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IMAGE: Dr. Gretchen Carlisle is a research scientist at the MU Research Center for Human-Animal Interaction in the MU College of Veterinary Medicine. view more
Credit: MU College of Veterinary Medicine
COLUMBIA, Mo. - As a former school nurse in the Columbia Public Schools, Gretchen Carlisle would often interact with students with disabilities who took various medications or had seizures throughout the day. At some schools, the special education teacher would bring in dogs, guinea pigs and fish as a reward for good behavior, and Carlisle noticed what a calming presence the pets seemed to be for the students with disabilities.
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BUFFALO, N.Y. Scientists have known for years that mutations in the MLL4 gene can cause Kabuki syndrome, a rare developmental disorder.
But a study published on Jan. 11 in
Nature Communications illuminates new details regarding how this occurs. (Images are available by contacting Charlotte Hsu in UB Media Relations at chsu22@buffalo.edu.)
The research suggests that MLL4 controls the production of neurons that secrete growth hormone-releasing hormone (GHRH) in a part of the brain called the hypothalamus. Mice without working copies of the MLL4 gene in this area had stunted growth and markedly fewer GHRH neurons. Mice with only one functioning copy of the gene had similar problems.
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Recent years have provided substantial research displaying the effect of genetic mu-tations on the development of autism and other neurodevelopmental disorders. Based on those studies, researchers have focused attention on the commonalities be-hind those mutations and how they impact on the functioning of the brain. A study conducted by Professor Sagiv Shifman from the Life Sciences Institute at the He-brew University of Jerusalem and the Center for Autism Research has found that genes associated with autism tend to be involved in the regulation of other genes and to operate preferentially in three areas of the brain; the cortex, the striatum, and the cerebellum.
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Blinding reviewers to applicant photos, discarding standardized testing, and other strategies to improve equity increased the proportion of women and underrepresented racial and ethnic groups in a cardiology fellowship program, researchers reported.
The multipronged intervention boosted the proportion of the entire fellowship who were women from the previous 5-year mean of 27.0% to 54.2% after 3 years of the changes (2017-2019), reported Jennifer A. Rymer, MD, MBA, of Duke Clinical Research Institute in Durham, North Carolina, and colleagues in
By the same comparison Black, Hispanic, Latinx, and Native American matriculants in the program rose from 5.6% to 33.3%. Importantly, we did not alter (ie, lower) our standard requirements for recruiting applicants, Rymer s group noted. Aside from eliminating US Medical Licensing Examination score criteria, we continued to select applicants to interview who met previously published criteria. Furthermore, we did not
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IMAGE: Alyssa Brunal, a recent graduate of Virginia Tech s translational biology, medicine, and health doctoral program, and Yuchin Albert Pan, an associate professor at Fralin Biomedical Research Institute, discovered a link. view more
Credit: Virginia Tech
For the brain to learn, retain memories, process sensory information, and coordinate body movements, its groups of nerve cells must generate coordinated electrical signals. Disorder in synchronous firing can impair these processes and, in extreme cases, lead to seizures and epilepsy.
Synchrony between neighboring neurons depends on the protein connexin 36, an essential element of certain types of synaptic connections that, unlike classical chemical synapses, pass signals between neurons through direct electrical connections. For more than 15 years, scientists have debated the tie between connexin 36 and epilepsy.