Category Archives: Physiology

Physiology

2 US scientists win Nobel Prize in medicine for showing how we react to heat, touch – Fox17

Two American scientists have won the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine for their discovery of receptors for temperature and touch.

The Nobel Assembly at Karolinska Institutet announced Monday morning that its awarding the honor to David Julius and Ardem Patapoutian.

Peter Barreras/Peter Barreras/Invision/AP

The Nobel Prize organization says Julius and Patapoutian solved how nerve impulses are initiated so that temperate and pressure can be perceived.

Julius utilized capsaicin, a pungent compound from chili peppers that induces a burning sensation, to identify a sensor in the nerve endings of the skin that responds to heat, according to the organization.

And Patapoutian reportedly used pressure-sensitive cells to discover a novel class of sensors that respond to mechanical stimuli in the skin and internal organs.

These discoveries launched research activities that officials say led to a rapid increase in our understanding of how the human nervous system senses heat, cold, and mechanical stimuli.

The laureates identified critical missing links in our understanding of the complex interplay between our senses and the environment, said the organization.

Julius, 65, is a physiologist who works as a professor at the University of California, San Francisco, while Patapoutian is a molecular biologist and neuroscientist at Scripps Research in La Jolla, California.

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2 US scientists win Nobel Prize in medicine for showing how we react to heat, touch - Fox17

Physiology

2021 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine goes to two researchers for their discovery of receptors for temperature and touch – Chemical &…

2021 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine goes to two researchers for their discovery of receptors for temperature and touch  Chemical & Engineering News

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2021 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine goes to two researchers for their discovery of receptors for temperature and touch - Chemical &...

Physiology

Why are males still the default subjects in medical research? – The Conversation AU

Women and girls account for 50% of the population, yet most health and physiology research is conducted in males.

This is especially true for fundamental research (which builds knowledge but doesnt have an application yet) and pre-clinical (animal) research. These types of research often only focus on male humans, animals and even cells.

In our discipline of exercise physiology, 6% of research studies include female-only participant groups.

So why do so many scientists seem oblivious to the existence of half of the worlds population?

Read more: Equal but not the same: a male bias reigns in medical research

Firstly, its important to understand key terminology in society and research. As referred to throughout this article, male and female are categories of sex, defined by a set of biological attributes associated with physical and physiological characteristics.

In comparison, men, women and non-binary people are categories of gender: a societal construct that encompasses behaviours, power relationships, roles and identities.

Here we discuss research on specific sexes, but further consideration of gender-diverse groups, such as transgender people, also remains a gap in science.

The main reasoning is that females are a more complicated model organism than males.

The physiological changes associated with the menstrual cycle add a whole lot of complexities when it comes to understanding how the body may respond to an external stimulus, such as taking a drug or performing a specific type of exercise.

Read more: From energy levels to metabolism: understanding your menstrual cycle can be key to achieving exercise goals

Some females use contraception, and those who do use different types. This adds to the variability between them.

Females also undergo menopause around the age of 50, another physiological change that fundamentally impacts the way the body functions and adapts.

Even when research with females is performed properly, the findings may not apply to all females. This includes whether a female individual is cisgender or gender nonconforming.

Altogether, this makes female research more time-consuming and expensive and research is nearly always limited by time and money.

Yes, because males and females are physiologically different.

This does not only involve visually obvious differences (the so-called primary sex characteristics, such as body shape or genitals), but also a whole range of hidden differences in hormones and genetics.

Theres also emerging evidence from our research team that sex differences impact epigenetics: how your behaviours and environment affect the expression of your genes.

Conducting health and physiology research in males exclusively disregards these differences. So our knowledge of the human body, which is mostly inferred from what is observed in males, may not always hold true for females.

Some diseases, such as cardiovascular (heart) disease, present differently in males and females.

Read more: Women who have heart attacks receive poorer care than men

Males and females may also metabolise drugs in a different way, meaning they may need different quantities or formulations. These drugs can have sex-specific side effects.

This may have major consequences in the way we treat diseases or the preferred drugs we use in the clinic.

Take COVID-19, for example. The severity and death rates of COVID-19 are higher in males than females. Sex differences in immunity and hormonal pathways may explain this, therefore researchers are advocating for sex-specific research to aid viral treatment.

No matter the cost or added complexity, research should be for everyone and apply to everyone. International medical research bodies are now starting to acknowledge this.

A March 2021 statement from the Endocrine Society, the international body for doctors and researchers who study hormones and treat associated problems, recognises:

Before mechanisms behind sex differences in physiology and disease can be elucidated, a fundamental understanding of sex differences that exist at baseline, is needed.

The National Institutes of Health (NIH), the largest medical research board in the United States, recently called for researchers to account for sex as a biological variable.

Unless a strong case can be made to study only one sex, studying both sexes is now a requirement to receive NIH research funding.

The Australian equivalent, the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC), indirectly recommends the collection and analysis of sex-specific data in animals and humans.

However the inclusion of both sexes is not yet a requirement to receive funding in Australia.

Because sex matters, we created a freely available infographic based on our research that aims at making female health and physiology research easier to design.

It presents as a simple flow through diagram that researchers can use before starting their project and prompts them to consider questions such as:

is the phenomenon I am investigating influenced by female hormones?

should all females in my cohort use the same contraception?

on which day of the menstrual cycle should I test my participants for the most reliable result?

Depending on the answers, our infographic proposes strategies (that can be practical such as who to recruit and when or statistical) to design research that takes into account the complexity of the female body.

Its easy to follow and accessible to all. And, while initially designed for exercise physiology research, it can be applied to any type of female health and physiology research.

Read more: Medicine's gender revolution: how women stopped being treated as 'small men'

Based on our infographics, we designed a female-only, four-year research project to map the process of muscle ageing in females. Females live longer than males but, paradoxically, are more susceptible to some of the consequences of ageing. Despite lots of ageing research in males, we still know very little about the female-specific characteristics at play.

So yes, the future is female so is our research. And we hope to inspire health and physiology researchers all over the world to do the same.

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Why are males still the default subjects in medical research? - The Conversation AU

Physiology

Department of Physiology and Biophysics Seminar – umc.edu

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When: Wednesday, September 01, 2021, from 12:00 p.m. to 1:00 p.m.Location: WebEx

Contact Info: Courtney Graham at chortongraham@umc.edu or 601-984-1820Related Link: Click here to view event flyer

Dr. Jennifer Sones, Associate Professor of Theriogenology in the Department of Physiology/ School of Medicine, will give the virtual Department of Physiology and Biophysics Seminar, Metabolic Basis of Disease in BPH/5 Mice, at noon on Wednesday, Sept. 1, online via WebEx.

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Department of Physiology and Biophysics Seminar - umc.edu

Physiology

Awards and Honors Across Weill Cornell Medicine August 27, 2021 – Weill Cornell Medicine Newsroom

Dr. Dolores Lamb, who was recruited as assistant professor of molecular biology in urology, has been elected Eastern Regional Administrative Secretary at the American Association of Bioanalysts (AAB) as a member of the AAB Membership Review Committee. Dr. Lambs term began in June 2021.

Dr. Christopher Mason, co-director of theWorldQuant Initiative for Quantitative Predictionand a professor of physiology and biophysics, has been selected to serve on the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) Committee to develop the next 10 years of NASA and space medicine priorities.

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Awards and Honors Across Weill Cornell Medicine August 27, 2021 - Weill Cornell Medicine Newsroom

Physiology

New imaging, machine-learning methods speed effort to reduce crops’ need for water – University of Illinois News

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. Scientists have developed and deployed a series of new imaging and machine-learning tools to discover attributes that contribute to water-use efficiency in crop plants during photosynthesis and to reveal the genetic basis of variation in those traits.

The findings are described in a series of four research papers led by University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign graduate students Jiayang (Kevin) Xie and Parthiban Prakash, and postdoctoral researchers John Ferguson, Samuel Fernandes and Charles Pignon.

The goal is to breed or engineer crops that are better at conserving water without sacrificing yield, said Andrew Leakey, a professor of plant biology and of crop sciences at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, who directed the research.

Drought stress limits agricultural production more than anything else, Leakey said. And scientists are working to find ways to minimize water loss from plant leaves without decreasing the amount of carbon dioxide the leaves take in.

Plants breathe in carbon dioxide through tiny pores in their leaves called stomata. That carbon dioxide drives photosynthesis and contributes to plant growth. But the stomata also allow moisture to escape in the form of water vapor.

A new approach to analyzing the epidermis layer of plant leaves revealed that the size and shape of the stomata (lighter green pores) in corn leaves strongly influence the crops water-use efficiency.

Micrograph by Jiayang (Kevin) Xie

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The amount of water vapor and carbon dioxide exchanged between the leaf and atmosphere depends on the number of stomata, their size and how quickly they open or close in response to environmental signals, Leakey said. If rainfall is low or the air is too hot and dry, there can be insufficient water to meet demand, leading to reduced photosynthesis, productivity and survival.

To better understand this process in plants like corn, sorghum and grasses of the genus Setaria, the team analyzed how the stomata on their leaves influenced plants water-use efficiency.

We investigated the number, size and speed of closing movements of stomata in these closely related species, Leakey said. This is very challenging because the traditional methods for measuring these traits are very slow and laborious.

For example, determining stomatal density previously involved manually counting the pores under a microscope. The slowness of this method means scientists are unable to analyze large datasets, Leakey said.

There are a lot of features of the leaf epidermis that normally dont get measured because it takes too much time, he said. Or, if they get measured, its in really small experiments. And you cant discover the genetic basis for a trait with a really small experiment.

To speed the work, Xie took a machine-learning tool originally developed to help self-driving cars navigate complex environments and converted it into an application that could quickly identify, count and measure thousands of cells and cell features in each leaf sample.

Jiayang (Kevin) Xie converted a machine-learning tool originally designed to help self-driving cars navigate complex environments into an application that can quickly analyze features on the surface of plant leaves.

Photo by L. Brian Stauffer

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To do this manually, it would take you several weeks of labor just to count the stomata on a seasons worth of leaf samples, Leakey said. And it would take you months more to manually measure the sizes of the stomata or the sizes of any of the other cells.

The team used sophisticated statistical approaches to identify regions of the genome and lists of genes that likely control variation in the patterning of stomata on the leaf surface. They also used thermal cameras in field and laboratory experiments to quickly assess the temperature of leaves as a proxy for how much water loss was cooling the leaves.

This revealed key links between changes in microscopic anatomy and the physiological or functional performance of the plants, Leakey said.

By comparing leaf characteristics with the plants water-use efficiency in field experiments, the researchers found that the size and shape of the stomata in corn appeared to be more important than had previously been recognized, Leakey said.

Along with the identification of genes that likely contribute to those features, the discovery will inform future efforts to breed or genetically engineer crop plants that use water more efficiently, the researchers said.

The new approach provides an unprecedented view of the structure and function of the outermost layer of plant leaves, Xie said.

There are so many things we dont know about the characteristics of the epidermis, and this machine-learning algorithm is giving us a much more comprehensive picture, he said. We can extract a lot more potential data on traits from the images weve taken. This is something people could not have done before.

Leakey is an affiliate of the Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology at the U. of I. He and his colleagues report their findings in a study published in The Journal of Experimental Botany and in three papers in the journal Plant Physiology (see below).

The National Science Foundation Plant Genome Research Program, the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy, the Department of Energy Biosystems Design Program, the Foundation for Food and Agriculture Research Graduate Student Fellows Program, The Agriculture and Food Research Initiative from the U.S. Department of Agriculture National Institute of Food and Agriculture, and the U. of I. Center for Digital Agriculture supported this research.

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New imaging, machine-learning methods speed effort to reduce crops' need for water - University of Illinois News

Physiology

Neurological manifestations of COVID-19 in patients: from path physiology to therapy – DocWire News

This article was originally published here

Neurol Sci. 2021 Aug 21. doi: 10.1007/s10072-021-05505-7. Online ahead of print.

ABSTRACT

Coronavirus is a family of ARN positive single-stranded belonging to the family of Coronaviridae. There are several families of coronavirus that transmit more or less serious diseases. However, the so-called coronavirus-19 (SARS-CoV2) is the one that is currently causing most of the problems; in fact, biological dysfunctions that this virus causes provoke damage in various organs, from the lung to the heart, the kidney, the circulatory system, and even the brain. The neurological manifestations caused by viral infection, as well as the hypercoagulopathy and systemic inflammation, have been reported in several studies. In this review, we update the neurological mechanisms by which coronavirus-19 causes neurological manifestation in patients such as encephalomyelitis, Guillain-Barr syndrome, lacunars infarcts, neuropsychiatry disorders such as anxiety and depression, and vascular alterations. This review explains (a) the possible pathways by which coronavirus-19 can induce the different neurological manifestations, (b) the strategies used by the virus to cross the barrier system, (c) how the immune system responds to the infection, and (d) the treatment than can be administered to the COVID-19 patients.

PMID:34417704 | DOI:10.1007/s10072-021-05505-7

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Neurological manifestations of COVID-19 in patients: from path physiology to therapy - DocWire News

Physiology

Inside the Pandemic – Crikey

Lets find our bearings in this ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.

Crikeys Janine Perrett and Amber Schultz, will be joined by one of Australias leading authorities on infection and immunity. Professor Peter Doherty shared the 1996 Nobel Prize in Medicine or Physiology for discovering the nature of cellular immune defence, and is the author of a new book entitled An insiders plague year.

Peter and his colleagues at the Doherty Institute have been at the forefront of the research and study of this highly infectious coronavirus. They are currently working with the federal government in assisting with official modelling to fill in those missing numbers from the four-stage plan.

He will be sharing insights into his new book and the role that science now plays in working with government to create effective health guidelines and policies.

What would you like to ask Peter about COVID-19, the pandemic, Australias response, and the way forward? The two most thoughtful questions will win a copy of the book at the end of the webinar.

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Inside the Pandemic - Crikey