Category archives: Neurobiology

Electrical stimulation allows nine paralysed patients to walk

Electrical stimulation allows nine paralysed patients to walk

MedicineNeurobiologyNeuroscience

By Rosa García-Verdugo

Electrical stimulation of the spinal cord can help recover mobility in some paralysed patients. However, the mechanism underlying this partial recovery of function remains unknown. A recent human study has confirmed the involvement of a group of cells previously identified in mice, paving the way to targeted treatments. In a recently published study in Nature […]

Neuroplasticity: Word and face recognition with half a brain

Neuroplasticity: Word and face recognition with half a brain

NeurobiologyNeuroscience

By César Tomé

An unprecedented study of brain plasticity and visual perception found that people who, as children, had undergone surgery removing half of their brain correctly recognized differences between pairs of words or faces more than 80% of the time. Considering the volume of removed brain tissue, the surprising accuracy highlights the brain’s neuroplasticity– and its limitations […]

Alzheimer’s disease: Is amyloid beta 42 the answer?

Alzheimer’s disease: Is amyloid beta 42 the answer?

BiomedicineMedicineNeurobiology

By Invited Researcher

In 1906, Alois Alzheimer, a psychiatrist and neuroanatomist, reported “a peculiar severe disease process of the cerebral cortex” to a gathering of psychiatrists in Tübingen, Germany. The case was a 50-year-old woman who suffered from memory loss, delusions, hallucinations, aggression and confusion – all of which worsened until her untimely death five years later. In […]

mTOR and rapamycin in autism spectrum disorders

mTOR and rapamycin in autism spectrum disorders

Neurobiology

By José Ramón Alonso

mTOR has nothing to do with Norse mythology, it stands for “mammalian target of rapamycin” or “target of rapamycin in mammalian cells”. mTOR is involved in important cellular processes, including growth, proliferation, motility, survival, protein synthesis, transcription and autophagy. The history of rapamycin is so suggestive that I cannot avoid mentioning it: in the 1960s […]

AI can predict Alzheimer’s risk from brain scans

AI can predict Alzheimer’s risk from brain scans

Computer scienceNeurobiologyNeuroscience

By Rosa García-Verdugo

Since humans are not very good at predicting the future, even if the help of a magic ball, scientists have developed a new system based on artificial intelligence to help us predict the future risk of suffering from Alzheimer’s disease by analysing certain parameters in brain scans. The research, recently published in the journal Diagnostics […]

Increased density of synapses in autism spectrum disorders

Increased density of synapses in autism spectrum disorders

NeurobiologyNeuroscience

By José Ramón Alonso

At a synapse, the plasma membrane of the neuron transmitting the information (the presynaptic neuron) is in close proximity to the membrane of the target cell (postsynaptic) and the two are separated by a space known as the synaptic cleft. Both the presynaptic and postsynaptic sites contain extensive assemblies of molecular machinery that link the […]

Mutations in the non-coding genome contribute to autism

Mutations in the non-coding genome contribute to autism

GeneticsNeurobiology

By José Ramón Alonso

A significant portion of an organism’s genome is non-coding; that is, it does not carry information to make proteins. Part of the non-coding DNA is transcribed into functional non-coding RNA molecules (e.g., transfer RNA, ribosomal RNA and regulatory RNA). Other functions of non-coding DNA include transcriptional and translational regulation of protein coding sequences, nuclear scaffold […]