Metabolic obesity: Coverage by LA Times, Huffington Post, Telegraph (UK), Medical News Today, Inquisitir, Medical Xpress, Medical Daily, Business Insider, Futurity, Daily Mail, Biz News, and University Herald on “Metabolically normal obese people are protected from adverse effects following weight gain.”
Antibiotic could eliminate hearing loss: Coverage by Examiner, Stanford News, and Science 2.0 on “Designer aminoglycosides prevent cochlear hair cell loss and hearing loss.”
Promising spinal muscular atrophy treatment: Coverage by SMA News Today on “SMN-targeted therapeutics for spinal muscular atrophy: are we SMArt enough yet?”
Gut-brain connection mapped: Coverage by Bioscience Technology and Medical Xpress on “Neuroepithelial circuit formed by innervation of sensory enteroendocrine cells.”
Elisa Fabbrini, Jun Yoshino, Mihoko Yoshino, Faidon Magkos, Courtney Tiemann Luecking, Dmitri Samovski, Gemma Fraterrigo, Adewole L. Okunade, Bruce W. Patterson, Samuel Klein
Bacterial infections represent a rapidly growing challenge to human health. Aminoglycosides are widely used broad-spectrum antibiotics, but they inflict permanent hearing loss in up to ~50% of patients by causing selective sensory hair cell loss. Here, we hypothesized that reducing aminoglycoside entry into hair cells via mechanotransducer channels would reduce ototoxicity, and therefore we synthesized 9 aminoglycosides with modifications based on biophysical properties of the hair cell mechanotransducer channel and interactions between aminoglycosides and the bacterial ribosome. Compared with the parent aminoglycoside sisomicin, all 9 derivatives displayed no or reduced ototoxicity, with the lead compound N1MS 17 times less ototoxic and with reduced penetration of hair cell mechanotransducer channels in rat cochlear cultures. Both N1MS and sisomicin suppressed growth of
Markus E. Huth, Kyu-Hee Han, Kayvon Sotoudeh, Yi-Ju Hsieh, Thomas Effertz, Andrew A. Vu, Sarah Verhoeven, Michael H. Hsieh, Robert Greenhouse, Alan G. Cheng, Anthony J. Ricci
Spinal muscular atrophy (SMA) remains one of the most common and lethal autosomal recessive diseases. Homozygous deletion of survival of motor neuron 1 (
Kathryn J. Swoboda
Satiety and other core physiological functions are modulated by sensory signals arising from the surface of the gut. Luminal nutrients and bacteria stimulate epithelial biosensors called enteroendocrine cells. Despite being electrically excitable, enteroendocrine cells are generally thought to communicate indirectly with nerves through hormone secretion and not through direct cell-nerve contact. However, we recently uncovered in intestinal enteroendocrine cells a cytoplasmic process that we named neuropod. Here, we determined that neuropods provide a direct connection between enteroendocrine cells and neurons innervating the small intestine and colon. Using cell-specific transgenic mice to study neural circuits, we found that enteroendocrine cells have the necessary elements for neurotransmission, including expression of genes that encode pre-, post-, and transsynaptic proteins. This neuroepithelial circuit was reconstituted in vitro by coculturing single enteroendocrine cells with sensory neurons. We used a monosynaptic rabies virus to define the circuit’s functional connectivity in vivo and determined that delivery of this neurotropic virus into the colon lumen resulted in the infection of mucosal nerves through enteroendocrine cells. This neuroepithelial circuit can serve as both a sensory conduit for food and gut microbes to interact with the nervous system and a portal for viruses to enter the enteric and central nervous systems.
Diego V. Bohórquez, Rafiq A. Shahid, Alan Erdmann, Alex M. Kreger, Yu Wang, Nicole Calakos, Fan Wang, Rodger A. Liddle