Smilagenin represents a new approach for treating neurodegeneration disease

Erxi Wu, assistant professor of pharmaceutical sciences, and Shuang Zhou, a doctoral student in Wu’s lab, co-wrote the article, “Smilagenin Attenuates Beta Amyloid (25-35)-Induced Degeneration of Neuronal Cells via Stimulating the Gene Expression of Brain-Derived Neurotrophic Factor,” which will be published by Neuroscience. They collaborated with Yaer Hu lab at Shanghai Jiaotong University, China, for the publication.

Waking embryos before they are born

Under some conditions, the brains of embryonic chicks appear to be awake well before those chicks are ready to hatch out of their eggs. That’s according to an imaging study published online on May 3 in Current Biology, a Cell Press publication, in which researchers woke chick embryos inside their eggs by playing loud, meaningful sounds to them. Playing meaningless sounds to the embryos wasn’t enough to rouse their brains.