It’ s time for some science news aka stuff I found interesting. Today’s episode includes two things. The first is about our brain’s plasticity and memory. The second is about how cancer metastasizes.
In 1995 a protein called ARC was discovered in the brain that is involved with plasticity. Brain plasticity is how our brains keep evolving and changing. It’s the term used to describe how neurons make new connections to each other while letting others go. Once upon a time, it was believed that our brains changed while growing but once they were fully grown our brains were basically done developing. Sure we can always make new memories along the way, but how the neurons were connected was considered to be pretty concrete. Well, that theory was thrown out once fMRI and PET scans became available. Now they can actually “see” neurons developing new connections all the time depending on what we are experiencing. This is called brain plasticity.
Science never sleeps as you know. Just recently it was discovered that the ARC proetien looks rather interesting. It looks like a virus with its capsid. The capsid is the protein shell of a virus. Inside the capsid is either DNA or RNA, depending upon the virus in question. Things got even more interesting regarding how we make memories. For a new memory to happen, neurons themselves must change their shape. This is called “plastic change of the neuron.” What’s the mechanism that causes that? And why does the ARC protein which causes neuron plasticity look like a virus? It could be ARC is actually a virus that we picked up several hundreds of thousands of years ago.
The main issue that challenges neuroscientists’ understanding of memory is that proteins don’t last very long in the brain, even though memories last nearly a lifetime. So for memories to remain, there must be plastic changes, meaning that neuron structures actually have to change as a result of memory consolidation.
But scientists never thought they would stumble on evidence that pointed to a viral origin for Arc, as these new findings suggest.
The research team needed to verify this theory, so they tested whether Arc actually acts like a virus. It turns out the Arc capsid encapsulated its own RNA. When they put the Arc capsids into a mouse brain cell culture, the capsids transferred their RNA to the mouse brain cells — just like viral infection does.
The researchers suspect this virus-mammal collaboration happened sometime between 350 and 400 million years ago when a retrotransposon — the ancestor of modern retroviruses — got its DNA into a four-legged creature. They also suspect that this happened more than once.
www.yahoo.com/...
So our ability to create memories may well be due to an alien invasion of our brains by a virus.
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Cancer sucks. No disputing that. Cancer starts with some specific type of tissue. In truth, it typically only becomes lethal when it metastasizes to new tissues in new areas of the body. 90% of cancer deaths are due to the original cancer tumor metastisizing to new parts of the body. This is why, when cancer is detected early, the chances of survival are quite good as it’s still only found where it started. It hasn’t metastasized yet and is therefore fairly easy to deal with.
But how does cancer metastasize? For it to do so, it has to change somehow to be able to invade new and different types of cells. Physiologically, this is some feat. Now scientists believe they’ve likely figured that out.
Cancer cells multiply extremely rapidly. They are on hyperdrive. They divide so fast that mistakes are made in the DNA and RNA in daughter cells. In other words, cancer cells are constantly mutating as they replicate themselves. Cancer, it turns out, is pretty sloppy while replicating. There is “DNA leakage” which occurs within the tumor itself. This is now believed to be a major reason cancer cells change enough to be able to invade new tissues in other parts of the body. With this understanding, new treatments can be developed that might go a long way in preventing cancer from metastisizing.
How metastasis occurs has been one of the central mysteries of cancer biology. The findings, published Jan. 17 in Nature, appear to have partly solved this mystery. The authors traced the complex chain of events that result from chromosomal instability - a widespread feature of cancer cells in which DNA is copied incorrectly every time these cells divide, resulting in daughter cells with unequal DNA content. Using models of breast and lung cancer, the investigators found that chromosomal instability leads to changes in the cells that drive metastasis.
"We showed that chromosomal instability can cause a leakage of DNA from the nuclei of cancer cells, leading to a chronic inflammatory response within the cells--and the cells essentially can hijack that response to enable themselves to spread to distant organs," said study lead author Dr. Samuel Bakhoum, a Holman research fellow at Weill Cornell Medicine and a senior resident in radiation oncology at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center.
"Metastasis causes 90 percent of cancer deaths, and this work opens up new possibilities for therapeutically targeting it," said senior author Dr. Lewis Cantley, the Meyer Director of the Sandra and Edward Meyer Cancer Center and a professor of cancer biology at Weill Cornell Medicine.
www.news-medical.net/...
What do you want to talk about today?
RSVPS
1. EagleOfFreedom
2. Bleeding Blue
3. DoingBusinessAs
4. momomia
5. ptressel
6. Kay3295
7.
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Puerto Rico Kos
Stay tuned, big Daily Kos meet-up on January 29th with Chef Bobby Neary aka newpioneer. Daily Kos is sending Kelly Macias from our Editorial Staff and Chris Reeves from our Community Building Staff to do some original reporting about Puerto Rico coinciding with the SOTU address.
PUERTO RICO RSVPS
1. newpioneer, organizer (kosmail him to connect)
2. Kelly Macias, Daily Kos Staff Writer
3. Chris Reeves, Daily Kos Community Outreach Organizer
4.
MAYBEES :
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Netroots Nation 2018