MicroRNA may serve as therapeutic targets for traumatic brain injury
2021-01-14
(Press-News.org) Scientists at the Walter Reed Army Institute for Research have shown that microRNA biomarkers related to Alzheimer's disease play a role in brain damage caused by traumatic brain injury.
TBI or brain trauma results from blows to the head, leading to chronic disruption of the brain and a cascade of long-term health conditions. Patients who suffer from TBI are at much higher risk of developing neurodegenerative disease or dementia, particularly Alzheimer's disease. The mechanism behind this relationship remains understudied, making the development effective therapeutics challenging.
MiRNAs are small pieces of genetic material that play a critical role in normal gene expression. Yet, studies have also linked abnormal miRNA levels, or dysregulation, to a range of diseases including neurodegenerative disorders and cell death after TBI, making them a subject of great interest to researchers who hope to use them as biomarkers and novel targets of drug therapies.
In their publication in the Frontiers in Neuroscience, researchers evaluated more than 800 miRNAs in TBI models, showing that TBI caused coordinated miRNA dysregulation followed by increased amounts of the beta-site amyloid cleaving enzyme, or BACE1, and loss of amyloid precursor protein. BACE-1 cleaves APP to generate amyloid beta peptides, a hallmark of neurodegenerative disease pathology and brain cells loss, which are the focus of several clinical trials for Alzheimer's disease.
"The coordination of miRNAs, BACE1 and APP may serve as collective biomarkers reflecting the harm caused by TBI that is relevant to development of neurodegenerative disease," said Dr. Bharani Thangavelu and Dr. Bernard S. Wilfred, lead authors within Brain Trauma Neuroprotection Branch at WRAIR's Center for Military Psychiatry and Neuroscience.
"MiRNAs are increasingly recognized as mediators of injury. It is quite remarkable that BACE1 and APP are hubs for the miRNA affected by TBI. This work infers that there may be underlying common features of TBI and AD that have not been seen before without a genetic variant, which is more frequently studied, for models that explore the connections between TBI and neurodegenerative disease," remarked Dr. Angela M Boutte, section chief of molecular biology and proteomics within the BTN Branch.
Future research is planned to characterize the direct role of these miRNAs and their relationship to BACE1 within TBI.
INFORMATION:
About the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research
Headquartered in Silver Spring, Maryland, the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research is the oldest and most mission-diverse biomedical research laboratory in the Department of Defense. WRAIR provides unique research capabilities and innovative solutions to a range of force health and readiness challenges currently facing U.S. Service Members, along with threats anticipated during future operations. With research units in the state of Washington, Africa, Asia and the Caucasus region, WRAIR houses three centers, the Center for Infectious Disease Research, the Center for Military Psychiatry and Neuroscience and the Center for Enabling Capabilities.
ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:
2021-01-14
Recently, the research team led by academician GUO Guangcan from the University of Science and Technology of China of the Chinese Academy of Sciences has made security analysis and improvement of source independent quantum random number generators with imperfect devices.
By studying the actual characteristics of the measurement devices of the source-independent quantum random number generation, the researchers pointed out that the security issues were caused by afterpulse, detection efficiency mismatching, poor sensitivity to photon number distribution ...
2021-01-14
Researchers at McGill University have identified a new cellular pathway that limits the growth and spread of brain tumors by controlling the recycling of cell surface receptor proteins. The study, which will be published January 14 in the Journal of Cell Biology (JCB), suggests that the pathway, which involves a protein called Rab35, is defective in many patients with glioblastoma and that restoring Rab35's activity could be a new therapeutic strategy for this deadly form of brain cancer.
Glioblastoma is the most aggressive type of brain cancer, and because it is largely untreatable, the average patient dies within 14 months of diagnosis. Like in other cancers, the proliferation and spread of glioblastoma cells depends on various receptor proteins on the outside of the cell. The ...
2021-01-14
While humans may struggle to navigate a murky, turbid underwater environment, weakly electric fish can do so with ease. These aquatic animals are specially adapted to traverse obscured waters without relying on vision; instead, they sense their environment via electric fields. Now, researchers are attempting to adapt these electrosensing techniques to improve underwater robotics.
Scientists have spent years studying how weakly electric fish--including the knife fish and elephantnose fish--utilize electricity for navigation. These fish have specialized electric organs that discharge small voltages into the surrounding water, creating their own personal electric fields. Nearby objects cause slight disruptions to these fields, which the fish detect with sensitive organs ...
2021-01-14
There is a growing consensus among scientists as well as national and local governments representing hundreds of millions of people, that humanity faces a climate crisis that demands a crisis response. New research from the University of California San Diego explores one possible mode of response: a massively funded program to deploy direct air capture (DAC) systems that remove CO2 directly from the ambient air and sequester it safely underground.
The findings reveal such a program could reverse the rise in global temperature well before 2100, but only with immediate and sustained investments from governments and firms to scale up the new technology.
Despite the enormous undertaking explored in the study, the research also reveals the need ...
2021-01-14
Leesburg, VA, January 14, 2021--According to ARRS' American Journal of Roentgenology (AJR), new suspicious findings occurred in 5.5% of breast MRI examinations performed to monitor response to neoadjuvant therapy; none of these new lesions were malignant.
"Our findings suggest that new lesions that arise in the setting of neoadjuvant therapy are highly unlikely to represent a new site of malignancy, particularly if the index malignancy shows treatment response," wrote Donna A. Eckstein and colleagues in the department of radiology and biomedical imaging at the University of California, San Francisco.
Based on a presentation at the ARRS 2019 Annual Meeting, Honolulu, ...
2021-01-14
Scientists at the University of Tsukuba show that using a layer of graphene just one atom thick improves the catalytic activity of nickel or copper when generating hydrogen gas, which may lead to cheaper fuel for zero-emission automobiles
Tsukuba, Japan - A team of researchers led by the Institute of Applied Physics at the University of Tsukuba has demonstrated a method for producing acid-resistant catalysts by covering them with layers of graphene. They show that using few layers allows for greater proton penetration during a hydrogen evolution reaction, which is crucial for maximizing ...
2021-01-14
The Beijing-Arizona Sky Survey (BASS) team of National Astronomical Observatories of Chinese Academy of Sciences (NAOC) and their collaborators of the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) project released a giant 2D map of the universe, which paves the way for the upcoming new-generation dark energy spectroscopic survey.
Modern astronomical observations reveal that the universe is expanding and appears to be accelerating. The power driving the expansion of the universe is called dark energy by astronomers. The dark energy is still a mystery and accounts for about 68% of the substance ...
2021-01-14
Organic luminescent materials have been highlighted as an exciting research topic owing to their prominent potentials in light-emitting diodes, fluorescent sensors, optoelectronic devices, in vivo imaging, anti-counterfeiting, data storage, and information encryption. However, applications of tunable fluorescent materials in the solid states have been largely hampered because these luminescent systems generally require time-consuming organic synthesis procedures and suffer from reduced photoluminescence (PL) owing to the notorious aggregation caused quenching. Aggregation-induced ...
2021-01-14
As an elementary type of collective excitation, plasmon has been found to dominate the optical properties of metals. The collective behavior of electrons in plasmons reflects the important difference between condensed matter and molecule-like ones. It is of great significance to study the evolution of plasmonic response and find out the boundary.
Controversy exists on such interesting questions as the division between the nanoparticle and molecules, and the physics of mesoscopic and microscopic plasmonic evolution. A unified understanding covering the small and large size limit, namely macro / meso / micro scales with sufficiently atomic precision is thus required. Clusters, as the transition from atomic molecules to condensed matter, are the ideal candidate for studying the evolution ...
2021-01-14
Making people stand in front of a scanner to have their body temperature read can result in a large number of false negatives, allowing people with Covid-19 to pass through airports and hospitals undetected.
A new study argues that taking temperature readings of a person's fingertip and eye would give a significantly better and more reliable reading and help identify those with fever.
The study, co-led by human physiologist and an expert in temperature regulation, Professor Mike Tipton, is published in Experimental Physiology.
Professor Tipton, ...
LAST 30 PRESS RELEASES:
[Press-News.org] MicroRNA may serve as therapeutic targets for traumatic brain injury
