A new strategy for repairing DNA damage in neurons harvardmed nature
"Use it or lose it" goes the adage, applied liberally to everything from our muscles to our minds, especially as we age.may indeed help maintain memory and other cognitive functions throughout life, scientists have found that the associated activity also damages neurons by inviting more breaks into their DNA.
"More research is needed, but we think this is a really promising mechanism to explain how neurons maintain their longevity over time," said co-first author Elizabeth Pollina, who carried out the work as a research fellow at HMS, and is now an assistant professor of developmental biology at the Washington University School of Medicine.
"We wondered whether there were specific mechanisms that neurons employ to mitigate this damage in order to allow us to think and learn and remember throughout decades of life," Pollina said.transcription factor whose function was discovered by Michael Greenberg's lab "NPAS4 is primarily turned on in neurons in response to elevated neuronal activity that's driven by changes in sensory experience, and so we wanted to understand the functions of this factor," Pollina added.
"What we found is that this factor plays a critical role in initiating a novel DNA repair pathway that can prevent the breaks that occur alongside transcription in activated neurons," Pollina said. "I think it opens up the idea that all cell types in the body probably specialize their repair mechanisms depending on their life span, the kinds of stimuli they see, and their transcriptional activity," Pollina said."There are likely many mechanisms of activity-dependent genome protection that we have yet to discover."
South Africa Latest News, South Africa Headlines
Similar News:You can also read news stories similar to this one that we have collected from other news sources.
First look at Strictly and Line of Duty stars in new DNA Journey seriesSeries five incoming.
Read more »
Mapping of morpho-electric features to molecular identity of cortical inhibitory neuronsAuthor summary The computational abilities of the brain arise from its organization principles at the cellular level. One of these principles is the neuronal type composition over different regions. Since computational functions of neurons are best described by their morphological and electrophysiological properties, it is logical to use morpho-electrically defined cell types to describe brain composition. However, characterizing morpho-electrical properties of cells involve low-throughput techniques not very well suited to scan the whole brain. Thanks to recent progress on transcriptomic and immuno-staining techniques we are now able to get a more accurate snapshot of the mouse brain composition for molecularly defined cell types. How to link molecularly defined cell types with morpho-electrical cell types remains an open question. Several studies have explored this problem providing valuable three-modal datasets combining electrical, morphological and molecular properties of cortical neurons. The long-term goal of the Blue Brain Project (BBP) is to accurately model the mouse’s whole brain, which requires detailed biophysical models of neurons. Instead of going through the time-consuming process of producing detailed models from the three-modal datasets, we explored a time-saving method. We mapped the already available detailed morpho-electrical models from the BBP rat dataset to cells from a three-modal mouse dataset. We thus assigned a molecular identity to the neuron models allowing us to populate the whole mouse cortex with detailed neuron models.
Read more »
Why Mercedes has not 'thrown away' old concept for its W14 F1 carMercedes says that the new W14 Formula 1 car has kept the 'core DNA' of its predecessor because the team felt that there was little to gain starting a new concept from scratch.
Read more »
Why Mercedes has not 'thrown away' old concept for its W14 F1 carMercedes says that the new W14 Formula 1 car has kept the 'core DNA' of its predecessor because the team felt that there was little to gain starting a new concept from scratch.
Read more »
See Which Part of New England Boasts the Most Dunkin' LocationsDunkin’ is not just in the northeast anymore. It’s everywhere these days. But have you ever wondered which parts of the country have the most Dunkin’ locations? It’s probably not surprising that the northeast continues to have the highest Dunkin’ density — it’s where the chain started, after all, and it’s so much a part of the region’s DNA that…
Read more »