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(Image caption: Brain showing hallmarks of Alzheimer’s disease (plaques in blue). Credit: ZEISS Microscopy)

New imaging technique measures toxicity of proteins associated with Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases

Researchers have developed a new imaging technique that makes it possible to study why proteins associated with Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases may go from harmless to toxic. The technique uses a technology called multi-dimensional super-resolution imaging that makes it possible to observe changes in the surfaces of individual protein molecules as they clump together. The tool may allow researchers to pinpoint how proteins misfold and eventually become toxic to nerve cells in the brain, which could aid in the development of treatments for these devastating diseases.

The researchers, from the University of Cambridge, have studied how a phenomenon called hydrophobicity (lack of affinity for water) in the proteins amyloid-beta and alpha synuclein – which are associated with Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s respectively – changes as they stick together. It had been hypothesised that there was a link between the hydrophobicity and toxicity of these proteins, but this is the first time it has been possible to image hydrophobicity at such high resolution. Details are reported in the journal Nature Communications.

“These proteins start out in a relatively harmless form, but when they clump together, something important changes,” said Dr Steven Lee from Cambridge’s Department of Chemistry, the study’s senior author. “But using conventional imaging techniques, it hasn’t been possible to see what’s going on at the molecular level.”

In neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, naturally-occurring proteins fold into the wrong shape and clump together into filament-like structures known as amyloid fibrils and smaller, highly toxic clusters known as oligomers which are thought to damage or kill neurons, however the exact mechanism remains unknown.

For the past two decades, researchers have been attempting to develop treatments which stop the proliferation of these clusters in the brain, but before any such treatment can be developed, there first needs to be a precise understanding of how oligomers form and why.

“There’s something special about oligomers, and we want to know what it is,” said Lee. “We’ve developed new tools that will help us answer these questions.”

When using conventional microscopy techniques, physics makes it impossible to zoom in past a certain point. Essentially, there is an innate blurriness to light, so anything below a certain size will appear as a blurry blob when viewed through an optical microscope, simply because light waves spread when they are focused on such a tiny spot. Amyloid fibrils and oligomers are smaller than this limit so it’s very difficult to directly visualise what is going on.

However, new super-resolution techniques, which are 10 to 20 times better than optical microscopes, have allowed researchers to get around these limitations and view biological and chemical processes at the nanoscale.

Lee and his colleagues have taken super-resolution techniques one step further, and are now able to not only determine the location of a molecule, but also the environmental properties of single molecules simultaneously.

Using their technique, known as sPAINT (spectrally-resolved points accumulation for imaging in nanoscale topography), the researchers used a dye molecule to map the hydrophobicity of amyloid fibrils and oligomers implicated in neurodegenerative diseases. The sPAINT technique is easy to implement, only requiring the addition of a single transmission diffraction gradient onto a super-resolution microscope. According to the researchers, the ability to map hydrophobicity at the nanoscale could be used to understand other biological processes in future.

Chances are you or somebody you know has recently become the owner of an Instant Pot, the multifunction electric pressure cooker that can produce fork-tender pot roasts in less than an hour, as well as brown meat, cook beans without soaking, and even do the job of a rice cooker or crockpot. The Instant Pot­­ isn’t advertised on TV or in the newspapers, and yet it’s become a viral marketing success story, with owners often describing themselves as “addicts” or “cult members.” That’s the kind of word-of-mouth publicity Instant Pot founders dreamed of when they first began designing the countertop appliances.

The Instant Pot electric pressure cooker has been around since 2010, but really became the buzz during the last six months of 2016. While the company’s electric pressure cookers are sold at Wal-Mart, Target and Kohl’s, the bulk of its sales come from Amazon, driven by social media. Deep discounts on Amazon Prime Day and again on Black Friday, along with the viral online sharing of these sales, turned Instant Pot into a household name. With 215,000 units sold on Prime Day alone, the Instant Pot Duo is Amazon’s top-selling item in the U.S. market. Not bad for a company that does no TV or print advertising and only recently began the process of hiring a marketing agency.

Not Just A Crock: The Viral Word-Of-Mouth Success Of Instant Pot

Photo: Grace Hwang Lynch

L.M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables (via books-n-quotes)

It’s been my experience that you can nearly always enjoy things if you make up your mind firmly that you will.

“People who never met her except across the footlights did not realize how, in her private life, she had such compassion and interest in everyone. After I returned from Hong Kong I was ill with a virus and she rang me up reproachfully later to say, ‘Why didn’t you let me know? I would have come and sit with you.’ Giving flowers to sick people is easy. Giving that precious commodity time is far more expensive for someone who had such a full life. But she always found time for everyone.” -Godfrey Winn

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Sleeping brain's complex activity mimicked by simple model

Researchers have built and tested a new mathematical model that successfully reproduces complex brain activity during deep sleep, according to a study published in PLOS Computational Biology.

Recent research has shown that certain patterns of neuronal activity during deep sleep may play an important role in memory consolidation. Michael Schellenberger Costa and Arne Weigenand of the University of Lübeck, Germany, and colleagues set out to build a computational model that could accurately mimic these patterns.

The researchers had previously modeled the activity of the sleeping cortex, the brain’s outer layer. However, sleep patterns thought to aid memory arise from interactions between the cortex and the thalamus, a central brain structure. The new model incorporates this thalamocortical coupling, enabling it to successfully mimic memory-related sleep patterns.

Using data from a human sleep study, the researchers confirmed that their new model accurately reproduces brain activity measured by electroencephalography (EEG) during the second and third stages of non-rapid eye movement (NREM) sleep. It also successfully predicts the EEG effects of stimulation techniques known to enhance memory consolidation during sleep.

The new model is a neural mass model, meaning that it approximates and scales up the behavior of a small group of neurons in order to describe a large number of neurons. Compared with other sleep models, many of which are based on the activity of individual neurons, this new model is relatively simple and could aid in future studies of memory consolidation.

“It is fascinating to see that a model incorporating only a few key mechanisms is sufficient to reproduce the complex brain rhythms observed during sleep,” say senior authors Thomas Martinetz and Jens Christian Claussen.