Researchers at Virginia Commonwealth University Medical Center’s VCU Massey Cancer Center and Harold F. Young Neurosurgical Center (Richmond, VA) and Old Dominion University (Norfolk, VA) have discovered that suppression of Wilms tumor 1 protein (WT1) results in downregulation of CD97 gene expression in three glioblastoma cell lines and reduces the characteristic invasiveness exhibited by glial tumor cells. This finding is announced in the article, “Novel report of expression and function of CD97 in malignant gliomas: correlation with Wilms tumor 1 expression and glioma cell invasiveness,” by Archana Chidambaram, Ph.D., and colleagues, published online ahead of print today in the Journal of Neurosurgery. Although further studies must be performed, the authors propose that CD97 may prove to be a new target for anti-glioma therapies.
Development
Padded headgear, boxing gloves may offer some protection for fighters
The use of padded headgear and gloves reduces the impact that fighters absorb from hits to the head, according to newly published research from Cleveland Clinic.
Why the middle finger has such a slow connection
Each part of the body has its own nerve cell area in the brain — we therefore have a map of our bodies in our heads. The functional significance of these maps is largely unclear. What effects they can have is now shown by Ruhr-University Bochum (Germany) neuroscientists through reaction time measurements combined with learning experiments and “computational modeling.” They have been able to demonstrate that inhibitory influences of neighboring “finger nerve cells” affect the reaction time of a finger.
Brain cells created from patients’ skin cells
(Medical Xpress) — Cambridge scientists have, for the first time, created cerebral cortex cells those that make up the brains grey matter from a small sample of human skin. The researchers findings, which were funded by Alzheimers Research UK and the Wellcome Trust, were published today in Nature Neuroscience.
Research links ‘brain waves’ to cognition, attention and diagnosing disorders
Professor Jason Mattingley, Foundation Chair in Cognitive Neuroscience at The University of Queensland, released his findings into brain waves’ at the Australian Neuroscience Society’s (ANS) annual conference last week.