Category Health/Medical

New OCT tool to study how diseases like dementia, Alzheimer’s, and brain tumors change brain tissue over time. “In the brain, the imaging depth is almost doubled,” said Martin Leahy of the National University of Ireland, Galway. “The authors demonstrate for the first time an application in which this capability opens up a whole new window into the live intact hippocampus, for discovery in brain research.”

From the experimental findings, the authors envision that this new optical coherence tomography (OCT) approach to brain study may enable examination of acute and chronic morphological or functional vascular changes in the deep brain, which has been rarely attempted before in the OCT community.

Choi and Wang used swept-source OCT (SS-OCT) powered by a vertical-cavity surface-emitting...

In Feb 2015, the photo of a striped dress stirred a worldwide internet debate ; now, neuroscientists have further decoded the phenomenon, demonstrating optical illusion is linked to specific brain activation patterns.

For some, it is black-blue, for others, it is white-gold. In a fMRI study, the neuroplasticity group headed by Prof. T. Schmidt-Wilcke solved the riddle of the illusion. In no time at all, the dress had captured the attention of media and scientists worldwide. Many research institutes have explored the phenomenon from various angles, by analyzing psychophysics or details of the image components...

BTI Professor Daniel Klessig and lab members Research Associate Hyong Woo Choi and Postdoctoral scientist Murli Manohar.

Aspirin’s active form, salicylic acid, blocks a protein called HMGB1, which triggers inflammation in damaged tissues. The new findings may explain the disease-preventing effects of a low-dose aspirin regimen and offer hope that more effective aspirin-like drugs may be developed for a wide variety of diseases.

“We’ve identified what we believe is a key target of aspirin’s active form in the body, salicylic acid, which is responsible for some of the many therapeutic effects that aspirin has...

Murphy et al. describe a novel pseudokinase architecture from human TRIB1 and characterize its substrate-recognition motif within the C/EBPα transcription factor. Combined with biophysical studies, this shows how Tribbles proteins eschew catalytic activity in favor of function as signaling scaffolds.

Protein Trib1 plays a vital role in controlling how and when other proteins are degraded, which is essential for managing protein levels in the cell. The finding could be used to develop new drugs to treat cancers such as leukaemia, caused by malfunctioning of the Trib1 protein.

Trib1 is part of the protein family Tribbles, which play diverse roles in cell signalling and development. Tribbles are named after the small, furry creatures from Star Trek that reproduce uncontrollably...