Warren symposium follows legacy of geneticist giant

If we want to understand how the brain creates memories, and how genetic disorders distort the brain’s machinery, then the fragile X gene is an ideal place to start. That’s why the Stephen T. Warren Memorial Symposium, taking place November 28-29 at Emory, will be a significant event for those interested in neuroscience and genetics. Stephen T. Warren, 1953-2021 Warren, the founding chair of Emory’s Department of Human Genetics, led an international team that discovered Read more

Mutations in V-ATPase proton pump implicated in epilepsy syndrome

Why and how disrupting V-ATPase function leads to epilepsy, researchers are just starting to figure Read more

Tracing the start of COVID-19 in GA

At a time when COVID-19 appears to be receding in much of Georgia, it’s worth revisiting the start of the pandemic in early 2020. Emory virologist Anne Piantadosi and colleagues have a paper in Viral Evolution on the earliest SARS-CoV-2 genetic sequences detected in Georgia. Analyzing relationships between those virus sequences and samples from other states and countries can give us an idea about where the first COVID-19 infections in Georgia came from. We can draw Read more
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olfactory receptor

When parents de-stress, so do offspring

Parents around the world can relax, knowing that their kids won’t inherit all of their stresses — at least at the DNA or epigenetic level. In an animal model, neuroscientists at Yerkes National Primate Research Center have shown they can reverse influences of parental stress by exposing parents to behavioral interventions following their own exposure to stress.

“These results in our mouse model are an important public health contribution because they provide optimism for applying similar interventional approaches in humans and breaking intergenerational cycles of stress,” says lead author Brian Dias. More information here.

The research was published in Biological Psychiatry, and is a continuation of Dias’ work with Kerry Ressler on this topic, which earned some attention in 2013. Note: the mice weren’t inheriting a fear as much as a sensitivity to a smell. Even so, it remains an intriguing example of how transgenerational (um, since the word “epigenetic” is so stretchy now) influences can be studied in a precise molecular way.

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Posted on August 30, 2018 by Quinn Eastman in Neuro Leave a comment

Epigenetic inheritance via sperm RNA

In 2013, Brian Dias (at Yerkes) and Kerry Ressler (now at Harvard) described a surprising example of epigenetic inheritance.

They found that a mouse, exposed to a smell in combination with stress, could transmit the resulting sensitivity to that smell to its offspring. At the time, there wasn’t a lot of information about mechanism.

Now other scientists have substantiated a proposal that micro RNA in playing a role in sperm. See this story (“Sperm RNAs transmit stress”) from Kate Yandell in The Scientist or this one from Rachel Zamzow at Spectrum, the Simons Foundation’s autism news site, for more. An added wrinkle is that this research shows that descendants of stress-exposed mice show a muted response to stress.

Note for Emory readers: Dias is scheduled to give a Frontiers in Neuroscience talk on Friday.

Posted on October 20, 2015 by Quinn Eastman in Neuro Leave a comment

Two heavy hitters in this week’s Nature

Two feature articles in Nature this week on work by Emory scientists.

One is from Virginia Hughes (Phenomena/SFARI/MATTER), delving into Kerry Ressler’s and Brian Dias’ surprising discovery in mice that sensitivity to a smell can be inherited, apparently epigenetically. Coincidentally, Ressler will be giving next week’s Dean’s Distinguished Faculty lecture (March 12, 5:30 pm at the School of Medicine).

Another is from Seattle global health writer Tom Paulson, on immunologist Bali Pulendran and using systems biology to unlock new insights into vaccine design.

Posted on March 6, 2014 by Quinn Eastman in Immunology, Neuro Leave a comment

Talkin’ about epigenetics

This intriguing research has received plenty of attention,  both when it was presented at the Society of Neuroscience meeting in the fall and then when the results were published in Nature Neuroscience.

The short summary is: researchers at Yerkes National Primate Research Center found that when a mouse learns to become afraid of a certain odor, his or her pups will be more Gafas Ray Ban Baratas sensitive to that odor, even though the pups have never encountered it. Both the parent mouse and pups have more space in the smell-processing part of their brains, called the olfactory bulb, devoted to the odor to which they are sensitive.

[Note: a feature on a similar phenomenon, transgenerational inheritance of the effects of chemical exposure, appeared in Science this week]

Somehow information about the parent’s experiences is being inherited. But how? Brian Dias and Kerry Ressler are now pursuing followup experiments to firmly establish what’s going on. They discuss their research in this video:

 

Posted on January 24, 2014 by Quinn Eastman in Neuro Leave a comment