doctordelacroix-blog - Tumblr blog

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A dead man returns? Curious... but I have my doubts.

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smallbranch replied to your post:snapshottearaway replied to your post:I. I think I...

that doesn’t seem all that revolutionary. a lot of powers are already genetic so it’s given that modifying genes would produce something. and even if you wanted to how would you pick the right strand of dna out of the gajillion in just one person.

You see, that's the thing. If I'm correct, this would let us single it down to a comparatively small amount of strands. It's not much, but the potential is overwhelming!

Perhaps... Perhaps I'm just overly excited. I've been looking for something like this for years, to be this much closer has me drunk with anticipation..

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snapshottearaway replied to your post:I. I think I may have stumbled upon something...

…care to enlighten us?

If I'm correct - and I think I may be - there could very well be a gene in the human DNA structure that, if modified slightly, could produce powers. A Variable X, if you will.

It requires more research, of course, but this is the biggest lead I've encountered in all my years of work.

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I.

I think I may have stumbled upon something revolutionary.

I.. I mean. I can't make any concrete proclamations yet, but... This could change the world.

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You're not on often, but whenever you are I enjoy hearing about how your research is going. I hope you get a promotion soon. You definitely deserve it for being so passionate and hardworking.

...Ah.

This is touching.. thank you, whoever left this message.

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how has work been going? have you made any breakthroughs or interesting discoveries lately?

Work has been going fairly well. I've acclimated and introduced myself to my coworkers, and I've found a niche in the water cooler sociopolitical forum.

As far as discoveries or breakthroughs... Not much of note, at least not anything newsworthy. I've spliced a few fruits together to create a couple of hybrid 'superfruit' plants, and did a bit of work trying to delay the onset of cell degeneration, but that certainly isn't going anywhere anytime soon.

I've been doing some research into the concept of positive body modifications for - ultimately, once perfected - workers, however. Much of it deals with sight, but the problem is getting it working in subjects that aren't still developing physically...

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((what kind of person would be Castella's ideal sexual partner?))

((Someone she can play with -- Ideally, someone that Castella can toy around in bed with and dominate. If there's an element of fighting for top dog status, even better.

Also, someone who doesn't mind getting rough. Like, "let's introduce a scalpel into the bedroom" rough.))

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((Oh, what the hey. I'll take some NSFW asks -- or just normal asks! -- for Castella. Let's delve into the mind of Ms. Quiet Scientist....))

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I'm trying to make this hybrid fruit plant produce larger, juicier berries.

It's slightly harder than expected. Perhaps it's too unstable..?

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Huh.

Looks like I managed to sleep through Valentine's Day. Oh well.

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New research from David Westaway, PhD, of the University of Alberta and Jiri Safar, MD, Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine has uncovered a quality control mechanism in brain cells that may help keep deadly neurological diseases in check for months or years.

Image credit:...

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Fighting Flies

When one encounters a group of fruit flies invading their kitchen, it probably appears as if the whole group is vying for a sweet treat. But a closer look would likely reveal the male flies in the group are putting up more of a fight, particularly if ripe fruit or female flies are present. According to the latest studies from the fly laboratory of California Institute of Technology (Caltech) biologist David Anderson, male Drosophilae, commonly known as fruit flies, fight more than their female counterparts because they have special cells in their brains that promote fighting. These cells appear to be absent in the brains of female fruit flies.  

"The sex-specific cells that we identified exert their effects on fighting by releasing a particular type of neuropeptide, or hormone, that has also been implicated in aggression in mammals including mouse and rat," says Anderson, the Seymour Benzer Professor of Biology at Caltech, and corresponding author of the study. "In addition, there are some recent papers implicating increased levels of this hormone in people with personality disorders that lead to higher levels of aggression."

The team’s findings are outlined in the January 16 version of the journal Cell.

Read more

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Erasing traumatic memories

Nearly 8 million Americans suffer from posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), a condition marked by severe anxiety stemming from a traumatic event such as a battle or violent attack.

Many patients undergo psychotherapy designed to help them re-experience their traumatic memory in a safe environment so as to help them make sense of the events and overcome their fear. However, such memories can be so entrenched that this therapy doesn’t always work, especially when the traumatic event occurred many years earlier.

MIT neuroscientists have now shown that they can extinguish well-established traumatic memories in mice by giving them a type of drug called an HDAC2 inhibitor, which makes the brain’s memories more malleable, under the right conditions. Giving this type of drug to human patients receiving psychotherapy may be much more effective than psychotherapy alone, says Li-Huei Tsai, director of MIT’s Picower Institute for Learning and Memory.

“By inhibiting HDAC2 activity, we can drive dramatic structural changes in the brain. What happens is the brain becomes more plastic, more capable of forming very strong new memories that will override the old fearful memories,” says Tsai, the senior author of a paper describing the findings in the Jan. 16 issue of Cell.

The new study also reveals the molecular mechanism explaining why older memories are harder to extinguish. Lead authors of the paper are former Picower Institute postdoc Johannes Graff and Nadine Joseph, a technical assistant at the Picower Institute.

Genes and memories

Tsai’s lab has previously shown that when memories are formed, neurons’ chromatin — DNA packaged with proteins — undergoes extensive remodeling. These chromatin modifications make it easier to activate the genes necessary to create new memories.

In this study, the researchers focused on chromatin modifications that occur when previously acquired memories are extinguished. To do this, they first trained mice to fear a particular chamber — by administering a mild foot shock — and then tried to recondition the mice so they no longer feared it, which was done by placing the mice in the chamber where they received the shock, without delivering the shock again.

This training proved successful in mice that had experienced the traumatic event only 24 hours before the reconditioning. However, in mice whose memories were 30 days old, it was impossible to eliminate the fearful memory.

The researchers also found that in the brains of mice with 24-hour-old memories, extensive chromatin remodeling occurred during the reconditioning. For several hours after the mice were placed back in the feared chamber, there was a dramatic increase in histone acetylation of memory-related genes, caused by inactivation of the protein HDAC2. That histone acetylation makes genes more accessible, turning on the processes needed to form new memories or overwrite old ones.

In mice with 30-day-old memories, however, there was no change in histone acetylation. This suggests that re-exposure to a fearful memory opens a window of opportunity during which the memory can be altered, but only if the memory has recently been formed, Tsai says.

“If you do something within this window of time, then you have the possibility of modifying the memory or forming a new trace of memory that actually instructs the animal that this is not such a dangerous place,” she says. “However, the older the memory is, the harder it is to really change that memory.”

Based on this finding, the researchers decided to treat mice with 30-day-old memories with an HDAC2 inhibitor shortly after re-exposure to the feared chamber. Following this treatment, the traumatic memories were extinguished just as easily as in the mice with 24-hour-old memories.

The researchers also found that HDAC2 inhibitor treatment turns on a group of key genes known as immediate early genes, which then activate other genes necessary for memory formation. They also saw an increase in the number of connections among neurons in the hippocampus, where memories are formed, and in the strength of communication among these neurons.

“Our experiments really strongly argue that either the old memories are permanently being modified, or a new much more potent memory is formed that completely overwrites the old memory,” Tsai says.

“This could be a very promising way to bring older memories back, process them in the hippocampus, and then extinguish them with the correct paradigm,” says Jelena Radulovic, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine who was not part of the research team.

Treating anxiety

Some HDAC2 inhibitors have been approved to treat cancer, and Tsai says she believes it is worth trying such drugs to treat PTSD. “I hope this will convince people to seriously think about taking this into clinical trials and seeing how well it works,” she says.

Such drugs might also be useful in treating people who suffer from phobias and other anxiety disorders, she adds.

Tsai’s lab is now studying what happens to memory traces when re-exposure to traumatic memories occurs at different times. It is already known that memories are formed in the hippocampus and then transferred to the cortex for longer-term storage. It appears that the HDAC2 inhibitor treatment may somehow restore the memory to the hippocampus so it can be extinguished, Tsai says.

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Findings Could Help Explain Origins of Human Limb Control

We might have more in common with a lamprey than we think, according to a new Northwestern University study on locomotion. At its core, the study of transparent zebrafish addresses a fundamental evolution issue: How did we get here?

Neuroscientists Martha W. Bagnall and David L. McLean have found that the spinal cord circuits that produce body bending in swimming fish are more complicated than previously thought.

Vertebrate locomotion has evolved from the simple left-right bending of the body exemplified by lampreys to the appearance of fins in bony fish to the movement of humans, with the complex nerve and muscle coordination necessary to move four limbs.

Bagnall and McLean report that differential control of an animal’s musculature — the basic template for controlling more complex limbs — is already in place in the spinal networks of simple fish. Neural circuits in zebrafish are completely segregated: individual neurons map to specific muscles.

Specifically, the neural circuits that drive muscle movement on the dorsal (or back) side are separate from the neural circuits activating muscles on the ventral (or front) side. This is in addition to the fish being able to separately control the left and right sides of its body [Video]

Ultimately, understanding more about how fish swim will allow scientists to figure out how humans walk.

“Evolution builds on pre-existing patterns, and this is a critical piece of the puzzle,” McLean said. “Our data help clarify how the transition from water to land could have been accomplished by simple changes in the connections of spinal networks.”

The findings will be published Jan. 10 in the journal Science. McLean, an assistant professor of neurobiology in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences, and Bagnall, a postdoctoral fellow in his research group who made the discovery, are authors of the paper.

“This knowledge will put us in a better position to devise more effective therapies for when things go wrong with neural circuits in humans, such as spinal cord damage,” McLean said. “If you want to fix something, you have to know how it works in the first place. Given that the fish spinal cord works in a similar fashion to our own, this makes it a fantastic model system for research.”

McLean and Bagnall studied the motor neurons of baby zebrafish because the fish develop quickly and are see-through. They used state-of-art imaging techniques to monitor and manipulate neuronal activity in the fish.

“You can stare right into the nervous system,” McLean said. “It’s quite remarkable.”

The separate circuits for moving the left and right and top and bottom of the fish allow the animal to twist its body upright when it senses that it has rolled too far to one side or the other.

“This arrangement is perfectly suited to provide rapid postural control during swimming,” Bagnall said. “Importantly, this ancestral pattern of spinal cord organization may also represent an early functional template for the origins of limb control.”

Separate control of dorsal and ventral muscles in the fish body is a possible predecessor to separate control of extensors and flexors in human limbs. By tweaking the connections between these circuits as they elaborated during evolution, it is easier to explain how more complicated patterns of motor coordination in the limbs and trunk could have arisen during dramatic evolutionary changes in the vertebrate body plan, the researchers said.

“We are teasing apart basic components of locomotor circuits,” McLean said. “The molecular mechanisms responsible for building spinal circuits are conserved in all animals, so this study provides a nice hypothesis that scientists can test.”

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unintentionaltension replied to your post:unintentionaltension replied to your...

Mitch King.

Pleased to make your acquaintance. I'll keep in touch.

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unintentionaltension replied to your post:unintentionaltension replied to your post: A...

Alright. I’ll sign up for that.

Thank you for your time. What's your name?

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unintentionaltension replied to your post: A question. Would any of you with powe...

What does it pay?

$200 for what may be an hour and a half of your time.

snapshottearaway replied to your post: A question. Would any of you with powe...

I would be willing!

Fantastic. I'll place you on my list, so we can set up a good time for an appointment.