Lifeboat Foundation

Researchers have completed the most advanced brain map to date, that of an insect, a landmark achievement in neuroscience that brings scientists closer to true understanding of the mechanism of thought.

“It’s been 50 years and this is the first brain connectome. It’s a flag in the sand that we can do this.” —

The international team led by Johns Hopkins University and the University of Cambridge produced a breathtakingly detailed diagram tracing every neural connection in the brain of a larval fruit fly, an archetypal scientific model with brains comparable to humans.

A new paper in Nature Communications illuminates how a previously poorly understood enzyme works in the cell. Many diseases are tied to chronic cellular stress, and UMBC’s Aaron T. Smith and colleagues discovered that this enzyme plays an important role in the cellular stress response. Better understanding how this enzyme functions and is controlled could lead to the discovery of new therapeutic targets for these diseases.

The enzyme is named ATE1, and it belongs to a family of enzymes called arginyl-tRNA transferases. These enzymes add arginine (an amino acid) to proteins, which often flags the proteins for destruction in the cell. Destroying proteins that are misfolded, often as a result of cellular stress, is important to prevent those proteins from wreaking havoc with cellular function. An accumulation of malfunctioning proteins can cause serious problems in the body, leading to diseases like Alzheimer’s or cancer, so being able to get rid of these proteins efficiently is key to long-term health.

The new paper demonstrates that ATE1 binds to clusters of iron and sulfur ions, and that the enzyme’s activity increases two-to three-fold when it is bound to one of these iron-sulfur clusters. What’s more, when the researchers blocked cells’ ability to produce the clusters, ATE1 activity decreased dramatically. They also found that ATE1 is highly sensitive to oxygen, which they believe relates to its role in moderating the cell’s stress response through a process known as oxidative stress.

Scientists created a map of an entire larval fruit fly brain that shows all 548,000 synapses in the organ.

The future of computing includes biology says an international team of scientists.

The time has come to create a new kind of computer, say researchers from John Hopkins University together with Dr. Brett Kagan, chief scientist at Cortical Labs in Melbourne, who recently led development of the DishBrain project, in which human cells in a petri dish learned to play Pong.

Continue reading “The Future of Computing Includes Biology: AI Computers Powered by Human Brain Cells” »

Individuals with newly-diagnosed atrial fibrillation (AFib), or an irregular heart rhythm, may have a modestly elevated risk of developing dementia, a new study indicates.

Summary: A newly constructed brain map shows every single neuron and how they are wired together in the brains of fruit fly larvae.

Source: UK Research and Innovation.

Researchers have built the first ever map showing every single neuron and how they’re wired together in the brain of the fruit fly larva.

A pilot trial by investigators from Brigham and Women’s Hospital, a founding member of the Mass General Brigham health care system, tested the nasal administration of the drug Foralumab, an anti-CD3 monoclonal antibody. Investigators found evidence that the drug dampened the inflammatory T cell response and decreased lung inflammation in patients with COVID-19. Further analysis showed the same gene expression modulation in patients with multiple sclerosis, who experienced decreased brain inflammation, suggesting that Foralumab could be used to treat other diseases. Their results are published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“We discovered a way to shut down inflammation not only seen in COVID-19, but also in a patient with multiple sclerosis as well as in healthy patients,” said lead author Thais Moreira, Ph.D., an assistant scientist at the Ann Romney Center for Neurologic Diseases at BWH and an instructor in Neurology at Harvard Medical School. “This is very exciting because not only does our study suggest that this new monoclonal antibody drug is safe and can modulate the immune system without major side effects, but it can also decrease inflammation in multiple realms, so it may be useful for treating other diseases.”

“Inflammation is a major cause of many diseases,” said senior author Howard Weiner, MD, founder and director of the Brigham Multiple Sclerosis Center and co-director of the Ann Romney Center for Neurologic Diseases. “Our center has spent decades looking for novel ways to treat disease where there is abnormal inflammation in a way that is safe and effective.”

Bipolar disorder (BD) is a debilitating condition characterized by alternating states of depression (known as depressive episodes) and abnormal excitement or irritability (known as manic episodes). Large-scale genome-wide association studies (GWASs) have revealed that variations in the genes present on the fatty acid desaturase (FADS) locus are linked to an increased risk of BD.

Enzymes coded by FADS genes—FADS1 and FADS2—convert or “biosynthesize” omega-3 fatty acids into the different forms required by the human body. Omega-3 fatty acids like eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA) and docosahexaenoic acid (DHA) are crucial for the brain to function, and a reduction in the synthesizing activity of these molecules seems to increase susceptibility to bipolar mood swings.

Research on most diseases involves establishment of an animal model of the disease. So, keeping this knowledge in mind, a team of researchers including Dr. Takaoki Kasahara and Hirona Yamamoto from RIKEN Brain Science Institute and Dr. Tadafumi Kato from Juntendo University in Japan, used CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing to create mutant mice that lack both Fads1 and Fads2 genes.

Ziqiang zhang*, long zhou*, chengyi wang, sanyuan chen, yu wu, shujie liu, zhuo chen, yanqing liu, huaming wang, jinyu li, lei he, sheng zhao, furu wei.

Microsoft

Abstract. We propose a cross-lingual neural codec language model, VALL-E X, for cross-lingual speech synthesis. Specifically, we extend VALL-E and train a multi-lingual conditional codec language model to predict the acoustic token sequences of the target language speech by using both the source language speech and the target language text as prompts. VALL-E X inherits strong in-context learning capabilities and can be applied for zero-shot cross-lingual text-to-speech synthesis and zero-shot speech-to-speech translation tasks. Experimental results show that it can generate high-quality speech in the target language via just one speech utterance in the source language as a prompt while preserving the unseen speaker’s voice, emotion, and acoustic environment. Moreover, VALL-E X effectively alleviates the foreign accent problems, which can be controlled by a language ID.