Association between poor sleep quality and an increased risk of developing Alzheimer's

Photo Credit: Claudio_Scott

New research has shown an association between sleep quality – less than seven hours - and Alzheimer's disease-related pathology in people without cognitive impairment. The study by an international team led by the Pasqual Maragall Foundation research centre, the Barcelonaβeta Brain Research Centre (BBRC), together with researchers from the University of Bristol and North Bristol NHS Trust, is published in the scientific journal Brain Communications today [3 November].

The results of the analysis, part of the European Prevention of Alzheimer's Dementia Longitudinal Cohort Study (EPAD LCS), indicate that poor sleep quality is related to an increase in pathology of Alzheimer's disease. This finding is relevant to help define future therapies, so that they can be targeted at the appropriate phase of the disease.

A cross-sectional analysis of sleep quality

Sleep abnormalities are common in Alzheimer's disease, and sleep quality can be affected early in the preclinical stage of the disease, even when no other symptoms are experienced. Understanding how and when sleep deprivation contributes to Alzheimer's disease progression is important for the design and implementation of future therapies.

Laura Stankeviciute, a predoctoral researcher at the BBRC and one of the main authors of the study, said: "The epidemiological and experimental data available to date already suggested that sleep abnormalities contribute to the risk of Alzheimer's disease.

"However, previous studies had limitations due to the lack of biomarkers of Alzheimer's disease, because they had a non-cross-sectional design, or because of the small size of the sample of participants.” This is the first study to include all of these factors.

Plant Hormones to Help Prevent Striga Invasion

 A field of the crop sorghum infected with Striga.
Photo Credit: 2022 KAUST; Muhammad Jamil; Jian You Wang.

As part of a multipronged approach to prevent infestations by the parasitic plant Striga hermonthica, researchers are unravelling the role of plant hormones, known as strigolactones (SLs).

Cereal crops release SLs that regulate plant architecture and play a role in other processes related to plant development and stress response. The SLs released by plant roots attract mycorrhizal fungi, which provide plant nutrients. But strigolactones also induce germination and invasion by the parasitic plant Striga, with severe impacts on agricultural production, particularly on cereal yields in Africa.

In an important discovery, the team has recently shown that canonical SLs do not affect plant architecture in rice.

The researchers employed CRISPR/Cas9 technology to generate rice lines without canonical SLs and compared them to wild-type plants. The shoot and root phenotypes did not differ significantly between the mutants and the wild type, indicating that canonical SLs are not major regulators of rice architecture.

“Knowing which SLs regulate plant architecture and other functions, such as establishing symbiosis with beneficial mycorrhizal fungi or enabling invasion by root parasitic plants, will allow us to optimize and engineer one trait without affecting others,” explains Jian You Wang, a postdoc in Al-Babili’s lab.

The research showed that canonical SLs do contribute to symbiosis with mycorrhizal fungi and play a major role in stimulating seed germination in root parasitic weeds.

The unintended consequences of using a ventilator

Higher strains caused by artificial ventilators (left) and less stretch when the same lung is made to breathe naturally.
Photo Credit: Mona Eskandari/UCR

Breakthrough research addresses a long-standing question in pulmonary medicine about whether modern ventilators overstretch lung tissue. They do.

These cutting-edge findings by UC Riverside researchers were recently published in the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine. They demonstrate major differences between how we naturally breathe versus how ventilators make us breathe. These results are critical, particularly in context of the COVID-19 pandemic and the rush to build ventilators.

“Using novel techniques, we observed that ventilators can overextend certain regions of the lungs,” said Mona Eskandari, UCR assistant professor of mechanical engineering and the BREATHE Center in the School of Medicine, who led the research. These results provide an explanation for the decline in lung health experienced by patients the longer they spend on the machines, especially in the case of disease.

Eskandari’s bMECH lab pioneered a technique to study lungs as they are made to breathe. On a custom-built ventilator designed in their lab, the researchers imitated both natural and artificial breathing. Then, they observed isolated lungs involved in both types of breathing using multiple cameras collecting fast, high-resolution images, a method called digital image correlation.

Oxygen deprivation at birth could increase the risk of cardiovascular disease

Photo Credit: Alexander Grey

An observational study at Karolinska Institutet shows that babies suffering oxygen-deficiency complications at birth are almost twice as likely to develop cardiovascular disease during childhood and early adulthood as those without such complications. Still, the absolute risk of cardiovascular disease is very low at a young age. The findings are published in the journal The Lancet Regional Health – Europe.

According to the researchers, the study could be the first of its kind to examine how complications related to asphyxiation at birth – something that occurs in about four million babies a year globally – affects the risk of cardiovascular disease later in life. Previous research has mostly concentrated on the association between asphyxia in the neonatal period and brain development.

Despite the relatively high risk, the absolute number of babies who suffer from cardiovascular disease despite asphyxiation at birth is very low. After the 30-year follow-up period, only 0.3 percent of those with asphyxia-related complications had a cardiovascular diagnosis, compared with 0.15 percent of those without complications.

Since the study was observational, the researchers are unable to establish any causality or propose any underlying mechanisms.

Patient-specific cancer tumors replicated in 3D bioprinting advance

Electron micrograph of a grown, hydrogel-embedded tumor spheroid.
Image Credit: University of Bristol

Bowel cancer patients could in future benefit from a new 3D bioprinting technology which would use their own cells to replicate the complex cellular environment of solid tumors in 3D models. The University of Bristol-led advance, published in Biofabrication, would allow clinicians to treat the models, known as spheroids, with chemotherapy drugs and radiation to help them understand an individual patient’s resistance to therapies.

Bowel cancer is the third-most prevalent cancer worldwide, a major cause of cancer-related deaths and is becoming more prevalent globally each year. While current therapies aim to shrink tumors through a combination of surgery, chemotherapy and/or radiotherapy, the heterogenous nature of bowel tumors mean that chemotherapy drugs have variable effects between patients.

In this new study, researchers developed a new 3D bioprinting platform with high content light microscopy imaging and processing. Using a mixture of bioinks and colorectal (bowel) cancer cells, the team showed they were able to replicate tumors in 3D spheroids.

To investigate how the tumors might respond to drugs, dose-response profiles were generated from the spheroids which had been treated separately with chemotherapy drugs oxaliplatin (OX), fluorouracil (5FU), and radiotherapy. The spheroids were then imaged over time. Results from their experiment showed oxaliplatin was significantly less effective against tumor spheroids than in current 2D monolayer culture structures, when compared to fluorouracil.

How Cells Find the Right Partners

Fluorescence microscopy images of Drosophila egg chambers of different developmental stages. Eya in the epithelial cells is depicted in orange.
Image Credit: Vanessa Weichselberger/University of Freiburg

During the growth and development of living organisms, different types of cells must come into contact with each other in order to form tissues and organs together. A small team working with Prof. Dr. Anne Classen of the Excellence Cluster CIBSS – Centre for Integrative Biological Signaling Studies of the University of Freiburg has discovered that complex changes in form, or morphogenesis, during development are driven exclusively via the affinity of cells to each other. The researchers examined the egg chambers of fruit flies (Drosophila melanogaster) and combined genetic methods and mathematical modeling in their work. The study has been published in the scientific journal Nature Communications.

Complex organization processes in egg chamber

The lead author of the study and a member of Classen’s lab, Dr. Vanessa Weichselberger, summarized the team’s work: “We wanted to find out how different types of cells organize their morphogenesis with each other in order to form functional units.” She continues, “The egg chamber is a good example, because within it, different cell populations must self-organize into functional units.” The egg chamber is the structure in which an immature egg cell, or oocyte, matures until it is ready for fertilization. Drosophila’s egg chamber looks like a tiny football. Inside, the growing egg cell is located on one side, and on the other are 15 nurse cells that provide nutrients for the immature egg cell. In order to produce an egg, the egg cell must mature, while the nurse cells are ultimately removed.

Both processes – the maturation of the egg cell and the removal of the nurse cells, are dependent on an external layer of epithelial cells. For this purpose, the epithelial cells are divided into specialized groups, which – based on their function – must either make contact with the nurse cells or the egg cell. This partnering between the inner and outer cells is a complex process which takes place while simultaneously the size relationships within the egg chamber continually change. “Until now, the mechanisms that could robustly control such a dynamic process were unknown,” says Classen.

Sikorsky And DARPA's Autonomous Black Hawk® Flies Logistics and Rescue Missions Without Pilots on Board

SikorskyOPVBlackHawkYuma2022
Sikorsky demonstrates to the U.S. Army for the first time how an optionally piloted Black Hawk helicopter flying in autonomous mode could resupply forward forces. These uninhabited Black Hawk flights occurred in October at Yuma Proving Ground in Arizona.
Photo Credit: Sikorsky, a Lockheed Martin company.

Sikorsky, a Lockheed Martin company (NYSE: LMT) and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) have successfully demonstrated to the U.S. Army for the first time how an uninhabited Black Hawk helicopter flying autonomously can safely and reliably perform internal and external cargo resupply missions, and a rescue operation.

Performed Oct. 12, 14 and 18 as part of the U.S. Army's Project Convergence 2022 (PC22) experiment, the flights show how existing and future piloted utility helicopters could one day fly complex missions in reduced crew or autonomous mode. This would give Army commanders and aviators greater flexibility in how and when aircraft and pilots are used, especially in limited visibility or contested environments.

Why It Matters

Sikorsky is partnered with DARPA to develop autonomy technology that will exponentially improve the flight safety and efficiency of rotary and fixed-wing aircraft. Sikorsky's autonomy system, known as MATRIX™ technology, forms the core of DARPA's ALIAS (Aircrew Labor In-cockpit Automation System) project.

Infants are less likely to contract COVID, develop severe symptoms than other household caregivers

Image by Pexels

Infants whose mothers test positive for COVID-19 tend to develop less-severe symptoms than their parents, if they become infected with the virus at all.

In one of the first studies to explore how COVID-19 specifically affects older infants, researchers from the University of Washington and at institutions at four other locations in the Western and Southern U.S. found that the number of infected people in a household was the factor most closely linked with the infant’s likelihood of being infected.

“The focus on infants early in the pandemic was about possible transmission risks during pregnancy, birth or through breastfeeding, but there were other questions about the risks in the household to infants and other children when caregivers are sick,” said Melanie Martin, assistant professor of anthropology at the UW and the first author of the study, which in the journal Frontiers in Immunology. “Infants are in the most contact, and very close contact, with their caregiver than with any other family members. And so, we asked, "How much are infants at risk, and how do you protect children when they are sick?”

The study analyzed surveys and antibody results (taken from pin-prick blood samples) of 46 pairs of COVID-positive mothers and their infants for two months following maternal infection. Infants were at least 1 month old, and COVID-positive mothers were enrolled in the study within days, sometimes hours, of receiving their positive PCR test results. The researchers also recruited a comparative group of 11 COVID-negative mothers, who tested negative after exposure or symptoms, and a control group of 26 mothers with no known COVID exposures or symptoms.

Why fish look down when they swim

Field site in Tumprop, India. The researchers collected video data a forested stream with a sandy substrate and low-to-medium flow.
Photo Credit: E. Alexander/Northwestern University

Just as you might look down at the sidewalk as you walk, fish look downward when they swim, a new study by a Northwestern University-led international collaboration has confirmed.

The study is the first to combine simulations of zebrafish’s brain, native environment and spatially-varying swimming behavior into one computational model. By analyzing this model, the researchers concluded that this quirk — looking down while swimming forward — is an adaptive behavior that evolved to help the fish self-stabilize, as when swimming against a current.

As water moves, fish are constantly trying to self-stabilize in order to stay in place — rather than getting swept away in a moving stream. Focusing on other fish, plants or debris might give the fish a false sensation that it’s moving. The stable riverbed below them, however, gives fish more reliable information about their swimming direction and speed.

“It’s similar to sitting on a train car that isn’t moving. If the train next to yours starts to pull to away from the station, it can trick you into thinking you are moving too,” said Northwestern’s Emma Alexander, who led the study. “The visual cue from the other train is so strong that it overrides the fact that all of your other senses are telling you that you are sitting still. That’s exactly the same phenomenon that we are studying in fish. There are many misleading motion cues above them, but the most abundant and reliable signals are from the bottom of the river.”

The study was published today (Nov. 2) in the journal Current Biology.

Alexander is an assistant professor of computer science in Northwestern’s McCormick School of Engineering, where she runs the Bio Inspired Vision Lab.

New 3D model shows how cadmium exposure may affect heart development

2D model showing how the pluripotent stem cells react to human relevant doses of cadmium over 8 days. From the control in the first panel, to the last panel, researchers can see how the differentiation to cardiomyocytes is inhibited with different doses of cadmium.
Credit: National Institutes of Health

NIH researchers develop new tools to demonstrate how environmental agents can lead to diseases.

Researchers have developed a three-dimensional model that shows how exposure to cadmium might lead to congenital heart disease. Affecting nearly 40,000 newborns a year, congenital heart disease is the most common type of birth defect in the United States. The model was created by scientists at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS), part of the National Institutes of Health.

Cadmium is a metal that can be released into the environment through mining and various industrial processes, and it has been found in air, soil, water, and tobacco. The metal can enter the food chain when plants absorb it from soil. Previous studies suggested that maternal exposure to cadmium might be a significant risk factor for congenital heart disease.

Using models derived from human cells and tissues, called in vitro models, researchers designed a 3D organoid model that mimics how the human heart develops. The researchers saw how exposure to low levels of cadmium can block usual formation of cardiomyocytes, which are the major type of cells that form the heart. In doing so, they revealed the biological mechanisms that might explain how cadmium could induce heart abnormalities.