

Tell your vegetarian friends to chew on that.

GOLLYGEE!

Tag: brain (page 1 of 2)

creating oligodendrocytes

the see through brain

eating meat helped our brains evolve