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Category: neuroscience – Page 914

Gut microbes protect against neurologic damage from viral infections

Gut microbes produce compounds that prime immune cells to destroy harmful viruses in the brain and nervous system, according to a mouse study published today in eLife.

The findings suggest that having healthy and diverse microbiota is essential for quickly clearing viruses in the nervous system to prevent paralysis and other risks associated with diseases such as multiple sclerosis.

A condition that causes progressive damage to nerve cells, multiple sclerosis has become more common over the past several decades. Viral infections in the brain or spinal cord are thought to trigger this disease. Some scientists believe that changes in the way we eat, increased sanitation or growing antibiotic use may be causing detrimental changes in the that live within the human body, potentially increasing the risk of multiple sclerosis and other related diseases.

Neurotech Salon lets talk Brain Computer Interfaces, Neuroscience, and Code

Lets meet to talk brain computer interfaces, neuroscience, collaboration and coding. Lets pitch projects to one another, join existing projects, write code together, build new brain computer interfaces and more.

Thinking about past NeurotechX SF meetups I think I like the Salon aspect the most, where people just meet up to talk about neuroscience, brain computer interfaces and coding. So I’m renaming this event series to “Neurotech Salon”, it’s every two weeks in San Francisco at the Red Victorian! Get ready to meet interesting people to talk about things like the future of brain machine interfaces, you can pitch your project, or perhaps join someone elses project, you can talk about your work in developing software, hardware, or your work in medical research, or talk about your studies as an academic.

Confirm your RSVP by making a charitable donation to a real charity like this one here https://www.facebook.com/donate/837355799969191/ in the amount of $5 dollars or more. If you feel like you can’t afford it just skip a meal, and take the money you would have paid for that meal and apply it to this event.

Differences in MS patients’ cerebrospinal fluid may be key to drugs that halt progression

The disability burden for people with multiple sclerosis (MS) can vary significantly depending on whether they have a relapsing/remitting form of the disease, where they experience periods of clinical remission, or a progressive form, where they have continued neurological deterioration without clinical remission. Effective therapies exist for managing relapsing/remitting MS, but treatment for progressive MS has proved more challenging. Now, a new paper published in the journal Brain from researchers at the Advanced Science Research Center (ASRC) at The Graduate Center, CUNY and Friedman Brain Institute at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai has identified potential mechanisms that may inform the development of therapies that effectively manage progressive MS.

Previous research had suggested that dysfunction of neuronal —the energy-producing subcellular organelles—occurs in the brains of MS with progressive clinical disability. However, the underlying this process remained elusive.

“Because the brain is bathed by the cerebrospinal fluid (CSF), we asked whether treating cultured neurons with the CSF from MS patients with a relapsing/remitting or a progressive disease course would possibly elicit different effects on neuronal mitochondrial function,” said the study’s primary investigator Patrizia Casaccia, Einstein Professor of Biology at The Graduate Center and founding director of the Neuroscience Initiative at the ASRC. “We detected dramatic differences in the shape of the neuronal mitochondria and their ability to produce energy. Only exposure to the CSF from progressive MS patients caused neuronal mitochondria to fuse and elongate while rendering them unable to produce energy. We therefore searched for potential mechanisms of CSF-induced neurodegeneration with the intent to define therapeutic strategies.”