Thiago Carvalho @cyrilpedia@social.cleverlibre.org

What is a Biomarker? A Snippet

by Elio
Most likely, we have all run into the term "bio­mar­ker," no? So, what is a bio­mar­ker? In 1998, the NIH Bio­mar­kers De­fi­ni­tions Work­ing Group de­fined a bio­mar­ker as "a cha­rac­ter­is­tic that is ob­ject­ive­ly mea­sured and eval­uat­ed as an in­di­ca­tor of nor­mal bio­lo­gi­cal pro­cesses,...

Read more → https://schaechter.asmblog.org/schaechter/2023/04/what-is-a-biomarker-a-snippet.html

#microbiology

.@DrJohannaRhodes explores a #PLOSBiology study of the alarming evolutionary potential of a #pandemic clone of #WheatBlast, arguing the urgent need for genomic surveillance & pre-emptive breeding of resistant wheat. Primer: https://plos.io/3MLuPay Paper: https://plos.io/3zP6Gse

My latest Clinical Pipeline column for #NatureMedicine is a look at zuranolone, a new antidepressant developed by Sage & Biogen, targeting the GABA pathway.

#drugdiscovery #drugdevelopment #depression #GABA #neuroscience

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41591-023-00032-8

Quite happy to share this latest work from our lab. In this study, we have addressed an important question of general importance: if and how brain medications (such as anti-depression drugs) change brain over time. We addressed this by specifically investigating the impact of an important drug, Ketamine.
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.04.12.536506v1
#biorxiv #neuroscience #ketamine #brainplasticity
thread ....

'The burden of navigating Covid’s risks now falls on the individual, and what “post-pandemic” means for one person or community, like Ninety-Fifth Street Elementary, looks wildly different than it does for others.'

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/05/magazine/la-school-pandemic.html?action=click&module=Well&pgtype=Homepage&section=The%20New%20York%20Times%20Magazine

Philadelphia’s 'Matisse in the 1930s' show is in Paris (l’Orangerie), will open in Nice in the summer.

'The exhibition fascinates as the first ever to focus on Matisse in this decade, for its optimistic account of renewal by an artist in his sixties and for European audiences as a rare chance to encounter tremendous paintings acquired by Americans.'

https://www.ft.com/content/4a5b1c3c-9e8c-4973-8fed-5bc9b0ec055a

On this #throwbackthursday we go back to our Episode #48, there we talked to Déborah Bourc'his from L'Institut Curie in Paris about her work on the role of DNA methylation in mammalian development. #epigenetics #podcast #womeninstem

Listen here: https://www.activemotif.com/podcasts#deborah-bourchis

Very excited to share my PhD work on B cell responses in lung cancer!

Antibodies to endogenous retroviruses promote lung cancer immunotherapy

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-05771-9

Synteny Identifies Reliable Orthologs for Phylogenomics and Comparative Genomics of the Brassicaceae https://doi.org/10.1093/gbe/evad034 #science #evolution #biology #genome #SciComm #evolgen_paper

Network lesion approaches?

Network lesion approaches strike me as pretty remarkable https://www.nejm.org/doi/10.1056/NEJMra1706158. For the aficionados: anything I should be wary about? Any cases in which it didn't lead but misled?

The gist behind them is that you gather together a group of patients with similar symptoms (like Capgras - the delusion that familiar people or things have been replaced by imposters). Next, you use anatomical MRI to pinpoint where the lesions are in their brain. The problem is that it's a bit hard to make sense out of it all. So using healthy controls, you study the network of brain areas that are functionally connected to those lesioned areas to test the hypothesis that symptoms emerge from sites functionally connected to a lesion location, not just the lesion location itself. If the same regions come up again and again across all patients, you might be onto something. You can also test hypotheses about the degree to which those regions overlap with functions you hypothesize to be involved (like brain areas involved in "familiarity" and such).

The approach has been used for all sorts of things, from depression and amnesia to Capgras and even free will:
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1814117115

Whenever I read the term "ganglionic eminence"...

#Neuroscience

@cyrilpedia
I love these columns; thank you. Wonderful to see a new pathway targeted for depression!
One of the things I found striking about the brexanolone trials was the unexpected (but not surprising) discovery that big benefits follow when new moms getting some sleep (ie nothing is in the IV at all):
https://www.washingtonpost.com/wellness/2022/12/09/pregnancy-depression-postpartum-sleep/

Do you know if this was also considered in the zuranolone trials as well? It's a pill - so new moms don't need to check out in the same way (big advantage). But if it works via GABA_A and what happens is that they sleep more, well ...

A new #preprint #OpenScience #PeerReview by #PCI_Ecology: Charberet, S., Maria, A., Siaussat, D., Gounand, I., & Mathieu, J. (2023). Feeding and growth variations affect δ13C and δ15N budgets during #ontogeny in a #lepidopteranlarva. #bioRxiv #Ecology. https://doi.org/10.1101/2022.11.09.515573