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Updated Brain Map Identifies Nearly 100 New Regions

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The brain looks like a featureless expanse of folds and bulges, but it’s actually carved up into invisible territories. Each is specialized: Some groups of neurons become active when we recognize faces, others when we read, others when we raise our hands.

On Wednesday, in what many experts are calling a milestone in neuroscience, researchers published a spectacular new map of the brain, detailing nearly 100 previously unknown regions — an unprecedented glimpse into the machinery of the human mind.

Scientists will rely on this guide as they attempt to understand virtually every aspect of the brain, from how it develops in children and ages over decades, to how it can be corrupted by diseases like Alzheimer’s and schizophrenia.

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Breast Milk Sugars Support Infant Gut Health

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Oligosaccharides found in breast milk stimulate the activity of gut bacteria, promoting growth in two animal models of infant malnutrition.

 

Gut microbes isolated from human infants that showed stunted growth can boost growth in two animal models of malnutrition with the addition of certain breast milk–derived sugars to the animals’ diets, researchers reported. The study, published today (February 18) in Cell, identifies oligosaccharides in mammalian breast milk that appear critical for the maturation of the infant gut microbiome.

“This is an excellent study that highlights the importance of [mammalian] milk oligosaccharides for infant growth and development,” said Lars Bodeof the University of California, San Diego, who was not involved in the work.

The results could inform “work to develop tools and levers to nudge the gut microbiota into the right direction to get durable effects on infant health,” said study coauthor David Mills from the University of California, Davis.

 

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Next Generation: Souped-up Probiotics Pinpoint Cancer

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Genetically engineered commensal bacteria help researchers detect cancer metastases in mouse livers.

 

The technique: Researchers at MIT and the University of California, San Diego, have programmed a probiotic Escherichia coli strain to detect cancer metastases in the liver. The team used these bacteria, described this week (May 27) in Science Translational Medicine, to detect cancer in mice.

“There are so many bacteria in our own bodies,” said lead author Tal Danino, a postdoc in Sangeeta Bhatia’s lab at MIT. “In some ways, they are a very natural delivery vehicle for agents for diagnosis.”

The new diagnostic technique takes advantage of an old finding: bacteria thrive in tumors. Tumors are filled with nutrients released from dying cells and relatively free of immune cells. So the researchers fed the engineered E. coli to mice and found that the bacteria indeed homed to liver tumors and multiplied.

The gastrointestinal tract is connected to the liver through the portal vein system, Danino explained. “If you orally deliver bacteria, a lot of them will end up in the liver.”

 

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DNA Loop-the-Loops A new full-genome map indicates how DNA is folded within the nuclei of human cells

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Researchers have created the highest-resolution map to date of how the human genome folds within the nucleus, according to a study published today (December 11) in Cell. The work illuminates basic facts about the genome’s 3-D structure, including that it forms around 10,000 loops. It also sheds light on how genome structure influences gene expression, as looping DNA brings promoters and enhancers into close proximity. The work covers one mouse and eight human cell types.

“This is indeed a standard-setting paper,” said Bing Ren, a professor of cellular and molecular medicine at the University of California, San Diego, who was not involved in the study. “It’s a landmark in the field of genome architecture.” Ren’s lab published its own 3-D map of genome structure last year, but according to Ren, this latest version has five to 10 times better resolution.

“This huge dataset will be used as a highly valuable resource for many researchers to mine and address all sorts of questions related to the functioning of our genome,” Wouter de Laat, who studies DNA architecture at the Hubrecht Institute in the Netherlands, wrote in an e-mail to The Scientist.

 

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