Category: Alternative Energy

[audio:http://blogs.dickinson.edu/sciencenews/files/2010/05/ConantGood.mp3]

by Kate Good & Dan Contant

By Abby Larson

Have you ever felt sad or stressed, laced up your running shoes and went on a run to find yourself feeling happier once you got back?  Anti-depressants might not be the best treatment for depression and anxiety, conditions that many Americans take drugs for.  Psychology Professors Smits and Otto from Southern Methodist and Boston Universities have shown that Exercise Therapy is a successful treatment of many mental health problems.
Presenting their findings at the Anxiety Disorder Association of America’s annual conference in March to researchers and mental health care providers, Smits and Otto have found that people who exercise show fewer signs of depression and stress.  Much like an anti-depressant, exercise triggers the release of neurotransmitters in the brain that help relieve stress and depression and allow patients to perform daily tasks more efficiently.  Additionally, as one exercises more, resting heart rate lowers, causing patients to feel less anxiety.
Smits believes that patients should exercise at least 150 minutes a week at a moderate-intensity or 75 minutes at high-intensity.  Exercise therapy is about the immediate benefits of exercise on mood, not just the long-term health benefits.
As the list of learned health benefits of exercise grows, psychiatrists should be encouraged to prescribe schedules and goals to exercise instead of anti-depressants for a less costly and more beneficial therapy for mood disorders.  So, next time you’re stressed about work or academics or have a loss of confidence, get outside and exercise.  It’s what the doctor ordered.

For more information, see links at SMU research

By Johnathan Nieves ’11

Cells known as regulator T cells are being implicated in limiting the effectiveness of therapeutic vaccines for HIV by suppressing the immune system. This new knowledge may help researchers when developing future HIV vaccines.

Our immune system may be a little dumber than we thought. Cells involved in the body’s immune system are being implicated in limiting the effectiveness of therapeutic vaccines for HIV. A recent study published in the journal PLoS ONE on March 24^th, demonstrated that regulatory T cells are involved in reducing the effectiveness of HIV vaccines by suppressing the immune system. The findings of the study may help researchers improve the effectiveness future therapeutic HIV vaccines.

Regulatory T cells (Treg) are important because they prevent the body’s immune system from attacking itself. When the immune system attacks itself, it is the result of it mistaking a non-harmful entity, like a liver cell, for a harmful one. The non-harmful entity is then tagged for destruction and the body’s immune system would destroy it and anything similar to it. This is known as an auto-immune response. Without Treg, autoimmune diseases could flourish.

So what if Treg cells are suppressing the immune system so that novel therapeutic HIV vaccines cannot be recognized and targeted for destruction?  University of Pittsburgh health science researchers sought to answer this question as a follow-up to an HIV vaccine they developed and tested in 17 HIV positive patients in 2008 that produced unsatisfying results. In the study the researchers removed Treg cells from the patients’ blood samples to see what effect the HIV vaccine would have on the sample in the absence of Treg. To their surprise they found that Treg reduced the patients’ immune system’s ability to recognize the HIV vaccine and begin to target the actual HIV virus in the patients blood.

“When we removed Treg from blood cells, we found a much stronger immune response to the vaccine, giving us insight into how we can develop more effective HIV vaccines,” said Charles R. Rinaldo, Jr., Ph.D., the study’s lead author. “Treg normally shuts down [the immune response] once the infection has been controlled, but in this case it appears to be [suppressing the immune response] early and possibly limiting the vaccine’s ability to do its job effectively.”

One theory is that the HIV infection itself is responsible for increasing Treg levels in the blood which in turn results in the immune systems inability to recognize the HIV virus.

“We know how to treat HIV, but are still learning how to use immunotherapy strategies to completely flush it out of the body,” added Bernard J.C. Macatangay, M.D., co-author of the study. “Our findings show Treg plays an important role, but we need to figure out how to maintain the right balance by getting around these cells without blocking them completely.”

To view the press release pertaining to this article, click here

The journal article pertaining to this article may be obtained here.

The last time you were thirsty, you probably opened your fridge for an ice cold Pepsi or even filled up your water glass from the sink.  This seems like a simple task, but to a plant this can be a life or death situation.  Drought affects areas in our own country as well as countries abroad.  Southern China is currently experiencing their worst drought in almost 100 years.  One rural farmer comments that in years past he has sold his wheat crop for $585 and this year it is only worth $30.

In a collaborative effort between Villanova and Drexel universities, researchers are beginning to discover a new way to combat this problem. Published in the American Journal of Botany in March 2010, their research began with a plant called the “resurrection fern” (Polypodium polypodioides) which can lose 95% of its water content without experiencing cell death.  One of the main scientists from Villanova explains that this is truly a miraculous property.  He says, “Imagine this happening to a human.  Most of us wouldn’t make it past 10% or 20%.”  Similarly, most common agricultural crops cannot survive water loss of 20-30%.

They used research techniques such as western blotting, immunolocalization, and atomic force microscopy to identify proteins that help the resurrection fern survive in extreme drought condition.

A class of proteins called dehydrin has been previously identified to participate in this miraculous drought resistance.  However, this study was able to identify the location of dehydrin proteins during the process of dehydration.  They found that the proteins were “prevalent” in the plant’s cell wall.  This is an important discovery that may lead to new findings about the mechanism of this reaction.

Information about this protein class has positive implications for common agricultural plants that currently don’t have protection against drought.  Dehydrins, and the mechanism of their role in drought resistance, could be the answer for thirsty plants worldwide as research continues.

Want to learn more? Check out the resources I used for this blog:

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2010-03/ajob-bdp033110.php

By Johnathan Nieves

Findings from a new study show that gene therapy may be effective in treating a rare disease that progresses to total blindness by adulthood.

 

Imagine how difficult daily activities would be without being able to see. For 1.3 million Americans today, that is the reality they face.  For a subset of individuals, though, gene therapy may be the answer to curing their debilitating disease. Findings from a study published March 3^rd in Science Translational Medicine showed that gene therapy may be effective in treating Leber’s congenital amaurosis (LCA), a rare genetic disease that progresses to total blindness by adulthood.

Gene therapy for LCA, which produced dramatic improvements last year in 12 children and young adults who received the treatment in a clinical trial, has cleared another hurdle.  In the human trial for LCA reported last year, researchers at PENN Medicine and The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia treated only one eye in each of their 12 patients. Because the treatment was experimental, researchers left one eye untreated in the event of unexpected complications. After the patients experienced partially restored eyesight in their treated eyes, many were eager to receive the same treatment in the other eye.

The same research team that conducted the human trial now reports that a study in animals has shown that a second injection of genes into the opposite, previously untreated eye is safe and effective. The study suggests that patients with LCA who benefited from gene therapy in one eye may experience similar benefits from treatment in the other eye.

“We designed this study to investigate the immunological consequences of administering the

gene therapy injection to the second eye after treating the first one,” said corresponding author Jean Bennett, M.D., Ph.D., F.M. Kirby professor of Ophthalmology at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. “The good news is that in animals, the second injection, like the first, is benign.”

 As in the human trials of this gene therapy, the researchers packaged a normal version of the missing gene that causes LCA into a vector. The vector, a viral messenger that is used to incorporate a gene into a cell’s DNA, was used to deliver the gene therapy to cells of the retina, the light sensing region of the eye. Once in the retina cells, the vector is able to incorporate the gene into the cell’s DNA. Once incorporated into the DNA, the cell’s DNA reading machinery can translate the gene and produce an enzyme that restores retinal function, effectively reversing blindness (to view an animation of this processess click on the image above).

 Although the virus used in the study does not cause human disease, it previously set off an immune response that cut short the initial benefits of gene therapy. In the current study, the team found no evidence of toxic side effects in the 10 animals that received treatment. All the animals, which had been specially bred to have inherited blindness, had improved vision, and showed no toxic effects from the treatment.

The study “provides encouraging indications that immune responses will not interfere with human gene therapy in both eyes,” said co-author Katherine A. High, M.D.  Additionally, the results may set the stage for gene therapy in LCA patients who were excluded from the previous trial. At present, the research team is planning another clinical trial of LCA gene therapy, which may include some of the patients from the first human trial.

 To view the original press release pertaining to this article, click here.