An expanding arcade of video games takes aim at easing autism traits, from poor visual attention to problems with motor skills, but the evidence of the games’ effectiveness remains limited.
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Category: neuroscience – Page 874
Only 35 per cent of five- to 17-year-olds and 62 per cent of children ages 3 and 4 are getting the recommended physical-activity levels for their age group (Editor’s note: around 60 minutes of moderate-to-vigorous physical activity daily, including vigorous-intensity activity on at least 3 days per week) and that this may be having an impact on the health of their brains.
___ Getting kids outside and active could help with brain health: Participaction report (The Globe and Mail): The physical benefits of kids leading an active lifestyle, including better heart heal…
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A group of researchers from Yale University and Agilent Technologies have developed a #syntheticbiology technique that turns bacterium E. Coli into a phosphorylated protein factory capable of churning out every known instance of this modification in human proteins.
Proteins, the end product of genes, carry out life functions. Most human proteins are modified by a process called serine phosphorylation — a chemical switch that can alter their structure and function. Malfunctions in this process have been implicated in diseases such as cancer and Alzheimer’s yet are difficult to detect and study. A group of researchers from Yale University and Agilent Technologies have developed a synthetic biology technique that turns bacterium E. Coli into a phosphorylated protein factory capable of churning out every known instance of this modification in human proteins.
“We synthesized over 110,000 phosphoproteins from scratch and we can now study how they all function together,” said Jesse Rinehart, associate professor of cellular and molecular physiology at the Systems Biology Institute and senior author of the research. “This is the future of scientific research — we can build everything we study.”
Previously, researchers were only able to create a single phosphoprotein at a time. The new platform will help scientists create designer proteins by studying the impact of phosphorylation on all potential protein interactions, the authors say. “Biologists want to know which proteins interact with each other because diseases can arise when these interactions go wrong,” said Karl Barber, a Yale graduate student who is the first author on the study and a recently named Schmidt Science Fellow.
New research shows that the brain‘s neuroplasticity isn’t as flexible as previously thought.
One of the brain’s mysteries is how exactly it reorganizes new #information as you learn new tasks. The standard to date was to test how neurons learned new behavior one #neuron at a time.
Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh decided to try a different approach. They looked at the population of neurons to see how they worked together while #learning a new behavior. Studying the intracortical population activity in the primary motor cortex of rhesus macaques during short-term learning in a brain–computer interface (BCI) task, they were able to study the reorganization of population during learning.
Their new research indicates that when the brain learns a new activity that it is less flexible than previously thought. The researchers were able to draw strong hypothesis about neural reorganization during learning by using BCI. Through the use of BCI the mapping between #neural activity and learning is completely known
“In this experimental paradigm, we’re able to track all of the neurons that can lead to behavioral improvements and look at how they all change simultaneously,” says Steve Chase, an associate professor of biomedical engineering at Carnegie Mellon and the Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition.
“When we do that, what we see is a really constrained set of changes that happen, and it leads to this suboptimal improvement of performance. And so, that implies that there are limits that constrain how flexible your brain is, at least on these short time scales.”
It is often challenging to learn new tasks quickly that require a high level of proficiency. Neural plasticity is even more constrained than previously thought as results of this research indicate.
“None of us predicted this outcome,” says Matthew Golub, a postdoctoral researcher in electrical and computer engineering at Carnegie Mellon. “Learning is far more limited on the scale of a few hours than any of us were expecting when we started this. We were all surprised that the brain wasn’t able to choose the best strategy possible.”
The research was done in collaboration with the Center for Neural Basis of Cognition, a cross university research and educational program between Carnegie Mellon and the University of Pittsburgh that leverages each institution’s strengths to investigate the #cognitive and neural mechanisms that give rise to biological intelligence and behavior.
Nature Neuroscience (2018) Full Abstract Study