In a public interview, Chinese biophysicist He Jiankui said he is receiving offers of financial support from figures in the US.
It is clear that specific memories are not stored in individual specific neurons.
But the epigenetic state of neurons influences whether they become part of memory…
Memories are encoded by sparse populations of neurons but how such sparsity arises remains largely unknown. We found that a neuron’s eligibility to be recruited into the memory trace depends on its epigenetic state prior to encoding. Principal neurons in the mouse lateral amygdala display intrinsic chromatin plasticity, which when experimentally elevated favors neuronal allocation into the encoding ensemble. Such chromatin plasticity occurred at genomic regions underlying synaptic plasticity and was accompanied by increased neuronal excitability in single neurons in real time. Lastly, optogenetic silencing of the epigenetically altered neurons prevented memory expression, revealing a cell-autonomous relationship between chromatin plasticity and memory trace formation. These results identify the epigenetic state of a neuron as a key factor enabling information encoding.
Geneformer is a recently introduced and powerful AI model that learns gene network dynamics and interactions using transfer learning from vast single-cell transcriptome data. This tool enables researchers to make accurate predictions about gene behavior and disease mechanisms even with limited data, accelerating drug target discovery and advancing understanding of complex genetic networks in various biological contexts.
Developed by researchers at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard and their collaborators, the AI model Geneformer uses the highest-expressed genes in sc-RNA expression data to generate a dense representation of each cell, which can be used as features for various downstream predictive tasks. What makes Geneformer unique, however, are the capabilities its architecture enables, even when trained on very little data.
Geneformer has a BERT-like transformer architecture and was pre-trained on data from about 30M single-cell transcriptomes across various human tissues. Its attention mechanism enables it to focus on the most relevant parts of the input data. With this context-aware approach, the model can make predictions by considering relationships and dependencies between genes.
Nano-MIND Technology for Wireless Control of Brain Circuits with Potential to Modulate Emotions, Social Behaviors, and Appetite.
Researchers at the Center for Nanomedicine within the Institute for Basic Science (IBS) and Yonsei University in South Korea have unveiled a groundbreaking technology that can manipulate specific regions of the brain using magnetic fields, potentially unlocking the secrets of high-level brain functions such as cognition, emotion, and motivation. The team has developed the world’s first Nano-MIND (Magnetogenetic Interface for NeuroDynamics) technology, which allows for wireless, remote, and precise modulation of specific deep brain neural circuits using magnetism.
The human brain contains over 100 billion neurons interconnected in a complex network. Controlling the neural circuits is crucial for understanding higher brain functions like cognition, emotion, and social behavior, as well as identifying the causes of various brain disorders. Novel technology to control brain functions also has implications for advancing brain-computer interfaces (BCIs), such as those being developed by Neuralink, which aim to enable control of external devices through thought alone.
Continue reading “New Technology to Control the Brain Using Magnetic Fields Developed” »
Minimally invasive cellular-level target-specific neuromodulation is needed to decipher brain function and neural circuitry. Here nano-magnetogenetics using magnetic force actuating nanoparticles has been reported, enabling wireless and remote stimulation of targeted deep brain neurons in freely behaving animals.
Teleology the return of Aristotle?
The scientific story of who we are is a reductionist, gene-centric model that forfeits natural phenomena like purpose due to its association with intelligent design and a transcendent, intelligent designer. Noble is neutral on religious matters. Yet he sees compelling evidence that purpose may be fundamental to life. He’s determined to debunk the current scientific paradigm and replace the elevated importance of genes with something much more controversial. His efforts have enraged many of his peers but gained support from the next generation of origins-of-life researchers working to topple the reign of gene-centrism. If successful, the shift could not only transform how we classify, study and treat disease, but what it means to be alive.
One of the earliest biomedical computer programmers, Noble created the first model for a working human heart in 1960 on a vacuum tube computer. The project led to his discovery that heartbeats are emergent properties—new phenomena—arising from feedback loops, transforming our understanding of heart function and underpin treatments for heart conditions that we use today. His research on the heart’s pacemaker demonstrates a prioritization of the organism as a whole over its genes alone. “Several genes could individually be knocked out but the process continues,” says Noble. These genes are responsible for heart rhythm, yet other mechanisms can take over to get the job done.
Continue reading “Evolution May Be Purposeful And It’s Freaking Scientists Out” »
The Nazca Mummies have to be amongst the most controversial topics in recent human history, they have been “debunked” multiple times since they were first discovered by Archeologist Thierry Jamin from Peru’s Inkarri institute. Given that this case needed more eyes from the international community, Thierry and Peruvian journalist Jois Mantilla agreed to associate themselves with Mexican journalist Jaime Maussan. What they wanted became a reality, but the movedidn’t come with not obstacles. Nearly seven years after the bodies were discovered from an undisclosed location in the Nazca region, there are still a majority of scientists and academia members who dismiss these bodies as fake. None of them have studied the specimens in person. So far, every scientist who comes close to these bodies and studies them has stated they are real bodies of once living beings.
Carbon 14 test results confirmed these specimens’ remains are from various times in the distant past, some are 1,000+ years old and others are between 1,500 and 2,000 years old. Despite the Carbon 14 test results, the x-rays, and other types of scans that show incredible evidence. There are still many from the mainstream scientific community who believe we won’t get to prove these bodies are real until we get resuls from an extensive DNA analysis that is taking place in lultiple places around the world. Because Jaime Maussan’s involvement did bring more eyes on these bodies, and multiple labs are already running tests on samples obtained directly from the two sources in Peru that have them.
A new study by scientists at deCODE Genetics shows that sequence variants drive the correlation between DNA methylation and gene expression. The same variants are linked to various diseases and other human traits.
The research is published in the journal Nature Genetics under the title “The correlation between CpG methylation and gene expression is driven by sequence variants.”
Nanopore sequencing is a new technology developed by ONT (Oxford Nanopore Technology), that enables us to analyze DNA sequences in real-time. With this technology, DNA molecules are drawn through tiny protein pores, and real-time measurements of electric current indicate which nucleotides in the DNA have passed through the pores. This allows the sequence of nucleotides in the DNA to be read, while also making it possible to detect chemical modifications of the nucleotides from these same measurements.
Several studies have indicated that interrupted epigenetic reprogramming using Yamanaka transcription factors (OSKM) can rejuvenate cells from old laboratory animals and humans. However, the potential of OSKM-induced rejuvenation in brain tissue has been less explored. Here, we aimed to restore cognitive performance in 25.3-month-old female Sprague–Dawley rats using OSKM gene therapy for 39 days. Their progress was then compared with the cognitive performance of untreated 3.5-month-old rats as well as old control rats treated with a placebo adenovector. The Barnes maze test, used to assess cognitive performance, demonstrated enhanced cognitive abilities in old rats treated with OSKM compared to old control animals. In the treated old rats, there was a noticeable trend towards improved spatial memory relative to the old controls.
A small team of public health specialists from the University of Glasgow and the Norwegian Institute of Public Health reports a possible link between some cases of autism and prenatal diet.
In their study, published in JAMA Network Open, the group analyzed information in two large databases of medical information on thousands of mothers and daughters in Norway and England.
Prior research has suggested that there appears to be diet, genetic and environmental factors involved in the development of autism in children while they are still in the womb, though the exact cause is still unknown. For this new study, the research team looked more closely at the role of diet in its development.
