Warren symposium follows legacy of geneticist giant

If we want to understand how the brain creates memories, and how genetic disorders distort the brain’s machinery, then the fragile X gene is an ideal place to start. That’s why the Stephen T. Warren Memorial Symposium, taking place November 28-29 at Emory, will be a significant event for those interested in neuroscience and genetics. Stephen T. Warren, 1953-2021 Warren, the founding chair of Emory’s Department of Human Genetics, led an international team that discovered Read more

Mutations in V-ATPase proton pump implicated in epilepsy syndrome

Why and how disrupting V-ATPase function leads to epilepsy, researchers are just starting to figure Read more

Tracing the start of COVID-19 in GA

At a time when COVID-19 appears to be receding in much of Georgia, it’s worth revisiting the start of the pandemic in early 2020. Emory virologist Anne Piantadosi and colleagues have a paper in Viral Evolution on the earliest SARS-CoV-2 genetic sequences detected in Georgia. Analyzing relationships between those virus sequences and samples from other states and countries can give us an idea about where the first COVID-19 infections in Georgia came from. We can draw Read more

Neuro

When genes forget to forget

In ancient Greek mythology, the souls of the dead were made to drink from the river Lethe, so that they would forget their past lives. Something analogous happens to genes at the very beginning of life. Right after fertilization, the embryo instructs them to forget what it was like in the egg or sperm where they had come from.

This is part of the “maternal-to-zygote transition”: much of the epigenetic information carried on and around the DNA is wiped clean, so that the embryo can start from a clean slate.

Developmental biologist Lewis Wolpert once said: “It is not birth, marriage or death which is
the most important time in your life, but gastrulation,” referring to when the early embryo separates into layers of cells that eventually make up all the organs. Well, the MZT, which occurs first, comes pretty close in importance.

When this process of epigenetic reprogramming is disrupted, the consequences are often lethal. Emory cell biologists David Katz and Jadiel Wasson discovered that when mouse eggs are missing an enzyme that is critical for the MZT, on the rare instances when the mice survive to adulthood, they display odd repetitive behaviors. Read more

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Proteomics making fantastic routine

Much of basic biomedical research concerns proteins. The enzymes that keep cells running, the regulators and receptors that control what our cells do, the antibodies that defend us against invaders — all of these are proteins.

That means every day, scientists are asking questions like:

What’s happening to my favorite protein? Is there more or less of it in this sample? What other proteins work with it or stick to it?

That’s where a proteomics core facility comes in. Given a mixture of hundreds or even thousands of proteins, proteomics specialists can separate, identify and quantify them.Proteomics1smaller

Researchers in the areas of Alzheimer’s disease, cancer metabolism, schizophrenia and vaccines all make use of Emory’s proteomics core facility. It was key to the Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center’s 2013 discovery of a new form of Alzheimer’s disease protein pathology.

Director Nick Seyfried reports that the core has acquired close to $3 million in sophisticated mass spectrometry equipment in the last few years. The Emory Integrated Proteomics Core, one of the Emory Integrated Core Facilities, is supported in part by the Winship Cancer Institute, the Atlanta Clinical and Translational Science Institute, and a recently renewed grant for ENNCF (Emory Neurosciences NINDS Core Facilities).

Protein mass spectrometry is like Wonkavision

There’s a scene in both the 1971 and 2005 film adaptations of Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, in which a chocolate bar is separated into millions of tiny pieces and sent flying across a clean room. Protein mass spectrometry resembles the first part of this process. Read more

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Neurons dominate GDBBS contest-winning images

Lab Land’s editor enjoyed talking with several students about their work at the GDBBS Student Research Symposium last week. Neurons dominate the three contest-winning images. The Integrated Cellular Imaging core facility judged the winners. From left to right:

ContestComposite

1st Place: Stephanie Pollitt, Neuroscience

2nd Place: Amanda York, Biochemistry, Cell and Developmental Biology

3rd Place: Jadiel Wasson, Biochemistry, Cell and Developmental Biology

Larger versions and explanations below.

Read more

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Sidestepping the placebo effect when studying depression

Research on depression must deal with a major obstacle: the placebo effect. This is the observation that patients improve in response to the sugar pills given as controls in clinical studies.

Clinical trial designers can incorporate various clever strategies to minimize the placebo effect, which is actually comprised of several statistical and psychological factors. Investigators can try to enhance, dissect or even “harness” them. [A recent piece in the New York Times from Jo Marchant focuses on the placebo effect in studies of pain relief.]

Emory psychiatrist Andrew Miller and his team have been developing a different approach over the last few years: studying symptoms of depression in people who are being treated for something else. This allows them to sidestep, at least partially, the cultural construct of depression, from William Styron to Peter Kramer to direct-to-consumer television ads.

Interferon alpha, a treatment used against hepatitis C virus infection and some forms of cancer, is a protein produced by the immune system that spurs inflammation. It also can induce symptoms of depression, such as fatigue and malaise. There are some slight differences with psychiatric depression, which Miller’s team describes here (less guilt!), but they conclude that there is a “high degree of overlap.”

Miller and his colleagues, including Jennifer Felger and Ebrahim Haroon, have documented how interferon-alpha-induced inflammation affects the brains of hepatitis C and cancer patients in several papers. That research, in turn, informs their more recent fruitful investigations of inflammation in the context of major depression. More on that soon.

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NINDS director: neuroscience now largest ‘bucket of money’

On Friday, NINDS director Walter Koroshetz made an interesting remark in a lecture to Emory’s Department of Neurology. He said that in the 2016 National Institues of Health budget, neuroscience is now the largest “bucket of money,” especially with the recent boost in funding for Alzheimer’s research. That’s larger than the bucket for cancer. To be sure, biomedical research in general got a boost from Congress, with the NIH receiving its largest increase in a decade, and cancer is still a big deal!

Koroshetz explained that neuroscience research is spread out among NINDS (National Institute for Neurological Disorders and Stroke), NIMH (National Institute of Mental Health), NIDA (National Institute for Drug Abuse) and several others, while cancer research is concentrated at the National Cancer Institute. [Here’s some official category tracking that the NIH does – his breakdown checks out.]

Koroshetz highlighted a project from Dieter Jaeger and Garret Stanley that is part of the White House’s BRAIN Initiative focused on mapping brain circuits and connectivity. He also noted NINDS’s efforts in promoting translational research, since pharmaceutical companies were frustrated by repeated failures in the 1990s with difficult areas such as stroke, and the R35 mechanism for funding “outstanding investigators” for up to eight years continuously.

Posted on by Quinn Eastman in Neuro 2 Comments

Grady Trauma Project — DICER link to PTSD plus depression

Violence and trauma are certainly not gifts, but scientifically, the Grady Trauma Project keeps on giving, even after co-director Kerry Ressler’s 2015 move to Massachusetts. Research at Emory on the neurobiology of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) continues. This Nature Communications paper, published in December with VA-based psychiatrist Aliza Wingo as lead author, is an example.

Three interesting things about this paper:

  1. The focus on PTSD co-occurring with depression. As the authors note, several studies looking at traumatized individuals found PTSD and depression together more often than they were present separately. This was true of Atlanta inner city residents in the Grady Trauma Project, veterans and survivors of the 2001 World Trade Center attack.
  2. DICER: the gene whose activity is turned down in blood samples from people with PTSD plus depression. Its name evokes one of the three Fates in Greek mythology, Atropos, who cuts the thread of life. DICER is at the center of a cellular network of regulation, because it is part of the machinery that generates regulatory micro-RNAs.
  3. The findings recapitulate work in mouse models of stress and its effects on the brain, with a connection to the many-tentacled Wnt signaling/adhesion protein beta-catenin.

Some past posts on the Grady Trauma Project’s scientific fruits follow. Read more

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Emory labs on LabTV

This summer, video producers from the web site LabTV came to two laboratories at Emory. We are pleased to highlight the first crop of documentary-style videos.

LabTV features hundreds of young researchers from universities and institutes around the United States, who tell the public about themselves and their research. The videos include childhood photos and explanations from the scientists about what they do and what motivates them. Screen Shot 2015-12-18 at 9.14.51 AM

The two Emory labs are: Malu Tansey’s lab in the Department of Physiology, which studies the intersection of neuroscience and immunology, focusing on neurodegenerative disease, and Mike Davis’ lab in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory, which is developing regenerative approaches and technologies for heart disease in adults and children. Read more

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Chasing invasive cancer cells and more at #ASCB15

Earlier today, we posted a notice on Eurekalert for a Sunday, December 13 presentation by graduate student Jessica Konen at the American Society for Cell Biology meeting in San Diego.

Her research, performed with Adam Marcus at Winship Cancer Institute, was the topic of a video that recently won first prize in a contest sponsored by the Association of American Medical Colleges. This was our video team’s first use of the “fast hand on whiteboard” effect, and a lot of fun to make. The video’s strength grows out of the footage Konen and Marcus have of cancer cells migrating in culture. Check it out, if you haven’t already.

Poster presentations at the 2015 ASCB meeting can be found by searching this PDF. A few Emory-centric highlights:

*Chelsey Ruppersburg and Criss Hartzell’s work on the “nimbus”, a torus-shaped structure enriched in proteins needed to build the cell’s primary cilium

*Anita Corbett on how Emory students have a strong record of attaining their own NIH research funding

*Additional work by Adam Marcus’ lab on the tumor suppressor gene LKB1 and how its loss drives lung cancer cells to take on a “unique amoeboid morphology”

*Research from David Katz’s lab on the “epigenetic eraser” LSD1 (lysine-specific demethylase) and its function in neurons and neurodegeneration Read more

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The secrets of a new Alzheimer’s secretase

The title of Keqiang Ye’s recent Nature Communications paper contains a provocative name for an enzyme: delta-secretase.

Just from its name, one can tell that a secretase is involved in secreting something. In this case, that something is beta-amyloid, the toxic protein fragment that tends to accumulate in the brains of people with Alzheimer’s disease.

Aficionados of Alzheimer’s research may be familiar with other secretases. Gamma-secretase was the target of some once-promising drugs that failed in clinical trials, partly because they also inhibit Notch signaling, important for development and differentiation in several tissues. Now beta-secretase inhibitors are entering Alzheimer’s clinical trials, with similar concerns about side effects.

Many Alzheimer’s researchers have studied gamma- and beta-secretases, but a review of the literature reveals that so far, only Ye and his colleagues have used the term delta-secretase.

This enzyme previously was called AEP, for asparagine endopeptidase. AEP appears to increase activity in the brain with aging and cleaves APP (amyloid precursor protein) in a way that makes it easier for the real bad guy, beta-secretase, to produce bad beta-amyloid.*At Alzforum, Jessica Shugart describes the enzyme this way:

Like a doting mother, AEP cuts APP into bite-sized portions for toddler BACE1 [beta-secretase] to chew on, facilitating an increase in beta-amyloid production. Read more

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Inflammation linked to weakened reward circuits in depression

About one third of people with depression have high levels of inflammation markers in their blood. New research indicates that persistent inflammation affects the brain in ways that are connected with stubborn symptoms of depression, such as anhedonia, the inability to experience pleasure.

The results were published online on Nov. 10 in Molecular Psychiatry.

The findings bolster the case that the high-inflammation form of depression is distinct, and are guiding researchers’ plans to test treatments tailored for it.

Anhedonia is a core symptom of depression that is particularly difficult to treat, says lead author Jennifer Felger, PhD, assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Emory University School of Medicine and Winship Cancer Institute.

“Some patients taking antidepressants continue to suffer from anhedonia,” Felger says. “Our data suggest that by blocking inflammation or its effects on the brain, we may be able to reverse anhedonia and help depressed individuals who fail to respond to antidepressants.”

In a study of 48 patients with depression, high levels of the inflammatory marker CRP (C-reactive protein) were linked with a “failure to communicate”, seen through brain imaging, between regions of the brain important for motivation and reward.

Emory researchers have found that high inflammation in depression is linked to a "failure to communicate" between two parts of the brain: the ventral striatum (VS, vertical cross section) and the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC, horizontal).

Emory researchers have found that high inflammation in depression is linked to a “failure to communicate” between two parts of the brain: the ventral striatum (VS, vertical cross section) and the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC, horizontal). Images from Felger et al, Molecular Psychiatry (2015).

Neuroscientists can infer that two regions of the brain talk to each other by watching whether they light up in magnetic resonance imaging at the same times or in the same patterns, even when someone is not doing anything in particular. They describe this as “functional connectivity.”

More here.

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