Category Health/Medical

Researchers plan to test whether restoring hippocampal oscillations (mimicking the effects of sleep in CA1) is sufficient for promoting normal memory formation when mice are sleep-deprived.

Scientists have known that a lack of sleep can interfere with the ability to learn and make memories. Now, a group of University of Michigan researchers have found how sleep deprivation affects memory-making in the brain. Previously, researchers knew that depriving mice of sleep after the mice performed a task resulted in the mice forgetting aspects of that task. But researchers weren’t sure what function of the hippocampus was kept from doing its job...

Human EPS cells (green) can be detected in both the embryonic part (left) and extra-embryonic parts (placenta and yolk sac, right) of a mouse embryo. Credit: Salk Institute

What totipotent stem cells can do that pluripotent ones can’t do, however, is develop into tissues that support the embryo, like the placenta. These are called extra-embryonic tissues, and are vital in development and healthy growth. Now, scientists at the Salk Institute, in collaboration with researchers from Peking University, in China, are reporting their discovery of a chemical cocktail that enables cultured mouse and human stem cells to do just that: generate both embryonic and extra-embryonic tissues...

Prefrontal cortex shapes memory formation by modulating hippocampal encoding

Neurons in the prefrontal cortex “teach” neurons in the hippocampus to “learn” rules that distinguish memory-based predictions in otherwise identical situations, suggesting that learning in the present helps guide learning in the future, according to research conducted at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and published April 5 in the journal Neuron. The study investigated memory flexibility and interference, the mechanisms by which the brain interprets events and anticipates their likely outcomes. The hippocampus is a temporal lobe brain structure for remembering recent events...

Scanning electron microscopy images of F. prausnitzii grown in LYBHI medium.

Oral administration of a commensal gut microbe, Faecalibacterium prausnitzii, improves fatty liver in mice. F. prausnitzii is considered one of the most important bacterial indicators of a healthy gut. Due to the central role of liver in the whole body metabolism, fatty liver is a major health problem. In Finland alone, it affects around 1,000,000 people of the general population and has an occurrence of 90% among obese individuals. Humans with high liver fat content had less F. prausnitzii and more inflammation in the subcutaneous adipose tissue. The researchers, therefore, decided to study whether oral F...