Protocols by DeYtH Banger, Clive Cooper (best novels for beginners .txt) 📕

then there’s the potential to save those cells to preserve vision.”

 

Glaucoma is the second leading cause of blindness in the world, affecting more than 60 million people. The disease often begins silently, with peripheral vision loss that occurs so gradually that it can go unnoticed. Over time, central vision becomes affected, which can mean substantial damage already has occurred before any aggressive therapy begins.

 

Many patients start receiving treatment when their doctors discover they have elevated pressure in the eye. Those treatments, such as eye drops, are aimed at lowering pressure in the eye, but such therapies may not always protect ganglion cells in the retina, which are the cells destroyed in glaucoma, leading to vision loss.

 

All current treatments for glaucoma are aimed at lowering pressure in the eye to reduce ganglion cell loss and not necessarily at directly preserving ganglion cells, says Apte, who is also a professor of developmental biology, of medicine, and of neuroscience.

New way of imaging eyes could spot glaucoma sooner

 

Glaucoma specialists attempt to track vision loss caused by ganglion cell death with visual field testing where a patient pushes a button when they see a blinking light.

As vision is lost, patients see fewer lights blinking in the periphery of the visual field, but such testing is not always completely reliable, says Norimitsu Ban, an ophthalmologist and postdoctoral research associate in Apte’s laboratory. Ban is first author of the study in JCI Insight.

 

Some older people don’t do as well on the visual field test for reasons that may not be related to what’s going on in their eyes, Ban says, so finding a marker of cell damage in the eye would be a much more reliable way to track the progression of glaucoma.

“We were lucky to be able to identify a gene and are very excited that the same gene seems to be a marker of stress to ganglion cells in the retinas of mice, rats and humans,” he says.

 

Studying mouse models of glaucoma, the researchers identified a molecule in the eye called growth differentiation factor 15 (GDF15), noting that the levels of the molecule increased as the animals aged and developed optic nerve damage.

 

When they repeated the experiments in rats, they replicated their results. Further, in patients undergoing eye surgery to treat glaucoma, cataracts, and other issues, the researchers found that those with glaucoma also had elevated GDF15 in the fluid of their eyes.

 

“That was exciting because comparing the fluid from patients without glaucoma to those with glaucoma, the GDF15 biomarker was significantly elevated in the glaucoma patients,’ Apte says. “We also found that higher levels of the molecule were associated with worse functional outcomes, so this biomarker seems to correlate with disease severity.’

 

The researches don’t believe that the molecule causes cells in the retina to die; rather, it’s a marker of stress in retinal cells. “It seems to be a harbinger of future cell death rather than a molecule that’s actually damaging the cells,” Apte says.

 

A potential limitation of the study is that the fluid samples were taken from the eyes of patients only once, so it was not possible to monitor levels of GDF15 over time. In future studies, it will be important to measure the biomarker at several time points to determine whether levels of the biomarker increase as the disease progresses.

 

Apte would like to know whether GDF15 levels eventually decline in those who have significant vision loss from glaucoma. In theory, when most of the ganglion cells in the retina already have died, fewer cells would be under stress, and that could mean lower levels.

“So we are interested in doing a prospective study and sampling fluid from the eye over several months or years to correlate glaucoma progression with levels of this marker”‘ he says. “We’d also like to learn whether levels of GDF15 change after treatment, a particularly important question as we try to develop therapies that preserve vision more effectively in these patients.”

 

The National Eye Institute, the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases, the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, and the National Institute of General Medical Sciences, of the National Institutes of Health funded the work.

The Schulak Family Gift Fund for Retinal Research, the Jeffrey Fort Innovation Fund, the Kuzma Family Gift Fund, the Central Society for Clinical and Translational Research, a Research to Prevent Blindness Physician Scientist Award, the Washington University Institute of Clinical and Translational Sciences, the American Federation for Aging Research, the Vitreoretinal Surgery Foundation and an unrestricted grant from Research to Prevent Blindness Inc. provided additional funding.

 

Source: Washington University in St. Louis

Fluffy dandelion seeds make great tools in the lab

 by Erika Ebsworth-Goold-WUSTL

 

New research finds a clever use for the dandelion: each of its tiny seeds can work as a perfect pipette in the lab.

“We found you can actually use dandelion seeds to perform precise droplet handling. There aren’t many tools that exist for this,” says Guy Genin, professor of mechanical engineering at the Washington University in St. Louis School of Engineering & Applied Science.

The team examined the wettability of dandelion seeds, or how liquids saturate them. While most materials can be wetted only by water (hydrophilic) or oil (oleophilic), the researchers found the pappus of a dandelion—the fluffy, white structure surrounding the seed—is omniphilic, able to be saturated by both materials. That rare trait makes it an extremely useful lab tool, especially when it comes to moving tiny amounts of either liquid from one setting to another.

 

 

A regular laboratory pipette.
(Credit: ILRI/Flickr)

 

“These dandelion pappi are chemically and structurally composed so that they will collapse in a special way if you dip them in either oil or water,” says Feng Xu, Genin’s collaborator and director of the Bioinspired Engineering and Biomechanics Center at Xi’an Jiaotong University. “Using the pappi, you can lift up a drop of water and deposit that drop of water into an oil bath. And you can go back into the oil, use the pappi to retrieve the drop of water, and move it elsewhere.”

Genin says using dandelions in the lab allows for precise handling of minute amounts of liquid, something especially important for the tiniest of experiments.

 

“Because it has this special omniphilic property, the seed provides us a new way of handling nanoliter-sized droplets in the lab. They are a beautiful controlled environment; they basically seal off the work around them so we can run a very controlled chemical reaction with them.

 

“The dandelion comes self-assembled, naturally grown, and its seeds are able to reliably and repeatedly pick up these tiny volumes of fluid that we need to transport in a lab setting.”

 

Lego robot squirts liquid in DIY lab for kids

The seeds can be used either individually or in large assays to collect greater amounts of liquid. Genin says the next step is to replicate the pesky dandelion’s omniphilic properties in synthetic materials.

“We hope to be able to develop bio-inspired omniphilic surfaces to create additional options for handling liquid for lab experiments,” Genin says.

 

Advanced Functional Materials recently published this research, which had financial support from the National Natural Science Foundation of China, the China Postdoctoral Science Foundation, and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities.

 

Source: Washington University in St. Louis

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20:00-28:45

 

Criminal Minds Season 1 Episode 12

X-Ray of the oceans

 

 

By NATHAN YAU

 

 

 

Using satellite data and spatial models, researchers estimate human influence in the ocean. Darker means more impact.

Two-thirds of the ocean shows increased strain from human-related factors, such as fishing and climate change. And more than three-quarters of coastal waters suffer from climate change and increases in the effects of harmful land-based activities, including pollution. In all, the researchers classified more than 40 percent of the ocean as “heavily impacted” by human activity.

It looks like you can find much of the data used here, under the Cumulative Impact Mapping section.

Criticism vs. Creation

 Filmmaker Kevin Smith talks about making things versus critiquing them. He’s talking about movies, but you can so easily plug in visualization. I just kept nodding yes. [via swissmiss]

Most popular colors used by most popular sites

 

By NATHAN YAU

 

 

Paul Hebert was curious about the colors used on the web’s larger