Still, I knew this alone wouldnt be enough to make students feel as if they were real-world health professionals in training. So I explored another innovation available to online learners: simulators. Simulators can mimic what goes on outside the classroom, or in the case of an anatomy and physiology class, what goes on inside the body.
See the original post:
Teaching about coronavirus: Science teacher on why her students are not panicking - The Morning Call
Plants can detect the quality, quantity and direction of light and use it as a signal to adapt their morphogenesis and growth. Thus according to their light transmission, coloured nets used to protect plants from pests and limit irradiance can also affect plant growth and production.
Scientists at Yezin Agricultural University (Myanmar), Kasetsart University (Thailand), INRA and CIRAD (France) have determined the importance of the light spectrum on plant growth, reproductive characteristics and fruit chemical composition in tomato plants, grown under blue or red nets transmitting similar photosynthetic yield from transplanting to the end of harvest.
Results showed that the morphological traits, organ physiology and fruit composition were strongly influenced by net colour. Plants under the red net were taller with a greater leaf area and a shoot to root ratio. An increased blue to red ratio slightly enhanced the reproductive development (visible bud development and 1st flowering) of tomato plants. An increased red to blue ratio enhanced the tomato glucose (17%) and fructose (6%) contents, while the citric (5%) and malic acids (4%) contents decreased, triggering a higher sugar/acid ratio. A high blue to red light limited organ growth and plant light interception was reduced despite a higher photosynthetic yield and a slight enhancement of the organ appearance rate.
"A low blue to red light increased fruit weight at harvest and even if it did not significantly improve fruit yield, it favoured fruit quality as it enhanced the tomato sugar/acid ratio," explain the scientists.
Source: Aye Aye Thwe, Poonpipope Kasemsap, Gilles Vercambre, Frdric Gay, Jessada Phattaralerphong, Hlne Gautier, 'Impact of red and blue nets on physiological and morphological traits, fruit yield and quality of tomato (Solanum lycopersicum Mill.)', 2020, Scientia Horticulturae, Volume 264, 109185.
See original here:
Red and blue nets impact on physiological and morphological traits of tomato - hortidaily.com
The Lebanese scientist awarded a Nobel Prize is Peter Brian Medawar who was born in 1915 in Rio De Janeiro, Brazil, to a Lebanese father with British nationality.
He studied zoology in Oxford, then pathology anatomy after graduation, and continued his work in scientific research related to medicine.
He began working in Oxford and then in London. He was then appointed director of the National Institute for Medical Scientific Research in the year 1962.
The Lebanese scientists research began in the study of tissue transplantation and in the regeneration of peripheral nerves. During World War II, he was asked to investigate the cause of the bodys rejection of any skin taste taken from another donor.
Medawar was the Chairmen of Zoology at the University of Birmingham (1947-1951) and then at the University of London (1951-1962), and held other prestigious scientific positions.
Some of his published researches are The Uniqueness of the Individual (1959), The Future of Man (1959), Platos Republic (1982), and Memoirs of a Thinking Radish (1986).
The prevailing theories up to that time were that vertebrates inherit the ability to distinguish their tissues from the tissues of any other vertebrates during pregnancy.
Medawar conducted studies on cattle twins by vaccinating one of the twins skins with skin taken from the other twin.
The immunologist noted that the graft was not rejected by the body in the real (monozygotic) twins, while it was rejected in some dizygotic twins and accepted in others.
It was clear to Medawar and his colleagues that the reason for this acceptance is that the dizygotic twins exchange considerable amounts of erythrocytes during pregnancy. This made the twins count the erythrocytes as their own.
According to the scientist, the transplantation of skin from a third team leads immediately to its rejection and excretion, as it includes all tissues of the twins and is not limited to one particular fabric.
Australian Frank M. Burnet was the first to say that there was acquired immunological tolerance. Mudawer adopted the Burnet theory and added his own research into it.
He demonstrated that newborn mice can acquire immune tolerance by injecting other donor mouse cells, thereby gaining tolerance to their cells and tissues as well as to cells of true twinning and tissue.
As a result of this study, Medawar developed his theory of organ immunity, which was the basis for his subsequent studies on tissue transplantation and organ transplantation.
Medawar and his colleagues thus came to present his theory of acquired immunological tolerance for homografts. This discovery earned him many awards, including the Nobel Prize.
He was awarded the Knighthood in 1965 and the Order of Merit in the year 1981. Earlier in 1951, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Academy in recognition of his scientific contributions.
The Lebanese scientist was also awarded the Gold Medal Medal in 1959, and the Nobel Prize for Medicine and Physiology in 1960 in partnership with Frank Macfarlane Burnet.
Peter Medawar is the first scientist of Lebanese origin to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology (Medicine).
Medawar confirmed in part of his Nobel prize acceptance speech that he used this discovery and demonstrated with [his] colleagues that this natural manifestation of immunological tolerance can be achieved experimentally in fetuses or in newborns.
He explained in his time many aspects of immune and autoimmune diseases, as well as in the advancement of human transplantation technologies. The scientist died at 75 years old in London.
According to the Nobel Prize official website, Medawar won the Nobel Prize for the discovery of acquired immunological tolerance in The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1960.
The website explains: He could perform new transplants on the mice when they became adults, something that did not work when the transplants were not performed during the fetus stage. The results had significance for organ transplants.
Read the rest here:
Meet the Lebanese Scientist Who Was Awarded a Nobel Prize - The961
A Rohingya Muslim refugee holds her malnourished child in Bangladesh. Better understanding of breastmilk could improve therapeutic foods to treat undernutrition.
Breastfeeding and breastmilk exert remarkable influence on infant survival and health (1, 2), including reduced risk from infections and promoting various aspects of postnatal development. The many maternal benefits include protection from breast and ovarian cancer and cardiometabolic disorders. Although the mechanisms underlying some of these benefits have been elucidated, the origins of others that have been reported, such as influence on adult IQ and later protection against obesity and diabetes, remain more obscure. Hence, timely investments in research designed to clarify the operations and biological effects of the mother-breastmilk-infant triad, and their translation into public health, are needed.
Breastmilk does not stand alone; maternal physiology, breastmilk composition, and infant physiology are parts of a coadapting system, with variations in each influencing the trajectory of infant development and maternal health. In addition to macronutrients and micronutrients essential for child survival, breastmilk contains other myriad bioactive components, including cells and microbes (3, 4). Breastmilk can be considered a live tissue whose composition varies between women and changes over the course of lactation. Structurally diverse human milk oligosaccharides (HMOs) represent the third most abundant nonaqueous component of breastmilk (after lactose and lipids). One prominent example illustrating how maternal genotype affects breastmilk composition is a single-nucleotide polymorphism that introduces a premature stop codon in the fucosyltransferase-2 (FUT2) gene. This mutation abolishes the ability to synthesize (1-2)-fucosylated HMOs. The presence or absence of these HMOs creates specific maternal lactotypes, known as secretors and nonsecretors, respectively, with the breastmilk of secretors conveying reduced risk of common forms of infectious diarrhea (5).
Comprehensive characterization of the components of each axis of the triad through longitudinal and cross-sectional studies of maternal-infant cohorts has expanded markedly. Increasingly, high-throughput analytical methods have been used to characterize more than 150 different HMO structures, and intra- and interpersonal variations in their representation within and across different populations (6). Other components of breastmilk, including compounds associated with the membrane that surrounds milk fat globules, microRNAs, and bacterial constituents, as well as antibodies and immune cells, are being actively cataloged and characterized. In addition to quantifying the products of metabolism in infants and their mothers by mass spectrometry, platforms are now available for simultaneously measuring the concentration of thousands of proteins circulating in blood that are biomarkers and regulators of numerous physiologic, metabolic, and immune processes, as well as other facets of growth and homeostasis (7). Furthermore, recent studies have highlighted how, with the use of culture-independent methods, features of gut microbial community development in infants and young children can be used as a readout for their nutritional status (8, 9).
Mechanistic insights hold the promise of providing more informative definitions of health status, better predictions of health outcomes, improved recommendations for preventing disease, and new therapeutic targets.
Although datasets pertaining to each axis are available, considerably more work is needed to quantitatively relate how environmental influences affect the triad and in turn, how variations in each of its axes influence the other (see the figure). For example, it will be interesting to discover what other maternal genetic factors affect biosynthesis of HMOs and other milk constituents. The mechanisms that link maternal nutritional status and other aspects of their physiology to breastmilk features and infant growth phenotypes are also an important issue. Additionally, which signaling pathways allow infant health status to regulate maternal biology, including breastmilk composition, should be investigated. How varied sociocultural, behavioral, and environmental factors shape and perturb the development of the triad is important to understand so that a normal range can be defined. Two disorders, childhood malnutrition and necrotizing enterocolitis (NEC), illustrate how a deeper understanding of the mother-breastmilk-infant triad could improve child health with potential lifelong benefits, and how some of the analytic challenges might be surmounted.
Childhood malnutrition contributes to 45% of deaths worldwide in those under the age of five; it manifests early in life and involves disruption of multiple biological systems fundamental to healthy growth, including host pathways influenced by the developing gut microbiota, which are key consumers of breastmilk constituents (8, 9). One approach for obtaining new insights about disease pathogenesis is to conduct longitudinal studies of healthy and malnourished children living in areas where disease burden is high, and to comprehensively characterize the plasma proteomes, metabolomes, and developing microbial communities of malnourished infants and their healthy counterparts, their mothers' breastmilk composition, and the products of microbial HMO utilization.
A strategy for defining functionally important interactions between triad components is to borrow from studies conducted in disparate fields where statistical covariation is used for feature reduction. Components that covary with each other are deemed important for defining the behaviors or functions of dynamic complex systems. Applying this approach to the developing gut microbiota of healthy members of a Bangladeshi birth cohort sampled monthly from 1 to 60 months of age disclosed a network composed of 15 covarying bacterial taxa (9). The abundances of these taxa describe normal gut microbial community assembly in healthy members of birth cohorts residing in diverse geographic locales and are useful for quantifying the degree of impaired microbial community development in children with moderate and severe acute malnutrition.
From the limited evidence available, microbiota immaturity associated with these conditions is not repaired with standard therapeutic foods. Affordable, culturally acceptable complementary foods have been identified that in combination repair the gut microbiota of Bangladeshi children with moderate acute malnutrition toward a state resembling that of age-matched, healthy growing children. This is accompanied by increases in numerous blood plasma protein biomarkers and mediators of growth, bone formation, neurodevelopment, metabolism, and immune function (8, 9).
These findings support the idea that healthy growth is linked in part to healthy development of the gut microbiota. They also raise the question of what factors shape microbial community development during the period of exclusive breastmilk feeding, and as children transition to complementary foods during the weaning period. Members of the bacterial genus Bifidobacterium, notably B. longum subsp. infantis, have suites of genes involved in the import and metabolism of HMOs. It is important that efforts be directed to defining the representation of B. infantis and other HMO-consuming bacteria in healthy versus malnourished infants and their mothers. This information, together with characterizing the representation of genes involved in HMO acquisition and degradation in different bacterial strains cultured from these children, would allow an assessment of (i) whether and how the presence of these different organisms and their genome features correlate with maternal breastmilk composition and (ii) the degree to which products of breastmilk metabolism correlate with host features. The answers, from analyses of human biospecimens as well as animal models colonized with consortia of human gut microbes representing different stages of community assembly (10, 11), could have important therapeutic implications. These include the development of new probiotic, HMO-based prebiotic and/or synbiotic (prebiotic combined with probiotic) therapies (12).
NEC provides a different type of opportunity to characterize the mother-breastmilk-infant triad. One of the most common and fatal gastrointestinal disorders in preterm infants, NEC develops within the first few weeks of delivery. It is characterized by destruction of the integrity of the intestinal wall, invasion of luminal bacteria, marked inflammation, and sepsis. Maternal and infant physiology are immature after preterm delivery in terms of producing and digesting breastmilk. Moreover, the use of antibiotics and other medications and interventions, when both mother and infant face serious and often life-threatening crises, further disrupts the mother-breastmilk-infant triad, including initial colonization of the infant intestine. Although breastmilk composition is not fully adapted to the physiological needs of the premature infant, breastmilk feeding, compared to enteral feeding with specialized breastmilk substitutes, reduces NEC incidence by 6- to 10-fold (13). The mechanisms underlying these protective effects remain largely uncharacterized.
HMOs significantly improve survival and reduce pathology in a neonatal rat model of NEC, leading to the identification of the HMO, disialyllacto-N-tetraose (DSLNT), as a protective factor (14), likely through its direct interactions with gut epithelial and immune cells. A multicenter study of mothers and their very-low-birthweight infants found that infants who developed NEC received breastmilk containing less DSLNT than infants who did not develop NEC (15). Proof of a causal relationship requires a randomized controlled clinical trial, which raises several challenges, including the availability of DSLNT and ethical considerations if control groups of high-risk infants were to be treated with formula alone. More generally, NEC illustrates the need to comprehensively define states of triad immaturity. This would entail longitudinal studies of the set of features that define breastmilk given to prematurely born neonates who do and do not develop this devastating disease. It would also require a simultaneous effort to obtain comprehensive definitions of the biological characteristics of chronologically age-matched preterm infants with and without NEC, as well as of their mothers.
Mothers face a balancing-act between various socioeconomic, cultural, and even marketing pressures to maintain or forego breastfeeding and their motivation to provide their infants with what is best for their health and development. This balancing act is perpetuated in part by confusion surrounding the respective attributes of breastmilk versus breastmilk substitutes, with consumer understanding being heavily influenced by commercial interests. Aspirational goals include new parameters for defining health status and deeper understanding of how health outcomes are related to breastfeeding and breastmilk components. Within a risk-stratified continuum of care, knowledge of the latter has potential therapeutic implications and opportunities, personalized to the circumstances of an individual mother and her infant (1). Such efforts will not only provide new appreciation of the remarkable properties of nature's first food, but also serve to further develop analytic approaches that yield insights into the dynamic systems that direct infant development.
Acknowledgments: We thank M. Barratt and S. Moukarzel for helpful input during writing. L.B. and A.S.R. contributed equally to this work. L.B. is a coinventor on patent applications related to the use of HMOs in preventing NEC and other inflammatory diseases. J.I.G. is a cofounder of Matatu, Inc., which characterizes the role of diet-by-microbiota interactions in animal health.
More here:
Understanding the mother-breastmilk-infant triad - Science Magazine
The University of Alberta landed in the top 10 of sport-related subjects for the fourth year in a row and inched closer to the top 10 in the categories of mining and minerals engineering and nursing, according to the latest QS World University Rankings by Subject.
The 2020 version of the subject rankings saw sports-related subjects jump to seventh from ninth, while mining and minerals engineering moved from 12th to 11th and nursing fought its way back into the top 20 to land at 18th.
Other U of A subjects that ranked in the top 50 included earth and marine sciences, which rose from 44th to tie for 41st; education, which rebounded from 47th to stick at 44th; and anatomy and physiology, which ranked 44th.
James Young, professor and chair of the U of As Department of Physiology, said he pins the U of As excellence in physiology to strategic recruitment pushes over the past four decades.
We've had really sustained recruitment of really excellent young faculty members who want to be part of an excellent environment, and we offer that, said Young. They're not just joining the Department of Physiology, they're joining the faculty and becoming part of a number of research institutes and facilities that really are world class.
Clayton Deutsch, director of the U of As School of Mining and Petroleum Engineering, said part of the programs success is the impact alumni are having on the mining industry.
You go around to different mining schools around the world, there will be U of A alumni there, said Deutsch. In mining companies all over the world, there are always U of A alumni around there.
He also said the programs approach of being committed academically while remaining practical is what places the U of As mining education among the worlds best.
Even despite some economic woes in the province, we have essentially 100 per cent employment of our students graduating within six months of finishing, said Deutsch. We do that by remaining current and steadfast in our focus on solving real-world mining problems.
One of the enduring legacies of Kerry Mummery, outgoing dean of the Faculty of Kinesiology, Sport, and Recreation, will be the university finishing in the top 10 in the category of sport-related fields for four years in a row.
"During my tenure as dean, I've had the pleasure of working with and bringing in some of the top professors in their field," said Mummery. "I've always been impressed with the quality of their work and how that work makes its way into the classroom to provide our students with a solid foundation of knowledge they wouldn't have found anywhere else."
Overall, the U of A ranked in the top 100 in 14 subjects and 35 in the top 250. No ranked subject had the U of A lower than ninth nationally, and the U of A was ranked top five in Canada in 18 categories.
As for the five broad subject ranks, the U of A moved up seven spots to 90th in life sciences and medicine, while dipping slightly in engineering and technology (down to 112 from 107), natural sciences (111 to 116) and arts and humanities (137 to 143). Social sciences and management surged 12 spots to finish at 160.
The methodology for compiling each subject ranking can vary greatly and depends on the publishing rates in each area. Academic reputation, which accounts for anywhere from 30 to 90 per cent of the weight given in determining the rank in a subject area, draws on responses from thousands of academics worldwide.
Other measures include employer reputation, which makes up between 10 and 30 per cent of the measure; citations per paper, which also accounts for between 10 and 30 per cent; and h-indexa way of measuring both the productivity and impact of an academic's published workwhich is valued anywhere from 10 to 30 per cent.
The success in this latest QS ranking follows news in October that the U of A moved back into the top five in Maclean's 2020 Canadian University Rankings, thanks in part to strong showings by the faculties of nursing, business and science.
In August, the ShanghaiRanking Consultancys 2019 Academic Ranking of World Universities by Subject saw the U of A jump into an eighth-place tie with Princeton in the category of environmental science and engineering. Overall, the U of A finished among the top 100 in 21 of the 54 subjects assessed for the ranking, one more than the previous year, with eight subjects ranking in the top 50.
Earlier, the 2019 NTU Ranking of research output placed the U of A 81st in the world, up seven spots over the prior year. The advancement was bolstered by the university's 43rd-place performance in the subject of agricultural science, 47th in environment/ecology and 48th in electrical engineering.
Read the rest here:
Top U of A subjects rise in new ranking of world's best - Folio - University of Alberta
Visceral fat increases a persons risk of developing various health conditions, such as hypertension and heart disease. Which exercise is the best at reducing levels of this harmful belly fat?
Researchers from the Duke University Medical Centre have discovered the best type of exercise to cut levels of visceral fat.
Their eight-month study compared how much visceral fat was lost due to aerobic exercise, resistance training or both.
Documenting 196 people, they found aerobic exercise to be the most efficient and effective way to lose the harmful belly fat.
Published in the American Journal of Physiology, lead author physiologist Cris Slentz, Ph.D. said: Our study sought to identify the most effective form of exercise to get rid of that unhealthy fat.
[If] you want to lose belly fat, aerobic exercise is the better choice because it burns more calories."
The study revealed aerobic exercise burned 67 percent more calories than resistance training.
The aerobic group performed an equivalent of 12 miles of jogging per week at 80 percent maximum heart rate.
READ MORE: Vitamin D deficiency symptoms: The sign on your head you need to watch out for
The resistance group, on the other hand, performed three sets of eight, 12 repetitions, three times per week.
What really counts is how much exercise you do, how many miles you walk and how many calories you burn," Slentz said.
If you choose to work at a lower aerobic intensity, it will simply take longer to burn the same amount of unhealthy fat."
Examples of aerobic exercise include anything that gets your heart pumping.
There are free aerobic workout videos to follow on the NHS website, which include dancing.
And aerobic exercises, also known as cardio, include spinning, running, swimming and hiking.
By repeatedly moving large muscles in the arms, legs and hips, breathing will get become rapid.
This maximises the amount of oxygen in your blood, according to the Mayo Clinic.
Additionally, the body will release endorphins natural painkillers which will promote an increased sense of wellbeing.
If youre new to moderate-intensity exercise, its best to start off slowly.
Also, if you have any current health conditions, do discuss your plans to exercise more with your doctor who can advise you further.
The NHS state: Aim to be physically active every day. Any activity is better than none, and more is better still.
Original post:
How to lose visceral fat: Best type of exercise to do to reduce the harmful belly fat - Express
Edibles or cannabis-infused foods are a common way to consume marijuana. The process of making edibles, just like baking brownies, is a science. The primary psychoactive compound in marijuana is called cannabinoids. When making edibles, you infuse a fat with cannabinoids to activate the chemical.
Mark Wilson, a Humboldt State University professor with a Ph.D. in microbiology, genetics and toxicology explained that cannabinoids are fat soluble and dont break down in water.
Some substances are water soluble and some substances are fat soluble, Wilson said. THC is primarily composed of carbon-carbon bonds and carbon-hydrogen bonds, so it cant interact well with water, but it can interact well with fats and oils.
This characteristic of THC, tetrahydrocannabinol, limits what can be turned into an edible. THC cant steep in hot water for weed tea. Marijuana would need to be steeped in hot milk instead, where the THC would break down and bond with the milk fats.
Things that dissolve into our fat tend to remain in our system much longer. That is, they slowly diffuse into fat, and slowly diffuse out. The fat acts as a sort of absorption compartment. That makes it detectable in drug tests for weeks.
Many people use butter as the main fatty ingredient in edibles. Dairy-based fats are a good option for infusing cannabinoids, but lactose-free alternatives are also solid options, including coconut and olive oil. Bacon fat can absorb cannabinoid infusions too, if youre looking for a savory option.
Joseph Szewczak, an HSU professor who studies and teaches comparative physiology and physiological ecology explained the physical changes to the body when people eat cannabis-infused fats rather than smoking cannabis plants.
Things that dissolve into our fat tend to remain in our system much longer, Szewcxak said. That is, they slowly diffuse into fat, and slowly diffuse out. The fat acts as a sort of absorption compartment. That makes it detectable in drug tests for weeks.
Whether inhaled or eaten, the THC enters the blood stream and messes with brain-cell functions in a unique way. Since THC is shaped like a chemical in the brain, the brain recognizes the chemical and allows to alter normal brain function. That chemical usually tells brain neurons to rest, but THC forces the brain to keep firing, which leads to deep thoughts, increased creativity and anxiety.
In light of these effects, its important to understand whats going to happen after eating an edible. First, since the body takes some time to digest edibles and since their THC is stored in fat, the high lasts longer. Second, the nature of THC and marijuana may lead to discomfort or anxiety, or may lead to creativity and fun, but thats dependent on many factors.
Co-Director of the Humboldt Institute for Interdisciplinary Marijuana Research Josh Meisel is researching the significance of set and setting, or who youre with and where you are, and how those things impact a high.
Peoples negative experiences may be influenced by edible use, Meisel said. But set and setting may be as influential or more influential than the psychoactive properties of the substance itself.
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Stoners Bake Snacks with Scientific Hacks - The LumberJack
Mapping the mammalian brain
The diverse physiology of the brain is reflected in its complex organization at regional, cellular, and subcellular levels. Sjstedt et al. combined databoth newly acquired and from other large-scale brain mapping projectsfrom transcriptomics, single-cell genomics, in situ hybridization, and antibody-based protein profiling to map the molecular profiles in human, pig, and mouse brain. The analysis is consistent with a conserved basic brain architecture during mammalian evolution, but it does show differences in regional gene expression profiles.
Science, this issue p. eaay5947
The brain is the most complex organ of the mammalian body, boasting a diverse physiology combined with intricate cellular organization. In an effort to expand our basic understanding of the neurobiology of the brain and its diseases, we performed a comprehensive molecular dissection of the main regions of the human, pig, and mouse brain using transcriptomics and antibody-based mapping. With this approach, we have identified regional expression profiles and observed similarities and differences in expression levels between these three mammalian species.
There is a need for a comprehensive overview of genes expressed in the mammalian brain categorized by organ, brain region, and species specificity. To address this need, a brain-centered knowledge resource of RNA and protein expression in the brain of three mammalian species has been created and used for cell topological analysis, systems modeling, and data integration. The regional expression of all protein-coding genes is reported, and this classification is integrated with results from the analysis of tissues and organs of the whole human body. All generated data, including high-resolution images and metadata, have been made publicly available in an open-access Human Protein Atlas (HPA) Brain Atlas.
The global analysis suggests similar regional organization and expression patterns in the three mammalian species, consistent with the view that basic brain architecture is preserved during mammalian evolution. However, there is considerable variability between species for many neurotransmitter receptors, in particular between human and mouse. This calls for caution when using the mouse as a model system for the human brain, for example, in attempts to develop therapeutic strategies. For some of the brain regions, such as the cerebellum and hypothalamus, the human global expression profile is closer to that of the pig than it is to that of the mouse, suggesting that the pig might be considered a preferred animal model to study many brain processes. We show that many signature genes identified previously for specific brain cell types (such as astrocytes, microglia, oligodendrocytes, and neurons) are expressed at even higher levels in peripheral organs. In fact, our results support a view of shared functions between many genes in microglia and immune cells, and a large number of genes previously identified as signature genes for astrocytes are shown to be shared with liver or skeletal muscle. The cerebellum stands out as having a distinct molecular signature with many regionally enriched genes. Several genes suggested to be involved in neuropsychiatric diseases are selectively expressed in the cerebellum.
The integration of data from several sources has allowed us to combine data from transcriptomics, single-cell genomics, in situ hybridization, and antibody-based protein profiling. This integrative approach for mapping the molecular profiles in the human, pig, and mouse brain has generated a detailed multilevel genome-wide view on the protein-coding genes of the mammalian brain, where we compared tissue specificity across the whole body, as classified in the HPA (www.proteinatlas.org). The open-access HPA Brain Atlas resource offers the opportunity to explore individual genes and classes of genes and their expression profiles in the various parts of the mammalian brain.
Multiple regions of the human, pig, and mouse brain were dissected and analyzed. A uniform manifold approximation and projection (UMAP) analysis (middle) shows the global expression patterns of 1710 samples in the human brain, with the cerebellum as the outlier. The HPA Brain Atlas (right) shows the expression of individual genes, for example, synaptosomal-associated protein 25 (SNAP25), in the different brain regions in the three mammalian species.
The brain, with its diverse physiology and intricate cellular organization, is the most complex organ of the mammalian body. To expand our basic understanding of the neurobiology of the brain and its diseases, we performed a comprehensive molecular dissection of 10 major brain regions and multiple subregions using a variety of transcriptomics methods and antibody-based mapping. This analysis was carried out in the human, pig, and mouse brain to allow the identification of regional expression profiles, as well as to study similarities and differences in expression levels between the three species. The resulting data have been made available in an open-access Brain Atlas resource, part of the Human Protein Atlas, to allow exploration and comparison of the expression of individual protein-coding genes in various parts of the mammalian brain.
Original post:
An atlas of the protein-coding genes in the human, pig, and mouse brain - Science Magazine
Oakcrests entire Science Olympiad team. Photo contributed
Oakcrest School earned a spot in the Virginia Science Olympiad high school state tournament by finishing in fifth place at the regional competition held at the University of Mary Washington on Saturday, Feb. 8.
Oakcrest was the only all-girls school among the eleven in the high school competition, which included Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, Fairfax High School and McLean High School. With two teams in the high school division, Oakcrest took first place among the eleven high schools in the Anatomy and Physiology competition, and fourth in the coding-intensive Detector Building category.
Oakcrest was also the only all-girls school among the thirteen middle schools that competed in the regional tournament. With one team in the middle school division, Oakcrest placed tenth out of twenty teams.
Notable high school student achievements included:
Mackenzie M. (20): First place, Anatomy & Physiology
Rachel F. (22) and Faven K. (23): Second place, Gravity Vehicle
Sofia J. (21) and Hannah L. (21): Fourth place, Detector Building
Rachel F. (22) and Grace C. (22): Sixth place, Fossils
Notable middle school student achievements included:
Vivian K. (25) and Ashleigh Y. (25): Fourth place, Heredity
Megan B. (25) and Maddie M. (26): Sixth place, Density Lab
It was a wonderful team effort across the board. The girls represented Oakcrest very well! said Science Olympiad coach and Oakcrest science teacher Dr. Kat Hussmann.
This will be the second year in a row that Oakcrest sends students to the Virginia Science Olympiad State Tournament. In 2019, Oakcrest was the first ever all-girls team to compete in the state tournament and Dr. Hussmann received the Virginia Science Olympiad Coach of the Year award. States will take place on March 28 at the University of Virginia.
See more here:
Oakcrest School Advances to States in the Virginia Science Olympiad - Vienna Connection
Dr. Seiler, aka the Jay-Z of physiology, talks about the inception of the polarized method.
Welcome to episode 100 with Dr. Stephen Seiler! We are so proud to have now brought 100 episodes of our passion for the bike to you. Thanks to all of you for coming along with us as weve interviewed some of the best physiologists, nutritionists, and athletes in professional cycling, and many of the most knowledgeable coaches in the world.
Today in episode 100, we get nearly two hours of Dr. Seiler, aka the Jay-Z of physiology. Our conversation is very natural, casual even, but there are so many moments of enlightenment and clarity.
Yes, Trevor wrote an outline for the show, as he always does. Thanks, Trevor. Then we proceeded to completely disregard it.
In many ways, it makes for a heck of a good show. We learn about the inception of the polarized method, from the creator himself. We discuss Dr. Seilers current research on the all-important aerobic threshold. And we jawthats my nod to his Texas rootsabout the future of sport science. Get ready for the wisdom to drop.
Are you following Dr. Seiler on Twitter? If not, you should. He frequently posts workout challenges, surveys, and his commentary on new scientific research and studies.
Now, sit back and grab your favorite beverage, or, better yet, find a nice long stretch of lonely road to listen in. Lets make you fast!
Check out all 100 Fast Talk Podcast episodes here.
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Fast Talk, ep. 100: Polarized Training - past, present, and future - VeloNews