Credit: Ulf Sirborn
The causes of the serious muscle disease ALS still remain unknown. Now, researchers at Karolinska Institutet and KTH Royal Institute of Technology, among others, have examined a type of cell in the brain blood vessels that could explain the unpredictable disease origins and dynamics. The results indicate a hitherto unknown connection between the nervous and vascular systems. The study, which is published in
Nature Medicine, has potential implications for earlier diagnoses and future treatments.
ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis) is a neurodegenerative disease of the motor neurons that eventually causes muscular atrophy, paralysis and death. There is currently no cure.
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IMAGE: An ion pump can deliver cytostatics more accurately in the brain, which gives less severe adverse effects in chemotherapy. view more
Credit: Thor Balkhed
Despite surgery and subsequent treatment with chemotherapy and radiation, the majority of patients experience recurrence of malignant brain tumours. Researchers at Linköping University, Sweden, and the Medical University of Graz, Austria, have shown in cells in culture that an ion pump can deliver drugs more accurately, which gives less severe adverse effects in chemotherapy. The results have been published in Advanced Materials Technologies. This is the first time an ion pump has been tested as a possible method to treat malignant brain tumours. We used cancer cells in the lab, and the results are extremely promising. However, it will probably take five to ten years before we see this new technology used in treatments for brain tumours , says Daniel Simon, associate professor at the Laboratory of Or
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A gene therapy protects eye cells in mice with a rare disorder that causes vision loss, especially when used in combination with other gene therapies, shows a study published today in
eLife.
The findings suggest that this therapy, whether used alone or in combination with other gene therapies that boost eye health, may offer a new approach to preserving vision in people with retinitis pigmentosa or other conditions that cause vision loss.
Retinitis pigmentosa is a slowly progressive disease, which begins with the loss of night vision due to genetic lesions that affect rod photoreceptors - cells in the eyes that sense light when it is low. These photoreceptors die because of their intrinsic genetic defects. This then impacts cone photoreceptors, the eye cells that detect light during the day, which leads to the eventual loss of daylight vision. One theory about why cones die concerns the loss of nutrient supply, especially glucose.
Altering a mosquito s gut genes to make them spread antimalarial genes to the next generation of their species shows promise as an approach to curb malaria, suggests a preliminary study published today in eLife.
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Technique allows mapping of epigenetic information in single cells at scale
Decoding epigenomic information from individual cells from the mouse brain. Histones are attached to DNA as beads on a string, with different versions decorating the genome as “epigenetic stickers”, labelling which genes are turned on or off. The method single-cell CUT&Tag allows to examine tens of thousands of single cells at the same time to determine their histone profiles. Illustration by Amagoia Agirre.
Histones are tiny proteins that bind to DNA and hold information that can help turn on or off individual genes. Researchers at Karolinska Institutet have developed a technique that makes it possible to examine how different versions of histones bind to the genome in tens of thousands of individual cells simultanously. The technique was applied to the mouse brain and can be used to study epigenetics at a single-cell level in other complex tissues. The study is published in Nature Biotechno