Imagine if we could under­stand the lan­guage two neu­rons use to com­mu­ni­cate. We might learn some­thing about how thoughts and con­scious­ness are formed. At the very least, our improved under­standing of neuron com­mu­ni­ca­tion would help biol­o­gists study the brain with more pre­ci­sion than ever before.

Heather Clark, an asso­ciate pro­fessor of phar­ma­ceu­tical sci­ences at North­eastern Uni­ver­sity, has received a $300,000 Young Fac­ulty Award from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency to explore neural cell com­mu­ni­ca­tion using her exper­tise in nanosensors.

With his knack for knowing what stem cells want, Yoshiki Sasai has grown an eye and parts of a brain in a dish.

All it took to grow a retina, it turned out, were a few tweaks, such as a reduction in the concentration of growth factors and the addition of a standard cell-culture ingredient called Matrigel. The result closely mimics eye development in the embryo. By the sixth day in culture, the brain balls start sprouting balloon-like growths of retinal cells, which then collapse in on themselves to make the double-walled optic cups. Sasai’s team snip them off — “like taking an apple from a tree”, says Sasai — transfer them to a different culture and let them be. Two weeks later, the cups have formed all six layers of the retina, an architecture that resembles the eye of an 8-day-old mouse (which, at that age, is still blind). That the cells could drive themselves through this dramatic biomechanical process without surrounding tissues to support them stunned Sasai as much as anyone else. “When I saw it, I thought, ‘Oh my god.’ Shape, topology and size are all recapitulated,” he says. Carefully explaining the pun to come, he adds: “In English, when you are surprised, you say ‘eye-popping’ — so we really thought this was eye-popping.”

(Source: nature.com)

The gears that help cells divide are coming into clearer focus. Researchers have used a new type of super-resolution microscopy to zoom in on centrosomes, which anchor the fibers that enable chromosomes to separate during cell division. Centrosomes have intrigued scientists since their discovery in the late 1800s, in part because cancer cells often amass extra copies of the structures. But they’re so tiny that they’re barely visible through traditional light microscopes, and researchers haven’t nailed down how they form and what role they play in cancer. So cell biologist David Glover of the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom and his postdoc Jingyan Fu turned to three-dimensional structured illumination microscopy to provide sharper portraits of centrosomes and to pinpoint several proteins they harbor. Each centrosome consists of two cylindrical components called centrioles shrouded by a molecular cloud, which balloons when cells start the process of division. As the team reveals online today in Open Biology, many of the cloud proteins first gather on the centrioles, moving into the cloud once division begins. That’s the case with the protein Cnn (green), shown above close to the cylindrical centriole (top) and dispersed in the cloud (bottom, inset). With further research, scientists might be able to determine how different proteins interact to construct centrosomes. “We can put the molecular jigsaw together,” Glover says.

Scientists have demonstrated an automated system that uses artificial intelligence and cutting-edge image processing to rapidly examine large numbers of individual Caenorhabditis elegans, a species of nematode widely used in biological research. Beyond replacing existing manual examination steps using microfluidics and automated hardware, the system’s ability to detect subtle differences from worm-to-worm – without human intervention – can identify genetic mutations that might not have been detected otherwise.

By allowing thousands of worms to be examined autonomously in a fraction of the time required for conventional manual screening, the technique could change the way that high throughput genetic screening is carried out using C. elegans.

Hang Lu’s research team is studying genes that affect the formation and development of synapses in the worms, work that could have implications for understanding human brain development. The researchers use a model in which synapses of specific neurons are labeled by a fluorescent protein. Their research involves creating mutations in the genomes of thousands of worms and examining the resulting changes in the synapses. Mutant worms identified in this way are studied further to help understand what genes may have caused the changes in the synapses.