News by Subject Biology

The visual cortex stores and remembers individual images, but when they are grouped into a sequence, mice can't recognize that without guidance from the hippocampus, according to a new study by neuroscientists at MIT's Picower Institute for Learning and Memory.

Long thought of as a generic alarm system, the locus coeruleus may actually be a sophisticated regulator of learning and behavior, according to a new review by MIT researchers. They will test this hypothesis with a new grant.

Every drug starts with the search for an active substance targeting disease-related key players. However, there is no perfect drug that affects the one target: no effect without side effects. A group led by Prof. Herbert Waldmann and Dr. Slava Ziegler at the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Physiology in Dortmund has now identified an unexpected effect for a group of characterized active substances: they all modulate cholesterol metabolism, a home-made problem, as it seems.

Study at the Federal University of São Paulo developed a recipe combining chickpea flour and psyllium, a plant-derived soluble fiber. The product is nourishing and rated highly by consumers in qualitative surveys.

In a new University of California, Irvine-led study, researchers found that a certain protein prevented regulatory T cells (Tregs) from effectively doing their job in controlling the damaging effects of inflammation in a model of multiple sclerosis (MS), a devastating autoimmune disease of the nervous system.

An international team of researchers led by Kumamoto and Tokyo Universities (Japan) have shown that the L452R mutation of the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein, which is common to two variants (Epsilon and Delta), is involved in cellular immunity evasion via the human leukocyte antigen (HLA) A24, and enhances viral infectivity. HLA-A24 is one of the most prominent HLA-class I alleles, especially in East/Southeast Asian populations, which might make them particularly vulnerable to variants with the mutation.