Category Biology/Biotechnology

Sertraline. Credit: http://www.neurosoup.com/sertraline-zoloft/

The study – conducted in nonhuman primates with brain structures and functions similar to those of humans – found that the antidepressant sertraline, a SSRI, Zoloft, significantly increased the volume of one brain region in depressed subjects but decreased the volume of two brain areas in non-depressed subjects.

“These observations are important for human health because Zoloft is widely prescribed for a number of disorders other than depression,” said Carol A. Shively, Ph.D., professor of pathology-comparative medicine at Wake Forest Baptist.

METHOD: 41 middle-aged female monkeys were fed a diet formulated to replicate that consumed by many Americans for 18 months, during which time depressive behavior in the animals was recor...

Nanoporous gold is like a sponge of tiny pores. It could be used to make new devices to detect pathogens. Credit: Erkin ?eker, UC Davis

UC Davis Dept of Electrical and Computer Engineering demonstrated that they could detect nucleic acids using nanoporous gold, a novel sensor coating material, in mixtures of other biomolecules that would gum up most detectors. This method enables sensitive detection of DNA in complex biological samples, such as serum from whole blood.

“Nanoporous gold can be imagined as a porous metal sponge with pore sizes that are a 1000X smaller than the diameter of a human hair,” said Assist. Prof Erkin Seker...

Buildup in brain cells of the protein alpha-synuclein (dark spots) occurs in the neurodegenerative disorder Multiple System Atrophy (MSA). Jensflorian/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0

Prions are misfolded proteins that make copies of themselves by inducing others to misfold. By so doing, they multiply and cause disease. The resulting illness in this case is multiple system atrophy (MSA), a neurodegenerative disease similar to Parkinson’s. The study, published August 31 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, adds weight to the idea that many neurodegenerative diseases are caused by prions.

In the 1960s researchers led by Carleton Gajdusek at the National Institutes of Health transmitted kuru, a rare neurodegenerative disease found in Papua New Guinea, and Creutzfeldt–Jakob disea...