Ever wondered how sea squirts keep track of time? How touch-sensitive neurons in our fingertips relay signals to the brain? Find out the answers to these questions and more in this week’s newsletter.
– Julia Deathridge, Associate Features Editor
A section of the tissue lining the nose of a mouse with a sub-type of odor-sensing neurons labeled in green and proliferating cells labeled in magenta. Image Credit: Hossain et al. (CC BY 4.0)
As we get older, the heart gradually loses its ability to effectively pump blood around the body. But what are the molecular changes underpinning this deterioration? New findings published in eLife point to the mitochondrial enzyme arginase-II as a key player in this process. Rather than acting directly on cardiac muscle cells, this enzyme triggers inflammation and causes a rise in reactive oxygen species, which collectively harm various cell types in the heart. In this Insight article, Xicong Tang and Hongyu Qiu explore how this discovery could reshape our understanding of cardiac aging.
The nose contains hundreds of different odor-sensing neurons, and is constantly producing new ones to replace those that have been damaged or lost. However, rather than replacing like with like, a new study suggests that the nose is more likely to produce neurons that can sense the specific odors it has been exposed to.
The timing of our internal circadian clock – which regulates our sleep-wake cycle – has been linked to mental health symptoms like reduced motivation. However, most studies in psychiatry do not take the circadian rhythms of participants into account. Recent research, based on a survey in which people were asked to complete motivation-driven tasks online, suggests that overlooking circadian rhythms in such studies may be a mistake.
Before tiny marine creatures known as sea squirts can transform into adults, they must first attach themselves to a surface and remain there for at least 30 minutes. But how do they know how long they've been anchored? This study suggests that a molecule found throughout the animal kingdom may hold the answer.
The tips of our fingers are packed full of specialized neurons called mechanoreceptors, which send information to the brain whenever we touch an object. Now, a paper published in eLife suggests that these neurons don’t just send signals about current physical contacts, but also retain a memory of previous contacts with objects. In this Insight article, Rochelle Ackerley and Roger Watkins discuss the experiments that led to this finding, and the exciting innovations it could lead to.
Salmonella – a bacterium that infects over 100 million people worldwide – can survive and multiply inside macrophages, the very immune cells that are meant to destroy it. To achieve this, it relies on access to certain amino acids. Now, a group of researchers has discovered that Salmonella specifically needs the amino acid β-alanine and identified the mechanisms it uses to obtain it, revealing promising new targets for treating the infection.
The parasite that causes sleeping sickness – Trypanosoma brucei – exists in two forms inside human hosts. This recent study confirms the long-standing theory that tsetse flies primarily take up the stumpy form of the parasite when they bite infected humans, challenging recent work that suggested the slender form might also be transmissible.
Visual representations of data are becoming more popular in scientific literature, but they are also vulnerable to mis-use – especially colormaps, which assign specific colors to data values. To better understand the extent of the problem, Markita Landry from the University of California, Berkeley and coworkers analyzed over 6,000 articles in 10 biology journals. Their data, published in bioRxiv, revealed that only 19% of the research articles they examined had used colormaps correctly, highlighting the need for better education and clearer guidelines on how to use color-based data visualizations.
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