[60 sec Science] Work harder but not longer

A group of Finnish scientists found that those working more than 55 hours a week had poorer cognitive performance than those who worked 40 hours a week (standard working hour). It's not clear why working long hours might have a negative effect on the brain. But researchers say that it could be due to increased sleeping problems, depression, an unhealthy lifestyle and a raised risk of cardiovascular disease, probably linked to stress. The research work was publish on the January issue of American Journal of Epidemiology.

芬兰一组科学家通过跟踪调查发现，相对于标准工作时长（每周40小时），每周工作超过55小时的人在认知能力上会出现障碍。目前还不清楚长时间工作对大脑造成不良影响的原因，但是有可能和睡眠不足，精神压抑，不健康生活习惯以及因精神紧张而引发的心血管疾病有关。

原始研究论文见：
http://aje.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/full/169/5/596

(Photo from the Internet)

PSF Journal Club: Rainbow in the Brain: visualizing neuronal circuits in colors

Dr. Wen-Feng Chen will give a talk on a recent paper published in Nature at 12:00 PM on the next Wednesday (Feb 25, 2009).

The authors of this paper used Cre/lox system to shuffle the fluorescent protein expression cassettes to
expression different stochastic mixtures of XFPs to elucidate neuronal circuits in as much as 90 colors in mouse brain stem.  They call this technique "Brainbow".


(Photo from scienceblogs.com)


For more information on the paper, please go to:

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v450/n7166/full/nature06293.html

 

Everyone is welcome and please join us at CRB room 302.

Group Talk History List - 2009

Feb 13, 2009 Friday
Title: Lentiviral vector in gene therapy for spinal cord injury.
Speaker: Zhilong Jiang, PhD

Feb 25, 2009 Wednesday (CRB302, 12:00PM)
PSF Journal Club: Rainbow in the Brain: visualizing neuronal circuits in colors
Speaker: Wen-Feng Chen, PhD

[60 sec Science] Watch out for the first 90 days after your first-time child birth

Researchers from Karolinska institute, Sweden found that there is a high risk of mental illness for the first-time mother, especially for those of high maternal age. During (but not after) the first 90 d post-partum the risk of psychoses among women without any previous psychiatric hospitalization was independently affected by: maternal age, high birth weight and diabetes.

瑞典卡洛林斯卡研究院（诺贝尔生理医学奖颁奖地——按）研究人员发现没有精神病史的初次生产的母亲在产后90天内容易产生精神方面的异常（我们常说的"产后抑郁症"——按）。引起精神疾病的高危因素有：产妇高龄，产儿高体重以及母亲有糖尿病。

科学论文见：
http://medicine.plosjournals.org/perlserv/?request=get-document&doi=10.1371/journal.pmed.1000013

[60 sec Science] More water, less flu virus

Scientists from Oregon State University found that absolute humidity modulates influenza survival, transmission and seasonality. Simply put, the higher absolute humidity, the less influenza virus in the air. Their work has been published in the Feb 9 issue of PNAS.

美国俄勒冈州立大学研究人员发现空气绝对湿度对流感病毒的存活、传播以及季节性爆发有一定的关系。他们对过去研究资料的分析后发现，空气绝对湿度低的时候，流感病毒在空气中的存活时间长，反之则短。他们的研究工作发表在二月九号的美国科学院院刊上。

科学论文见：
http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2009/02/09/0806852106.abstract

[60 sec Science] Why we need a partner

Scientists at UPenn Vet School found that male mice live longer when housed with female mice. The hypothesis is that the females' effect on the environment of the spermatogonial stem cells likely occurs through the male's endocrine and nervous systems, but other systems are likely involved.

Detailed news see here.


宾夕法尼亚大学兽医学院的研究者发现和雌性老鼠混居的雄性老鼠能推迟其生殖功能的衰老。

The coming talk on Feb 13, 2009 (Friday)

Dr. Zhilong Jiang from Drexel University is going to give us a talk about  "Lentiviral Vector in Gene Therapy for Spinal Cord Injury" at 6:30 PM next Friday.

Everyone is welcome to join us and to ask questions. Snacks will be provided.


The talk will be held at CRB 302, 6:30 PM.



Abstract

Lentiviral vector (Lv) is widely used HIV-based RNA vector for gene transfer, due to its high transduction efficiency into dividing and non-dividing cells, and integration into cell genomes for better gene duration in infected cells. Most importantly, lentiviral vector has deleted of all viral genomes, thus has very lower immune responses than other vector after administration in vivo. Therefore lentiviral vector has much more advantage over other gene transfer vectors (adenoviral vector, HSV vector), promoting long-term gene expression and less immune response in vivo. Our facility have produced several high quality of lentiviral vectors encoding a variety of genes including brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) and Neurotrophin-3 (NT-3), IL-10, FoxP3, CCR5 and CCR7, etc. The studies in vivo have confirmed their beneficial effects on injured spinal cord recovery.

Spinal cord injury is very common neurological disorder, mostly due to car accident with incidence of 1/20,000 Americans, characterized by neuron loss and destruction of signal transduction pathway between brain cortex and four limbs, ultimately cause paralysis and sensation loss. Re-establishing the connection in the injured sites, by promoting neuron growth and regeneration is essential to functional recovery. Our studies demonstrate that brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) and neurotrophin-3 (NT-3) provide neuroprotection and promote axon growth after transplantation into injured spinal cord. First, we infected fibroblasts, adipocyte-derived stromal cells (Ad-MSC) or neuron stem cells (NSC) with Lv BDNF/GFP, Lv NT-3/GFP or Lv-GFP (control), expanded the infected cells for up to 2 weeks. The expression of BDNA and NT-3 remain remained high, up to 80% of 3-day post infection, the gene modified cells expanded for at least 20 times, thus expansion after infection protocol provided enough cells for cell transplantation without compromise of therapeutic gene expression level. In vitro and in vivo functional studies showed that BDNF and NT-3 produced from modified cells facilitated axonal growth in a chick dorsal root ganglion (DRG) and promoted regeneration of axons into injured sites, form synapses and connections with other axons in grafts, thus over-expression of BDNF and NT-3 in injured spinal cord might be promising strategy in gene therapy of spinal cord injury.