Category Health/Medical

The MIND diet has 15 dietary components, including 10 “brain-healthy food groups” and five unhealthy groups — red meat, butter and stick margarine, cheese, pastries and sweets, and fried or fast food.

A diet created by researchers at Rush University Medical Center may help substantially slow cognitive decline in stroke survivors, according to preliminary research presented on Jan. 25 at the American Stroke Association’s International Stroke Conference 2018 in Los Angeles. The findings are significant because stroke survivors are twice as likely to develop dementia compared to the general population. The diet, known as the MIND diet, is short for Mediterranean-DASH Diet Intervention for Neurodegenerative Delay...

Taste cells at the back of the tongue, studied by USC Dornsife researchers. The red-colored cells detect sour taste and the green-colored cells detect bitter, sweet or umami. The cell nuclei are colored blue. Credit: Yu-Hsiang Tu and Emily Liman

In a quest to understand how the body detects sour taste, the researchers found a proton channel involved in the body’s ability to maintain balance. Scientists at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences have discovered an entirely new class of ion channels. These channels let protons (H+ ions) into cells, are important in the inner ear for balance, and are present in the taste cells that respond to sour flavors.

Protons control whether a solution is acidic or basic. They set pH...

AKT isoforms have distinct hippocampal expression and roles in synaptic plasticity. eLife, 2018 DOI: 10.7554/eLife.30640.001

New study sheds light on key protein. For 5 years, the assistant professor of integrative physiology at CU Boulder has been working to better understand a protein called AKT, which is ubiquitous in brain tissue and instrumental in enabling the brain to adapt to new experiences and lay down new memories. Until now, scientists have known very little about what it does in the brain. But in a new paper funded by the National Institutes of Health, Hoeffer and his co-authors spell it out for the first time, showing that AKT comes in 3 distinct varieties residing in different kinds of brain cells and affecting brain health in very distinct ways...

Recombinant protein construction and PNp generation and characterization

Researchers have developed a universal vaccine to combat influenza A viruses that produces long-lasting immunity in mice and protects them against the limitations of seasonal flu vaccines, according to a study led by Georgia State University. The CDC estimates influenza has resulted in between 12,000 and 56,000 deaths annually in the U.S. since 2010.

Seasonal flu vaccines must be updated each year to match the influenza viruses that are predicted to be most common during the upcoming flu season, but protection doesn’t always meet expectations or new viruses emerge and manufacturers incorrectly guess which viruses will end up spreading...