Category Health/Medical

The newly developed sealant that was applied over a 3-mm-diameter hole in a porcine blood vessel. Credit: Image courtesy of National Institute for Materials Science (NIMS)

In recent years, patients with emphysema have been increasing mainly among middle-aged and elderly males due to aging and excessive smoking. Emphysema makes brittle lungs, and in severe cases, holes develop in the lung tissue, causing air leakage. Researchers have developed a new sealant to close holes developed in lungs and blood vessels using Alaska pollock gelatin, and have reported that the sealant is about 12X stronger than conventional sealants and is able to resist pressure as high as ~2.8X the normal blood pressure.

The advantage is that it remains liquid at room temperature as it contains gelatin extracted from ...

The dystrophin protein connects the cytoskeleton of muscle fibers with its N-terminal actin-binding domain and the extra-cellular matrix via a cysteine-rich C-terminal domain that binds dystroglycan, which in turn is bound to laminin 2. Between these two functional domain lies a large central domain that consists of 24 spectrin like repeats.

Human clinical trials are next step. Muscular dystrophy, which affects approximately 250,000 people in the US, occurs when damaged muscle tissue is replaced with fibrous, fatty or bony tissue and loses function. For years, scientists have searched for a way to successfully treat the most common form of the disease, Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy (DMD), which primarily affects boys...

REM sleep — the phase of night-time mammalian sleep physiology where dreams occur — has long fascinated scientists, clinicians, philosophers, and artists alike, but the identity of the neurons that control REM sleep, and its function in sleep have been controversial due to a lack of precise genetic methods to study the sleeping brain. (stock image) Credit: © asife / Fotolia

ID of the neurons that control REM sleep, and its function in sleep have been controversial due to a lack of precise genetic methods to study the sleeping brain. Now neuroscientists provide the first answers to both questions, identifying a neural circuit in the brain that regulates REM sleep, and showing that REM sleep controls the physiology of the other major sleep phase, called non-REM (NREM) sleep.

The study began...

PA Ameliorates CNS Autoimmunity via Induction of Treg Cells in the Small Intestine

Adjusting length of fatty acids consumed by mice altered the function of T helper cells in the gut – either intensifying or alleviating symptoms in an animal model of the autoimmune disease (i.e., multiple sclerosis).

A team compared in mice the effects of short-chain fatty acids, which are solely metabolized by gut bacteria and are typically found in fiber-rich diets, with the effects of long-chain fatty acids, the most abundant component of western diets. They found that long-chain fatty acids, such as lauric acid and palmitic acid, promoted the development and release of proinflammatory T cells from the intestinal wall to other areas in the body, including the brain...