Category: Science News

{Eggs can be ‘tricked’ into developing into an embryo without fertilisation, but the resulting embryos, called parthenogenotes, die after a few days because key developmental processes requiring input from sperm don’t happen.}

However, scientists from the Department of Biology & Biochemistry at the University of Bath have developed a method of injecting mouse parthenogenotes with sperm that allows them to become healthy baby mice with a success rate of up to 24 per cent.

This compares to a rate of zero per cent for parthenogenotes or about two per cent for nuclear transfer cloning.

The study is published today (Tuesday, 13 September, 2016) in the journal Nature Communications.

Molecular embryologist Dr Tony Perry, senior author of the study, said: “This is first time that full term development has been achieved by injecting sperm into embryos.

“It had been thought that only an egg cell was capable of reprogramming sperm to allow embryonic development to take place.

“Our work challenges the dogma, held since early embryologists first observed mammalian eggs around 1827 and observed fertilisation 50 years later, that only an egg cell fertilised with a sperm cell can result in a live mammalian birth.”

The idea was the brain child of Dr Toru Suzuki in Dr Perry’s team in the University of Bath’s Laboratory of Mammalian Molecular Embryology, who performed the study together with team member Dr Maki Asami and colleagues from the University of Regensburg and the Fraunhofer Institute for Toxicology and Experimental Medicine in Germany.

The baby mice born as a result of the technique seem completely healthy, but their DNA started out with different epigenetic marks compared with normal fertilisation. This suggests that different epigenetic pathways can lead to the same developmental destination, something not previously shown.

The discovery has ethical implications for recent suggestions that human parthenogenotes could be used as a source of embryonic stem cells because they were considered unviable. It also hints that in the long-term future it could be possible to breed animals using non-egg cells and sperm. Although this is still only an idea, it could have potential future applications in human fertility treatment and for breeding endangered species.

Dr Paul Colville-Nash, from the Medical Research Council (MRC) who funded the work, said: “This is an exciting piece of research which may help us to understand more about how human life begins and what controls the viability of embryos, mechanisms which may be important in fertility. It may one day even have implications for how we treat infertility, though that’s probably still a long way off.”

The study was funded by the Medical Research Council (MRC).

{You may have noticed that women are more prone to sleep disturbances than men. They are, for instance, up to twice as likely to suffer from insomnia than men. Could there be a link between the body clock that regulates sleep and being a female or a male? Yes, according to an original study conducted by Dr. Diane B. Boivin of McGill University’s Department of Psychiatry and the Douglas Mental Health University Institute.}

By controlling for the menstrual cycle and hormonal contraceptive use, Dr. Boivin shows, in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), that the body clock affects sleep and alertness differently in men and women.

“For a similar sleep schedule, we find that women’s body clock causes them to fall asleep and wake up earlier than men. The reason is simple: their body clock is shifted to a more easterly time zone,” says the Director of the Centre for Study and Treatment of Circadian Rhythms at the Douglas Institute, one of the research centres of the CIUSSS de l’Ouest-de-l’Île-de-Montréal.

And, she adds, “This observed difference between the sexes is essential for understanding why women are more prone to disturbed sleep than men.”

A novel experiment

In this study, the medical researcher’s team compared in 15 men and 11 women variations in sleep and alertness regulated by the body clock. The women who were recruited were cycling naturally and were studied during two phases of their menstrual cycle. This is a crucial point because previous research by Dr. Boivin had shown that the phase of the menstrual cycle affects the biological rhythms of body temperature and sleep.

“Our participants did not exhibit any sleep problems during the study. Just the same, our results are helping us understand, among other things, why women are more likely than men to wake up earlier in the morning and feel tired after a night’s sleep. As well, women are less alert at night than men,” explains Boivin.

Thus, the results of this study hint that women could be less biologically suited for night work. Further research will be necessary to explore this matter and develop interventions suited to men’s and women’s health.

More than a third of the Canadian population experiences sleep disturbances. One consequence of this is that close to 15% of adults have functional problems.

{Highly-stressed women 40-percent less likely to conceive during ovulation window.}

Women who reported feeling more stressed during their ovulatory window were approximately 40-percent less likely to conceive during that month than other less stressful months, research shows.

What many have long suspected, has been scientifically confirmed — women’s high stress reduces their probability of conception.

University of Louisville School of Public Health and Information Sciences epidemiologist Kira Taylor, Ph.D., and her UofL and Emory University colleagues, found that women who reported feeling more stressed during their ovulatory window were approximately 40-percent less likely to conceive during that month than other less stressful months. Similarly, women who generally reported feeling more stressed than other women, were about 45-percent less likely to conceive. The results of the study recently published in the journal Annals of Epidemiology.

In the study, 400 women 40-years-old and younger who were sexually active recorded their daily stress levels measured on a scale from one to four (low to high). The diaries also contained information regarding menstruation, intercourse, contraception, alcohol, caffeine and smoking. Urine samples also were collected throughout the study, and women were followed until they became pregnant or until the study ended, for an average of eight menstrual cycles.

Researchers calculated mean stress levels during each phase of the menstrual cycle, with day 14 as the estimated time of ovulation. They found the negative effect of stress on fertility was only observed during the ovulatory window, and was true after adjustments for other factors like age, body mass index, alcohol use and frequency of intercourse.

“These findings add more evidence to a very limited body of research investigating whether perceived stress can affect fertility,” Taylor said. “The results imply that women who wish to conceive may increase their chances by taking active steps towards stress reduction such as exercising, enrolling in a stress management program or talking to a health professional.”

The study also found that women who did conceive experienced an increase in stress at the end of the month in which they became pregnant. Taylor hypothesizes this could be the result of two factors: women became stressed after taking a home pregnancy test and learning they were pregnant, and/or most likely the increased stress was the result of changes in hormone levels caused by pregnancy itself.

“Some individuals are skeptical that emotional and psychological attributes may be instrumental in affecting fertility,” Taylor said. “I hope the results of this study serve a wake-up call for both physicians and the general public that psychological health and well-being is just as important as other more commonly accepted risk factors such as smoking, drinking alcohol, or obesity when trying to conceive.”

{New research has shown that the corticosteroid deflazacort is a safe and effective treatment for Duchenne muscular dystrophy. The findings, which appear this month in the journal Neurology, could pave the way for first U.S.-approved treatment for the disease.}

“Duchenne muscular dystrophy patients have limited treatment options and a desperate need for effective therapies,” said University of Rochester Medical Center (URMC) neurologist Robert Griggs, M.D., lead author of the study. “This study shows that deflazacort may provide an important treatment for delaying the progression of the disease.”

Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD) is a condition found almost exclusively in boys. The disease is characterized by muscle weakness which begins to appear at a young age and progresses rapidly leading to significant disability. Boys with the disease often end up in a wheelchair by age 9 or 10 because of weakness in their legs. The symptoms eventually spread to other parts of the body, including the heart and muscles responsible for breathing, and the disease is often fatal by the time the individual reaches his late teens. An estimated 28,000 people in the U.S. suffer from the disease.

While there is currently no ap proved treatment for DMD, the corticosteroid prednisone is often used “off label” to treat the condition. Several studies, beginning with research conducted by Griggs and his colleagues more than 20 years ago, have shown that daily use of corticosteroids can increase muscle mass and slow muscle degeneration in DMD patients, prolonging their ability to walk and preserving respiratory function. However, many DMD patients in the U.S. are not prescribed corticosteroids, primarily due to concern over the side effects of prolonged drug use in children.

While deflazacort is approved for use in Europe and elsewhere to treat DMD, the drug has never gone through the approval process with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Studies of the drug abroad have shown that it is effective and has fewer side effects compared to other corticosteroids, namely less associated weight gain.

Deflazacort was involved in a Phase 3 clinical trial in the U.S. in the mid-1990s. However, soon after the trial was completed, the company sponsoring the research lost interest in the drug, the study results were never published, and efforts to obtain FDA approval were abandoned.

At the urging of patients and their families, Griggs and others spent decades attempting to get access to the original study data. In the intervening years, another company — Marathon Pharmaceuticals — acquired the rights to the deflazacort and began a new push to gain FDA approval for the drug. The researchers were never able to obtain the data from the original clinical trial sponsor and in the end had to painstakingly reconstruct the study results from the information collected at each individual study site. This data forms the basis for the new Neurology study.

The study, which involved 196 DMD patients, showed that deflazacort was safe, effectively preserved muscle strength, and was associated with less weight gain than prednisone.

The data from the study is the foundation for two New Drug Applications currently pending before the FDA for use of the drug to treat DMD. If approved, deflazacort with be the first drug sanctioned in the U.S. to treat the disease.

Griggs is also heading up another international study that seeks addresses the variation in care that DMD patients currently receive by establishing a universal and effective standard of care. The new study, called FOR-DMD (Finding the Optimum Regimen of Corticosteroids for Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy), will determine whether daily steroid treatment or an alternative regime is more effective in slowing the disease progression and managing side effects. The clinical trial, which will evaluate both prednisone and deflazacort, will follow 200 patients for 3-5 years.

{For many years, research has claimed that men and women’s brain are wired differently, but a new research has dismissed such claims.}

According to Professor Gina Rippon, a neuroscientist from the University of Aston, there is no difference between male and female brains.

She said that gender differences were a result of cultural and environmental factors.

The neuroscientist claims that segregation happens when children are given different toys; that is, it occurs from a young age, when boys are given toys and books that differ from those given to girls.

She reveals that this segregation can change the way their brains develop.

Speaking at the British Science Festival in Swansea, she said: “There is no such thing as a male or female brain.

“The brain is a mosaic and every brain is different for every individual.”

{A study has found that during sleep, the experiences you care about are more likely to enter your long-term memory.}

Eighty non-Welsh speaking participants were taught Welsh words before either a period of wake or sleep.

Those who slept showed an increased ability to learn the words, and the effect was greatest in those who placed personal value on the language.

This suggests that memories perceived as important undergo preferential treatment by the brain during sleep.

While it has long been established that sleep helps the consolidation of memories, this is the first study to show that the effect is influenced by how much you care about the memory.

The findings were discussed on Friday at the British Science Festival and are soon to be published in the Journal of Sleep Research.

“The mere fact that your beliefs about something seem to affect how the brain processes things during the night is really quite astounding,” said Prof Mark Blagrove from Swansea University, who conducted the research with colleague Elaine van Rijn.
The test was conducted on native English-speaking university students, recently arrived in Wales and not having previously lived in the country.

Using a tablet computer app, the participants were presented with 28 Welsh and Breton translations of English words.

The app tested immediate recall of the words and then how many were remembered 12 hours later, after either no sleep or at least 6 hours’ sleep.

Participants were also asked to rate how much they valued the Welsh language.
For the sleep group only, there was a significant correlation between the value placed on the Welsh language and the number of Welsh words recalled.

According to Prof Blagrove and Ms van Rijn, this suggests that anything we have experienced is more likely to be consolidated in our sleep, if it is something we value personally.

The study was conducted in the Swansea sleep lab, where the team also studies the occurrence and the effects of dreams.

{Volunteers who started an experiment feeling neutral about certain faces they saw ended up unknowingly adopting the feelings that scientists induced via an MRI feedback technique, according to newly published research.}

The study in PLOS Biology therefore suggests that there is a single region of the brain where both positive and negative feelings for faces take shape and provides the second demonstration this year that the MRI technique can be used to train a mental process in an unknowing subject. This spring, the team used the same method to associate the perception of color with the context of a pattern so strongly that volunteers saw the color when cued by the pattern, even if the color wasn’t really there.

In the new study, the researchers sought to determine whether they could direct feelings about faces — a more sophisticated brain function that is closer to their eventual goal, which is to develop the technique to the point where it could become a tool for psychological therapy, for instance for anxiety.

“Face recognition is a very important social function for people,” said co-author Takeo Watanabe, the Fred M. Seed Professor of Cognitive and Linguistic Sciences at Brown University. “Facial recognition is associated with people’s emotions.”

Decoded neurofeedback explained

The technique, which the researchers call “DecNef,” for decoded neurofeedback, starts with detecting and analyzing the specific activity patterns in a brain region that correspond to a mental state. For example, at the beginning of the new study, while 24 volunteers saw hundreds of faces and rated their sentiments about each of them (on a scale of 1 for dislike to 10 for like, with 5 for neutral), the researchers used MRI to record the patterns of activity in a brain region called the cingulate cortex.

That step alone was fairly conventional neuroscience except that many scientists believe that positive or negative feelings about faces are formulated in separate brain regions. But this team of four researchers at Brown University and the Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute International in Kyoto, Japan, wanted to test whether the cingulate cortex handles both sides of the emotion.

Sure enough, the researchers’ software, called a decoder, was able to analyze the recordings to identify reliable and distinct patterns in each volunteer’s cingulate cortex associated with positive and negative feelings about faces.

“We found that the cingulate cortex seems to handle both opposing directions with different activity patterns,” said co-author Yuka Sasaki, associate professor (research) of cognitive, linguistic and psychological sciences at Brown.

With these signature patterns established for each volunteer, the participants were then unknowingly divided into two groups of 12 — either positive or negative — and were called back in for a few days of additional research in the MRI machine. In this phase the subjects were shown a subset of the faces they rated as neutral and were then asked to perform a seemingly unrelated task: After seeing each face on the screen, they were then shown a disk and asked to somehow use their minds to try to make it appear as big as possible. The bigger they could make the disk, they were told, the more of a small monetary reward they could receive.

In reality, the tasks weren’t unrelated. Participants didn’t know this at the time, but the only way the disk would grow was when the MRI readings showed that they happened (for whatever reason) to produce their signature patterns of positive or negative feelings about faces in their cingulate cortex. In other words, the experiment rewarded volunteers in the positive group with a larger disk when they produced the pattern associated with liking the faces after seeing a previously neutral one. Similarly, the experiment rewarded volunteers in the negative group with a growing disk the more they happened to produce the pattern associated with dislike after seeing a neutral one.

In essence, DecNef aims to train people to produce specific feelings or perceptions in specific contexts by rewarding those moments when they unknowingly do so.

A third group of six other participants was used as a control group. They saw faces and rated them, but were not given the DecNef step of having to enlarge a disk in association with the activation patterns that represent positive or negative feelings.

Finally, all the participants were then queried anew about their feelings regarding the initially neutral faces.

Facial feelings were affected

When the researchers analyzed the results, they were able to make several key findings. On average, the positive group’s ratings of the neutral faces moved up mildly but significantly (by about 0.6 on the 1 to 10 scale), while the negative group’s ratings of the faces moved down a bit less but still significantly. Meanwhile the control group’s ratings didn’t change significantly at all.

“From all these results we conclude that association of originally neutrally rated faces with covert induction of activity patterns in the single brain region, the cingulate cortex, led to changes in facial preference specifically for those faces, and in a specific preference — positive or negative — direction,” the authors wrote in the study.

To be as certain as possible about the findings, they did a few more analyses. In post-experiment interviews, they asked the subjects whether they knew what was really going on — none did. Then the researchers explained what the experiment was really about and asked people to say whether they thought they were in the positive or negative group. People were no better than chance at saying which they were in. Together these results suggest that none of the experimental volunteers changed their preferences about neutral faces based on their own will or intention.

In another analysis, the researchers crunched the numbers to see if the degree of activity in the cingulate cortex during the disk-enlargement phase correlated with the degree of change in preferences. The results revealed a high correlation (0.78 out of 1). In other words, the amount of brain activity was proportional to the amount of induced feeling.

Toward a DecNef therapy

While the induced changes in feeling were mild, the training took place over only a few days, the researchers noted. Training that occurs on the scale of weeks, as is often required for clinical therapies, might have induced stronger feelings.

But even a small effect could be beneficial for people if it blunts a persistently painful feeling associated with a certain trigger, Watanabe said.

“If someone develops a traumatic memory that makes him or her suffer, even a small reduction of the suffering would be helpful,” Watanabe said.

The researchers also said they are aware that there could be potential abuse or misuse of the technique — a kind of brainwashing — so it might be good if it proves at least somewhat limited in its effect.

In addition to Sasaki and Watanabe, the paper’s other authors are lead author Kazuhisa Shibata and corresponding author Mitsuo Kawato.

{Exposure to air pollution at the place of residence increases the risk of developing insulin resistance as a pre-diabetic state of type 2 diabetes. Scientists of Helmholtz Zentrum München, in collaboration with colleagues of the German Center for Diabetes Research (DZD), reported these results in the journal Diabetes.}

“Whether the disease becomes manifest and when this occurs is not only due to lifestyle or genetic factors, but also due to traffic-related air pollution,” said Professor Annette Peters, director of the Institute of Epidemiology II at Helmholtz Zentrum München and head of the research area of epidemiology of the DZD.

For the current study, she and her colleagues in collaboration with German Diabetes Center Düsseldorf and the German Heart Centre analyzed the data of nearly 3,000 participants of the KORA study who live in the city of Augsburg and two adjacent rural counties. All individuals were interviewed and physically examined. Furthermore, the researchers took fasting blood samples, in which they determined various markers for insulin resistance and inflammation. In addition, leptin was examined as adipokine which has been suggested to be associated with insulin resistance. Non-diabetic individuals underwent an oral glucose tolerance test to detect whether their glucose metabolism was impaired.

The researchers compared these data with the concentrations of air pollutants at the place of residence of the participants, which they estimated using predictive models based on repeated measurements at 20 sites (for particle measurements) and at 40 sites (for nitrogen dioxide measurements) in the city and in the rural counties.

“The results revealed that people who already have an impaired glucose metabolism, so-called pre-diabetic individuals, are particularly vulnerable to the effects of air pollution,” said Dr. Kathrin Wolf, lead author of the study. “In these individuals, the association between increases in their blood marker levels and increases in air pollutant concentrations is particularly significant! Thus, over the long term — especially for people with impaired glucose metabolism — air pollution is a risk factor for type 2 diabetes.”

Dirtier than the WHO allows

The authors are also concerned that the concentrations of air pollutants, though below EU threshold values, are still above the proposed guidelines of the World Health Organization (WHO). As a consequence, they demand changes in government policy: “Lowering the threshold for acceptable air pollution levels would be a prudent step,” said Dr. Alexandra Schneider, who was also involved in the study. “We are all exposed to air pollution. An individual reduction by moving away from highly polluted areas is rarely an option.” Moreover, the association between increased exposure to air pollution and respiratory and cardiovascular diseases has now been clearly established.

Next, the scientists want to investigate the influence of ultrafine particles. “Diabetes will be a main focus of our research, also in this context. A precise knowledge of the risk factors is crucial for counteracting the increasing incidence of diabetes,” said Peters, looking to the future.

{It’s normal for the nipples to get hard when stimulated or when the weather is cold, but why do they get hard for no reason at all? Researchers have an answer.}

According to a research published in the journal Nature Neuroscience, there is actually a nerve cell in the body whose only job is to hand out nipple erections.

This little nerve decides whether you’re going to have pointy nipples or not.

According to Alessando Furlan, the study’s co-author: “One thing we found was that goose bumps and nipple erection are caused by neurons that are specialised to regulate these functions by controlling the erectile muscles in these tissues.”

Unfortunately, there’s actually nothing you can do about it; it’s a natural bodily process.

{Children with emotionally invested parents are more likely to be successful, a study published in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience shows.}

Looking at 27 children aged between four and six, the study examined the quality of the emotional bond to their parents, and their cognitive control including: resisting temptation, their ability to remember things, and whether they are shy or withdrawn.

Maximizing children’s chances of success can seem daunting and an impossibly tall order. Future indicators of success seem driven, to a large extent, by factors beyond our immediate control: genes and the environment. This research, however, found a caring and emotionally attentive environment is liable to be a long-term game-changer.

The study involved a combination of questionnaires, behavioral tasks and electrophysiological measurements. The findings, according to Dr Schneider-Hassloff: “support developmental theories which propose that a high emotional quality in the mother-child interaction (attachment security) fosters the cognitive development of the child.”

The researchers looked at the quality of the emotional bond — referred to as emotional availability (EA) — between mothers and children. Second, the children’s executive functions were measured through a number of exercises.

Finally, the study measured the neural responses of children who were tasked to inhibit certain aspects of their behavior. This was achieved through EEG (Electrotroencephalography) by measuring small variations in voltage in certain key parts of the brain.

Dr Schneider-Hassloff noted: “this study investigated the association between emotional interaction quality and the electrophysiological correlates of executive functions in preschool children for the first time,” thereby shedding new light on the long-term importance of emotional nurturing.

Parents who understand this, by encouraging independence in their kids while remaining emotionally available, give their young ones a better chance at future success. Even in hardship they can create an emotional space that will have long-lasting and powerful consequences for the child’s future life-skills, the study asserts.

The researchers encourage further work into emotion-driven caretaker-child interactions, particularly for children at risk.