Wanted: Division of Genetics and Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology Program Directors
We’re seeking two highly qualified scientists to serve as program directors in the Genetic Mechanisms Branch (GMB) and the Developmental and Cellular Processes Branch (DCPB) of our Division of Genetics and Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology (GMCDB).
GMCDB supports research grants focused on understanding the structure and function of cells and cellular components and the cellular and molecular mechanisms that underlie inheritance, gene expression, and development. All prospective candidates should have expertise in the mechanism and regulation of genetics including basic molecular processes, cellular biolo...
Source: NIGMS Feedback Loop Blog - National Institute of General Medical Sciences - January 17, 2024 Category: Biomedical Science Authors: Chrissa Chverchko Tags: Job Announcements Source Type: blogs
Research Organism Superheroes: Fruit Flies
Credit: iStock.
Those pesky little bugs flying around the overripe bananas in your kitchen may hold the key to understanding something new about how our bodies work. That’s right, the fruit fly (Drosophila melanogaster) is a widely used research organism in genetics because of its superpower of reproducing quickly with similar genes to people.
Researchers have been studying fruit flies for over a century for many reasons. First, they’re easy to please—just keep them at room temperature and feed them corn meal, sugar, and yeast (or those bananas on your counter!). Second, they reproduce more quickly and have shor...
Source: Biomedical Beat Blog - National Institute of General Medical Sciences - January 17, 2024 Category: Research Authors: Chrissa Chverchko Tags: STEM Education Tools and Techniques Cool Creatures Research Organisms Source Type: blogs
Ppp1r17 Upregulation in the Hypothalamus Slows the Aging of Metabolism in Mice
Researchers here describe a specific issue in the aging of metabolism connected to the activity of Ppp1r17 in the hypothalamus in the brain. This affects the sympathetic nervous system, leading to reduced innervation of fat tissue, which in turn negatively affects many tissues via altered availability of circulating nutrients, signal molecules, and the like. The researchers note a few points at which they can intervene to stop this decline, either Ppp1r17 in the brain, or the circulating molecule eNAMPT released by fat cells. The effect size on life span in mice is modest, and there is the remaining question of why this de...
Source: Fight Aging! - January 17, 2024 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Daily News Source Type: blogs
Suppressing Inflammatory Activity of Supporting Cells in the Brain as a Treatment for ALS
Constant, unresolved inflammatory behavior in the supporting cells of the brain is implicated in the pathology of diverse neurodegenerative conditions. Here, researchers find that dampening this inflammation can help restore function in animal models of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). This joins many other conceptually similar demonstrations conducted in the laboratory for a range of different neurodegenerative diseases. It remains to be seen as to how well these anti-inflammatory strategies will perform in human clinical trials.
ALS is caused by the loss of upper motor neurons, located in the brain, and lowe...
Source: Fight Aging! - January 17, 2024 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Daily News Source Type: blogs
What ’ s in a name?
What names we give the flora and fauna. Names are critical for scientific discourse and general conversation alike. They can be weird and wonderful, informative, confusing, hilarious even, and sometimes baffling. While common, or vernacular, names vary wildly, science, of course, has a relatively standardised method of naming living things. The common format, which is often colloquially known as the Latin name, is to have the species in a genus, a family group, and then to follow that genus name with the species name.
For example, in the UK, we might talk of the Snowdrop, or the Common Snowdrop. This delicate plant with wh...
Source: David Bradley Sciencebase - Songs, Snaps, Science - January 16, 2024 Category: Science Authors: David Bradley Tags: Biology Science Source Type: blogs
A Proteomic Model for Five Subtypes of Alzheimer's Disease
There has been some work in recent years aimed at distinguishing subtypes of Alzheimer's disease that may respond quite differently to therapies. How much of the poor results in clinical trials is a matter of aiming too broadly, at patients who cannot respond well to a specific therapy? Of late, this attempt at categorization has focused on proteomic analyses of patient samples. Here find a paper covering results that were discussed late last year, in which researchers propose that there are five important subtypes of Alzheimer's disease.
Alzheimer's disease (AD) is heterogenous at the molecular level. Understandi...
Source: Fight Aging! - January 16, 2024 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Daily News Source Type: blogs
The Future Of Cognitive Health: This Is How Digital Health Can Help
According to this study, digital healthcare technologies offer ways to manage and slow down the progression of conditions like dementia and mild cognitive impairment. However, choosing the right technology is difficult because there’s no comprehensive review that covers the various types of digital technology for cognitive impairment, including their effects and limitations.
The goal of the study was to identify different types of digital health technologies used for dementia and mild cognitive impairment and evaluate how the results are measured and aligned with their intended purposes.
A total of 13...
Source: The Medical Futurist - January 16, 2024 Category: Information Technology Authors: Andrea Koncz Tags: TMF cognitive health Source Type: blogs
Fight Aging! Newsletter, January 15th 2024
In conclusion, FMD cycles have high potential to be effective in increasing the toxicity of a range of therapies against ALL and other blood cancers and should be tested in randomized clinical trials, especially in combination with immunotherapy and low toxicity cancer therapies.
In summary, we present a new strategy for improving leukemia treatment by combining FMD with chemotherapy to promote the killing of ALL cells in part by an immune-dependent mechanism. Fasting/FMD has been shown to reduce chemotherapy-associated toxicity in pre-clinical and clinical studies and thus represents a safe and potentially effectiv...
Source: Fight Aging! - January 14, 2024 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Newsletters Source Type: blogs
Healthcare AI Regulations and Ethics – 2024 Health IT Predictions
As we kick off 2024, we wanted to start the new year with a series of 2024 Health IT predictions. We asked the Healthcare IT Today community to submit their predictions and we received a wide ranging set of responses that we grouped into a number of themes. In fact, we got so many that we had to narrow them down to just the best and most interesting. Check out our community’s predictions below and be sure to add your own thoughts and/or places you disagree with these predictions in the comments and on social media.
All of this year’s 2024 health IT predictions (updated as they’re shared):
John and ...
Source: EMR and HIPAA - January 12, 2024 Category: Information Technology Authors: John Lynn Tags: AI/Machine Learning Ambulatory C-Suite Leadership Health IT Company Healthcare IT Hospital - Health System LTPAC Regulations 2024 Health IT Predictions Alison Sloane Anika Heavener ArentFox Schiff LLP athenahealth Barnes & Thornb Source Type: blogs
Effects of LDLR Variants on Longevity via Lowered Cardiovascular Disease
This study suggests that LDLR is a promising genetic target for human longevity. Lipid-related gene targets, such as PCSK9, CETP, and APOC3, might potentially regulate human lifespan, thus offering promising prospects for developing newer nonstatin therapies.
Link: https://doi.org/10.1186/s12944-023-01983-0 (Source: Fight Aging!)
Source: Fight Aging! - January 12, 2024 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Daily News Source Type: blogs
Chronological Age is Not a Good Component of Patient Risk Assessment
Chronological age is embedded in a great many standardized, widely-used protocols for patient risk assessment. Age-related diseases are, after all, age-related, and this use of chronological age has long seemed a reasonable choice. That said, we are now moving into an era in which novel means of measuring biological age are under development, such as epigenetic clocks.
Biological age is the burden of damage and dysfunction resulting from the causative processes of aging. Obviously, this should better reflect the odds of suffering age-related disease. While biological age correlates with chronological age, there is a...
Source: Fight Aging! - January 9, 2024 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Medicine, Biotech, Research Source Type: blogs
Wrong lessons in lipidology : Eradicating LDL is not our goal !
15 % of body weight is fat. (10kg) Out of which just 250 mg of cholesterol is streaming in blood. We must understand fat, lipid and cholesterol are different entities. LDL is obviously a target against atherosclerosis. While the total body fat seems to do little in determining blood cholesterol levels, what is more scientifically shocking is the slope of curve between blood LDL levels and plaque burden is rarely linear. Mind you, LDL constitutes .000025% of total fat. We have many other targets in dyslipidemia like free cholesterol, harmful fatty acids, remnant cholesterol, TGLs, dysfunctional HDLs
LDL is not innocen...
Source: Dr.S.Venkatesan MD - January 9, 2024 Category: Cardiology Authors: dr s venkatesan Tags: Uncategorized cut off value for ldl esc aha guidlines for lipids functions of ldl molecule good and bad cholesterol how low ldl can go inclisiron lipid metabolism lipidology pcsk inhibitors repatha Source Type: blogs
A Direct Link Between Genomic Instability and Inflammation in Senescent Cells
Aging is characterized by constant sterile inflammation, a state that is disruptive to tissue structure and function. A number of forms of molecular damage have been shown via various mechanisms to provoke this inflammation. Mitochondrial dysfunction, for example causes mitochondrial DNA to mislocalize to the cytoplasm, where it triggers an innate immune response that evolved to recognize the presence of bacterial DNA. Mitochondria are the evolved descendants of ancient symbiotic bacteria, and their remnant DNA is close enough to bacterial genomes for this to occur.
In today's open access paper, researchers discuss ...
Source: Fight Aging! - January 8, 2024 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Medicine, Biotech, Research Source Type: blogs
How Can the Immune System Go Awry?
This post is part of a miniseries on the immune system. Be sure to check out the other posts in this series that you may have missed.
The immune system is designed to closely monitor the body for signs of intruders that may cause infection. But what happens if it malfunctions? Overactive and underactive immune systems can both have negative effects on your health.
Autoimmune Disorders
To effectively monitor the body for pathogens, the adaptive immune system has to learn what a pathogen “looks like” on a molecular level. During their development, white blood cells go through training to learn how to differe...
Source: Biomedical Beat Blog - National Institute of General Medical Sciences - January 8, 2024 Category: Research Authors: Chrissa Chverchko Tags: Cells Injury and Illness Diseases Immunology Miniseries Infectious Diseases Microbes Sepsis Source Type: blogs
The Hallmarks of Aging in the Context of Sarcopenia
Researchers have implicated numerous mechanisms in the age-related loss of muscle mass and strength leading to the condition known as sarcopenia. While not everyone arrives at a diagnosis of sarcopenia, everyone is subject to the progressive deterioration of muscle tissue. One of the challenges facing attempts to understand age-related disease in detail is that the noteworthy mechanisms of aging form a complex, interacting web of cause and consequence. It is next to impossible to determine which mechanisms are more or less important from observation alone. So while one can mount a good argument for sarcopenia to be driven ...
Source: Fight Aging! - January 8, 2024 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Daily News Source Type: blogs
