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A major hurdle to developing new and effective treatments for drug addiction is better understanding how exactly it manifests itself before, during and after chronic use. In a paper published online in the April 21, 2021 issue of the journal
eNeuro, an international team of researchers led by scientists at University of California San Diego School of Medicine describe the creation of two unique collections of more than 20,000 biological samples collected from laboratory rats before, during and after chronic use of cocaine and oxycodone.
Developed by the Preclinical Addiction Research Consortium, located in the Department of Psychiatry at UC San Diego School of Medicine and at Skaggs School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences, the new cocaine and oxycodone biobanks include samples from 20 different organs, plus urine, blood and feces.
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Animals use their sense of smell to navigate the world to find food, sniff out mates and smell danger. But when a hungry animal smells food and a member of the opposite sex at the same time, what makes dinner the more attractive option? Exactly what is it about the odor of food that says, Choose me?
Research by investigators at Harvard Medical School illuminates the neurobiology that underlies food attraction and how hungry mice choose to pay attention to one object in their environment over another.
In their study, published March 3 in
Nature, Stephen Liberles and co-author Nao Horio, identified the pathway that promotes attraction to food odors over other olfactory cues.
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Look deep inside the brain of someone with Alzheimer s disease, most forms of dementia or the concussion-related syndrome known as chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) and you ll find a common suspected culprit: stringy, hairball-like tangles of a protein called tau.
Such conditions, collectively known as tauopathies strike scores of people across the globe, with Alzheimer s alone affecting six million people in the United States.
But more than a century after German psychiatrist Alois Alzheimer discovered tau tangles, scientists still have much to learn about them.
A University of Colorado Boulder study, published this week in the journal
Neuron, shows for the first time that tau aggregates gobble up RNA, or ribonucleic acid, inside cells and interfere with an integral mechanism called splicing, by which cells ultimately produce needed proteins.
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IMAGE: Synaptic activation promotes a signaling cascade that results in the expression of long noncoding RNA, ADEPTR. It s quickly transported along dendrites to synapses, where it acts on proteins involved in. view more
Credit: Credit: Jenna Wingfield and Yibo Zhao of the Puthanveettil lab at Scripps Research in Jupiter, Florida.
JUPITER, FL Making memories involves more than seeing friends or taking photos. The brain constantly adapts to new information and stores memories by building connections among neurons, called synapses. How neurons do this reaching out arm-like dendrites to communicate with other neurons requires a ballet of genes, signaling molecules, cellular scaffolding and protein-building machinery.
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.