Category Biology/Biotechnology

A study suggests that high-fat diets fuel the creation of inflammatory immune cells in the bone marrow of mice. The results may help explain how high-fat diets trigger inflammation, which can contribute to the development of insulin resistance, type 2 diabetes and other complications in individuals with obesity.

An invasion of inflammatory immune cells, called monocytes, into fat tissue is a hallmark of obesity, but what leads to this harmful phenomenon is unclear. Many immune cells, including monocytes, are produced in the bone marrow, which is very sensitive to environmental changes. Scientists have already shown that fat cells in the bone marrow rapidly expand in response to a high-fat diet.

“We wanted to know ...

Early intervention with rituximab, a drug used in the treatment of rheumatoid arthritis (RA), can reduce the risk of deterioration in myasthenia gravis, an autoimmune disease that causes loss of muscle control. This is according to a randomized clinical study led by researchers at Karolinska Institutet in Sweden and published in the journal JAMA Neurology.

“Patients with new onset myasthenia who received rituximab as a complement to standard of care showed greater improvement compared with patients who were given a placebo,” says Fredrik Piehl, professor at the Department of Clinical Neuroscience, Karolinska Institutet, and the study’s principal investigator...

The new label-free deep-tissue imaging with the wave correction algorithm retrieves the fine neural network of the mouse brain with the intact skull by focusing the light and filtering out undesired multiple scattered light waves.

Researchers led by Associate Director CHOI Wonshik of the Center for Molecular Spectroscopy and Dynamics within the Institute for Basic Science, Professor KIM Moonseok of The Catholic University of Korea, and Professor CHOI Myunghwan of Seoul National University developed a new type of holographic microscope...