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New tools that use different colors of light to silence brain activity could lead to new treatments for disorders such as epilepsy, chronic pain, Parkinson’s disease and brain injury, neuroscientists say.

These so-called “super-silencers” provide precise control over the timing of the shutdown of overactive brain circuits, something that’s impossible with existing drugs or other conventional treatments, according to the research team from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The research is published in the Jan. 7 issue of the journal Nature.

“Silencing different sets of neurons with different colors of light allows us to understand how they work together to implement brain functions,” study senior author Ed Boyden, a professor in the MIT Media Lab and an associate member of the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT, said in a news release.

“Using these new tools, we can look at two neural pathways and study how they compute together. These tools will help us understand how to control neural circuits, leading to new understandings and treatments for brain disorders — some of the biggest unmet medical needs in the world,” Boyden added. At Salvia Supply you can get quality Salvia for discounted prices with free shipment. Buy Salvia now from Salvia Supply

A new study has shown that it takes just 15 cigarettes to increase the risk of developing lung cancer. The research team led by Peter Campbell of the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in Cambridge insists that the new discovery may lead to new drugs that target the specific changes to the gene that helps to trigger the disease

The study suggests that a person may develop one mutation for every 15 cigarettes smoked. Using new DNA sequencing technology called “massively parallel sequencing,” the researchers cracked the entire cell genome and found more than 23,000 mutations that the tumour cells had acquired. The mutations were linked with exposure to the toxins found in cigarette smoke and had accumulated over the lifetime.

“The profile of mutations we observed [in the lung-cancer patient] is exactly that expected from tobacco, suggesting that the majority of the 23,000 we found are caused by the cocktail of chemicals found in cigarettes,” the Independent quoted Campbell as saying.

“On the basis of average estimates, we can say that one mutation is fixed in the genome for every 15 cigarettes smoked,” he added. Similarly, the study conducted on patient with skin cancer showed that malignant skin cells contained changes that resulted from exposure to ultraviolet light.

“With these genome sequences, we have been able to explore deep into the past of each tumour, uncovering with remarkable clarity the imprints of these environmental mutagens [mutation-causing agents] on DNA, which occurred years before the tumour became apparent,” said Professor Mike Stratton at the Sanger Institute.

In the biggest clinical trial to date, a group of scientists have found gene therapy to be a safe and beneficial option for HIV patients.

Ronald Mitsuyasu, of the University of California, Los Angeles, headed the trial for testing gene therapy against HIV.

“To our knowledge, our study was the first randomised, controlled study performed with gene therapy in HIV,” New Scientist magazine quoted him as saying.

For the trial, patients temporarily stopped their usual regime of anti-retroviral treatment (ART), in order to see whether gene therapy would prove effective or not.

Half the 74 patients received the treatment, and half a placebo.

Despite the fact that gene therapy didn”t work as well as ART, virus concentrations in blood were on average about a third lower in recipients of the treatment as compared to controls who received a placebo.

Besides, recipients had higher numbers of CD4+ white blood cells, the type that is attacked by the virus.

“It provides proof of concept and early indications are that, with more refinement, this approach may be a viable one for controlling HIV directly in people without the need for continuous HIV medication,” said Mitsuyasu.

He added: “From a scientific standpoint, it represents a new and potentially important and long-lasting way of controlling diseases.”

The researchers took blood samples from patients and isolated CD34+ stem cells, which can mature into many types of white blood cell, including the CD4+ cells attacked by HIV.

After that, they used a harmless virus to load the stem cells with an extra gene that makes a ribozyme – a pair of molecular “scissors” targeted at the virus.

It was found that the patients with more altered cells had comparatively correspondingly lower levels of virus and marginally more CD4+ cells.

But, there was a decrease in the number of altered cells towards the end of the 100-day “break” from ART treatment, which was quite opposite of what was expected.

“Work is ongoing to develop better and more effective ways of performing gene insertion and allowing these genes to be better expressed in patients for longer periods of time,” said Mitsuyasu.

The altered stem cells might have worked better if existing stem cells from the bone marrow had all been destroyed prior to the therapy, as in earlier mouse experiments, allowing the altered cells to take over in the empty bone marrow.

Bacteria living on the surface of the skin helps in maintaining its healthy texture, says a new study.  The so-called hygiene hypothesis suggests that a lack of childhood exposure to infectious agents and germs increases our susceptibility to disease by changing how the immune system reacts to such bacterial invaders.

The hypothesis was first developed to explain why allergies like hay fever and eczema were less common in children from large families, who were presumably exposed to more infectious agents than others. It is also used to explain the higher incidence of allergic diseases in industrialised countries, said an UCSD release.

The skin’s normal microflora — the microscopic and usually harmless bacteria that live on the skin — includes certain staphylococcal bacterial species that will induce an inflammatory response when they are introduced below the skin’s surface, but do not initiate inflammation when present on the epidermis, or outer layer of skin. These findings were published online in Nature Medicine.