Insulin, long recognized as a primary regulator of blood glucose, is now also understood to play key roles in neuroplasticity, neuromodulation, and neurotrophism.
Insulin, long recognized as a primary regulator of blood glucose, is now also understood to play key roles in neuroplasticity, neuromodulation, and neurotrophism.
Present in every tissue of the body, ubiquitin appears to be involved in a dizzying array of functions, from cell cycle and division to organelle and ribosome biogenesis, as well as the response to viral infection. The protein plays at least two role
Not all inflammation leads to pain. Despite widespread infection followed by fever, colds rarely cause pain. But when some cytokines and certain immune cells are active near pain-sensing nerves, they trigger receptors that convey pain sensations to t
Looking for a more realistic way to study memory, we turned to place cells—a network of cells that record a rat’s memory of an environment. Each place cell would fire only when the rat was in one particular location in space, creating a map as the
Long-term potentiation (LTP), discovered in the 1970s, was later shown to be the molecular basis of memory. Since many diseases of aging affect memory, could memory formation and storage be altered by the same mechanisms in normal aging and diseased
Early on, researchers had learned that the hippocampus was the structure in the brain where long-term memories were created and stored, but it was not known whether the different cell types within this structure might be more or less susceptible to t
The initiating cause of Alzheimer’s disease is still unknown. However, from our studies it’s clear that many types of neuronal damage—from traumatic brain injury, to epilepsy, infection, or genetic predisposition—can activate brain immune cells—
While gut microbiota appear to have both positive and negative impacts on our health, in the guts of healthy, lean individuals, the good outweighs the bad. Gut bacteria, most of which reside in the large intestine, process many otherwise indigest
Gut bacteria that feed on healthy food appear to amplify the nutritional benefits of those foods. However, they also appear to amplify the undesirable effects of unhealthy food. Here are a few examples. Read the full story.
The optogenetic toolset is composed of genetically encoded molecules that, when targeted to specific neurons in the brain, enable the electrical activity of those neurons to be driven or silenced by light. When these opsins are expressed in the lipid