Alternative for longer life! Syed Shamsh Tabrez on how alternative splicing increases lifespan during dietary restriction.

Celebrating 100th birthday in good health! Who doesn't want that. With modern medicine, more and more people are living longer and healthier lives. And diet plays a major role in helping us live longer. Scientific evidence points more and more towards a low-calorie diet leading to increase in lifespan. But eating less to restrict calories is so tough! Everyone wants to have an ice-cream at the end of the day. Is it possible to eat indulgent food and still extend lifespan?

Tabrez and colleagues wanted to understand the basic biological changes that occur with dietary restriction. Illuminating the underlying principles would help harnessing them for increasing lifespan. They found that during dietary restriction, the genetic information processing is altered and this changes the biological landscape of the cells. Such alterations could help cells with efficient energy processing. To know more, please listen to Tabrez.




To know more, please refer to:
Differential alternative splicing coupled to nonsense-mediated decay of mRNA ensures dietary restriction-induced longevity
Tabrez et al., Nature communications, 2017

My heart beats to your tunes only! Kirill Tokarev on how male song promotes monogamy in zebra finch.

You might have seen the reality shows that put multiple bachelors together and it ends up in dramatic cases of cheating and adultery. Mixing attractive people provides a good recipe for amorous behavior. Polygamy should follow in close-knit and passion-filled social environment. However, we do know that individual male-female bonding can arise and be maintained even under such situations. How can monogamy be sustained?

Kirill Tokarev and colleagues used zebra finches as model to understand development of monogamy in a close-knit social structure. Female zebra finches are attracted to the singing of the male song, and in a community, multiple male songs would be heard by the female. Evolution of monogamy would require atleast two conditions:
1. after bonding, females responding to their partner's singing only,
2. to maintain harmony in the society males not being aggressive to other singing males.

How do both these conditions arise in zebra finches? To know that, please listen to Kirill.




To know more, please refer to:
Sexual dimorphism in striatal dopaminergic responses promotes monogamy in social songbirds
Tokarev et al., eLife 2017  

Deux in one! Krista Byers-Heinlein on how bilingual babies comprehend two languages.

We all have a dream to learn that foreign language. Could be French for your love of Paris or French cuisine. Or could be Japanese because of the anime industry. But, its really tough! Isn't it? However, millions of bilingual kids do this so effortlessly. How are they able to achieve this feat, which so many of us find so demanding.

Krista and colleagues study language comprehension in kids to understand how they make sense of a bilingual world. They wanted to know how kids monitor the language they are spoken to. Interestingly, they found an 'expectation' for one language within a single sentence. This suggested that kids efficiently parse information that helps them comprehend and learn multiple languages at the same time. To know more, please listen to Krista.


To know more, please refer to:
Bilingual infants control their languages as they listen
Krista Byers-Heinlein et al., PNAS, 2017   

Do you remember the time when... How episodes shape our memories by Jai Yu!

Imagine sitting with your friends chatting about previous trips. You might mention the time when you went to a beautiful waterfall. You mention some details of the event, like the sun, weather and scenery. You can remember the activities from that day. But would you remember the exact duration you were at the waterfall, apart from a crude number? Or what you did the day earlier or the day later. Probably not so clearly. The event became fresh in your memory, but many details were lost to time. How does the brain retain this experience.

Jai and colleagues investigated the phenomena of coding experiences in the brain to understand how the mind recollects past experiences. They used an interesting model where a rat's behavior is monitored while it searches for a reward and then consumes it. The rat's activity gets divided into mobility (searching for reward) and immobility (consumption of reward). The rat's brain uses the changes in activity as switches to break time into discrete chunks. Each chunk becomes an episode and might be processed and saved differently. This way the brain could define interesting parts of experience and save them as separate memories, such as memories of experience on paths to reach rewards versus memories of being at those reward locations. To know more on how this happens, please listen to Jai.



To know more, please refer to:
Distinct hippocampal-cortical memory representations for experiences associated with movement versus immobility
eLife, Aug., 2017

The sugar deception! Interview with Maria Veldhuizen to know if our brain can tricked into uncoupling sweetness from calorie content.

We all know of diet drinks and sugar-free desserts. Such foods have ingredients that are sweet, but low in calorie. The temptation to savor and relish sweet foods without paying the price of high calorie intake is pretty tempting, isn't it? But does taking food items with a mismatch in sweetness and calorie content actually work on our brains? Can our brain detect the disparity?

Maria and colleagues wanted to understand the affect of discrepancy between the sweetness of the food and its calorie content on the brain's response and metabolism. By providing people drinks that were of the same nutritional value, but varying in calorie, they found that the body responded the best when the two things, sweetness and calories, matched. This suggested that calories are not the only factor that trigger metabolic and mental responses. It could be that the brain's reward circuits better register foods that match in their sweetness and nutritional content. This is of great importance because we live in a world where increasing amounts of food contain such mismatches. To know more, please listen to Maria.


To know more, please refer to:
Integration of Sweet Taste and Metabolism Determines Carbohydrate Reward
Maria et al., Current Biology, 2017

Is believing seeing? Interview with Benedikt Ehinger on how humans percieve unreliable information!

We use the information from our senses to make sense of the world. But sometimes, the information can be unreliable. What does our mind do in face of corrupted information?

Benedikt and colleagues wanted to understand how our mind makes sense of the world when faced with unreliable information. They used the model of blind spot, a part of our visual field that does not detect light. Our mind fills-in the blind spot such that we are not aware of its presence. The experiment was set up to find out if we are aware of 'information filling-in', which makes the blind spot a source of unreliable information. Unexpectedly, not only are we not aware of the unreliability of the information, we in-fact prefer the filled-in information from the blind spot over reality. In the words of André Breton, “The imaginary is what tends to become real.” To know more, please listen to Benedikt.


To know more, please refer to:
Humans treat unreliable filled-in percepts as more real than veridical ones.
Benedikt Ehinger, et al., eLife, May, 2017

Don't judge a book by its cover. Different neural circuitry underlying similar behavior by Akira Sakurai!

It is assumed that similar behaviors are generated by similar neuronal mechanisms. If nature has found one way of doing things, it will reuse it again and again for the same purpose. Akira and colleagues wanted to investigate this phenomena in the swimming behavior of two closely related molluscs. The swimming behavior of the two species is generated by very similar neurons, yet when they looked closely, the connections between neurons differed drastically. This suggested that the swimming behavior used the same same blueprint, but different architecture. To know more, please listen to Akira.  


For more information, please refer to:
Artificial Synaptic Rewiring Demonstrates that Distinct Neural Circuit Configurations Underlie Homologous Behaviors
Akira Sakurai and Paul S. Katz, Current Biology, June 2017

Blood from lungs! Interview with Emma Lefrançais on platelet production in lungs!

Blood nourishes every part of our body. It is generated every day to carry oxygen and food towards, and garbage away from every cell. Our lungs breathe in the oxygen that goes to the blood and remove carbon dioxide from it. Do lungs passively interact with circulating blood, or can they even generate new blood cells and spread them through the body?

Emma and colleagues wanted to test lungs as an active area of blood production. For this, they live imaged the blood cells within the lungs of mice. This amazing feat showed them platelets being born inside of the lung. And this pool of platelets were not a minority, but a significant part of blood count. Not only did they find platelet birth, but they also found blood stem cells living in the lung. These cells could, under certain conditions, help recover many types of blood cells! To know more about this exciting and profound discovery, please listen to Emma.


For more information, please refer to:
The lung is a site of platelet biogenesis and a reservoir for haematopoietic progenitors
Lefrançais et al., Nature, 2017

How deep breaths help with relaxation -- Interview by Kevin Yackle!

The one advice for relaxation is to take deep breaths. Yoga practitioners and doctors alike give this age-old advice. But how does our body connect breathing with calmness? Or is this a placebo effect??

Kevin and colleagues wanted to understand the biological connection between breathing and relaxation. For this, they targeted a specific region in the brain that is involved in controlling breathing. They killed a small region within this special area. Surprisingly, and fortunately, the animal's breathing did not stop. But it was slower, and was connected to the animal being calm under normal conditions! This showed a link between deep, slow breaths and a relaxed state of mind. To know more, please listen to Kevin.



For more information, please refer:
Breathing control center neurons that promote arousal in mice
Yackle et al., Science, 2017

Honeybees to Drones! Interview with Mark Roper on visual detectors for navigation!!

You must have all experienced a honeybee buzz around you, avoiding all your attempts at hitting it. These tiny animals are amazing at navigation. They move around like superman finding little flowers with ease. What makes them so good at navigation?

Mark and colleagues wanted to understand the amazing navigation capabilities of honeybees and generate a model of it. One would imagine that the system would be highly complex, with tons of interactions. But they show that the system can not only be modeled on a very few components, but it has a simplistic architecture. This generates a small and efficient system, which can be useful for helping us generate better navigation algorithm for daily life. As an instance, drones require large amounts of battery power for flying, which restricts the distance they can travel. But using honeybees based navigation system can allow them to be lighter and less power consuming, allowing them to fly much longer distances. Please listen to Mark to know more.



To know more, please refer to:
Insect Bio-inspired Neural Network Provides New Evidence on How Simple Feature Detectors Can Enable Complex Visual Generalization and Stimulus Location Invariance in the Miniature Brain of Honeybees
Roper et al., PLoS Computational Biology, 2017

Fangs or Venom, what came first? Interview with Nicholas Casewell on evolution of venom in Blenny Fishes!

Most of us get scared at the sight of a snake. It is the fear of a poisonous bite that scares us. Even if the snake is not poisonous, it scares us! So, just looking like something that is deadly, is enough to scare potential predators. Mimicking deadly venomous animals can be a good evolutionary strategy. For example, in the following video the animal looks like a snake, but is actually a caterpillar!!

Nicholas and colleagues use blenny fish to understand the evolution of venom and fangs, the apparatus for providing the venom. They find that one specie of blenny fish contains venom, but multiple other species of blenny fish only contain fangs, but not the venom! It seems the species only containing the fang, but not the poison, are mimicking the poisonous specie and taking advantage of the threat of the deadly venom. Just having the fangs without the poison provides advantages, without actually putting energy into generating the poison. To know more, please listen to Nick.


To know more, please refer to :
The Evolution of Fangs, Venom, and Mimicry Systems in Blenny Fishes
Casewell, Visser, Baumann, Dobson, Han et al., Current Biology, 2017

Listening with eyes! Interview with John Magnotti on deciphering McGurk effect!!

We all have tried to lip-read when we can't hear properly. We try to use visual cues to listen when the audio cue is missing or of bad quality. But did you know that our brain tries to use visual cues even when we can hear nicely. And if the two cues are not in sync, we can get confused. In-fact, we might 'hear' a different sound than what is falling on our ears! Our eyes change our audio perceptions! 

Have a look here:


John and colleagues wanted to understand why the effect occurs. And to do so, they generated a computational model which used an audio and visual cue to predict its perception. They found that an important step in correct perception is deciding if the cue arrives from one or two sources. Knowing the number of origins improves understanding. To know more, please listen to John.


To know more, please refer to:
A Causal Inference Model Explains Perception of the McGurk Effect and Other Incongruent Audiovisual Speech
Magnotti and Beauchamp.  PLoS Comput Biol 2017

Illuminating movements! Interview on motion control by optogenetics by Patrícia Correia.

Our brain controls our every behavior. This includes our simple everyday movements and our deepest thoughts and feelings. But are the mundane and complex processes connected in some way. Or are they processed in entirely different ways. Could there be a unified framework underneath the spectrum of behaviors.

Patricia and colleagues started by investigating the role of serotonin on mouse brain. Serotonin, a neuro-hormone, has been associated with mood and motivation within our brains. They wanted to understand the effect of providing increased amount of serotonin to mouse brain. They did this by using a technique called optogenetics, which is capable of using light to control cellular behavior. In their case, they used optogentics to increase serotonin levels in the brain. Upon doing this, they found a fascinating effect on the animal's locomotive behavior. This suggested that serotonin can controls our movements, possibly by affecting our motivations to carry them out! To know more, please listen to the interview with Patricia.


To know more, please refer to:

Transient inhibition and long-term facilitation of locomotion by phasic optogenetic activation of serotonin neurons.
Correia et al., eLife 2017;6:e20975

In addition, please have a look at wonderful fusion between art and science by Patricia, Roots of Curiosity, and her podcast, Creative Disturbance.

Beating Monday Morning Blues with Weekend Camping! Interview with Ellen Stothard on regulation of body clock by natural light.

Surely you have bing-watched your favorite series on Netflix, tucked inside a blanket with a hot cup of chocolate during a lazy weekend. We keep our eyes glued to the computer screen deep into the night, and shift bed time. But then comes Monday, and the body wants to remain inside the same warm blanket. Our body clock shifts and it wants to sleep late, and wake up later. Is there any way to reset the body to normal time? Get it refreshed for the week?

Ellen, Andrew and colleagues from University of Colorado find that exposing the body to natural light is an easy fix for the disrupted body rhythm. They find that spending a weekend under artificial light shifts the body clock to a later period, but that such delay can be prevented by weekend camping under natural sunlight. So to all people who feel the blues on Monday, pitch a tent. To know in detail on this phenomena, please listen to Ellen.


For further information, please refer to:
Circadian Entrainment to the Natural Light-Dark Cycle across Seasons and the Weekend
Stothard, McHill et al., Current Biology, 2017

Mind reading! Interview on Brain-computer interface for the completely locked-in by Ujwal Chaudhary.

Stephen Hawkins uses a special computer technology which translates the movements of his cheek muscles to communicate with the outside world. His inability to move any other muscle is due to loss of muscular function from ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis) disease. Unfortunately, some patients with ALS do not even retain a single musclular function, while retaining all mental functions; a state called locked-in syndrome. It would be great to help such people with a technology that could directly read the thoughts of the unfortunate patient.

With this inspiration, Ujwal and colleagues developed a brain-computer interface capable of reading simple 'yes' or 'no' thoughts of completely locked-in individuals. The interface is completely non-invasive and can be trained to read thoughts to any question. With this they can increase the interactions with the patients, stimulating and enriching their time, and increasing contact with the outside world.

This generates a nucleus that can be expanded to read full sentences, a technology out of sci-fi, but surely of great use to the unfortunately paralyzed. Please listen to Ujwal on this amazing technology.


To know further on the research, please read:
Brain–Computer Interface–Based Communication in the Completely Locked-In State.
Chaudhary et al., PLoS Biology, 2017

Sex is in the details! Interview with Esther Saiz on gender influencing neuronal circuitry.

'Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus.' But what differs between Mars and Venus. According to the author of the book, John Gray, the difference lies in the psyche. These differences could stem from different wiring inside the brain of individual sexes. With 100 billion neurons in the brain of typical human, and maybe as many as 1,000 trillion total connections, its a daunting task to answer this question.

Enter Esther and colleagues with their powerful model system C. elegans, which is a small transparent worm whose each and every cell in the body is accurately mapped along with most of cell's interacting partners. When they looked carefully at one neuron that differed between the sexes in C. elegans, they found a machinery that influenced the sex-specific maturation and behavior of that cell. Strikingly, this influence was not due to sexual hormones, but was wired inside the identity of the cell. So, just changing this one cell changed certain behaviors of the animal from one sex to another! To know more, please listen to Esther.


For further information, please refer to:
Sexually Dimorphic Differentiation of a C. elegans Hub Neuron Is Cell Autonomously Controlled by a Conserved Transcription Factor.
Saiz et al., Current Biology, 2017.
BioRxiv Link.

It's an emergency! Interview with Gesa Zander on cellular response to heat stress!

Imagine a sudden crisis within a country. One day, suddenly, there is a need to face an impending disaster. What happens? The people go into panic-mode and stop doing their regular jobs, and instead focus on averting the crisis. Normal production ceases, and things needed to face the disaster are produced. The pace of production is ramped, and irrespective of the quality, a huge quantity of emergency supplies is generated.

Like humans, cells in our body also face crisis. They need to adapt to extreme environments quickly in order to survive and thrive. Gesa, Alexandra, Lysann and colleagues wanted to know what happens to the cellular production process during the stress period. How does the cell switch to producing cell-responsive genes. And not only producing, but producing at a fast-pace. Are the quality controls applicable during normal times also applicable during the frantic response to stress. They find that the cell switches to stress-control mode, and for a certain time, eases on the quality controls of production. Please listen to Gesa on the interesting adaptability of the cells.


For more information, please refer to:
mRNA quality control is bypassed for immediate export of stress-responsive transcripts
Zander et al., Nature, 2016

A Time to Spring! Interview with Julia Qüesta on cold sensation in plants!!

Winter ends and the layer of snow clears off the ground. The soil is fresh for new cycle of vegetation. It instantly converts to a beautiful expanse of flowers and fresh plants. How does such a drastic change occur? How did the plants 'know' the change in seasons. They don't have an almanac or the weather channel to tell them of the ending cold, or do they??

Julia and colleagues undertook to understand the sensing of winter-to-spring transformation in plants. It is possibly the most important decision for the survival of the plant. Arising anew from winter needs to be perfectly timed. A little early, and the frosty cold will chill the new life. A little late and the other plants would have taken away precious space and resources, making it difficult to fight for survival. And importantly, its a one time event: an on-off switch. The plant needs to integrate a million parameters into a single result. An elaborate chain of events culminating into a life or death choice.

How does the switch operate? Julia and colleagues map the system to basepair resolution by finding the machinery and its corresponding binding sites on the plant genome for controlling the process. This amazing feat (for plant and the team) is a perfect example of how simplicity underlies complex decision making. To understand more, please listen to Julia.



To know more, please refer to:
Arabidopsis transcriptional repressor VAL1 triggers Polycomb silencing at FLC during vernalization.
Qüesta et al., Science 2016.

Colonizing Mars! Lessons on avoiding inbreeding issues from flatworms by Longhua Guo!

Imagine the year 2500. We have chosen twenty of our best and brightest to send to Mars. They have the mission to start a human colony there. Of-course that would mean breeding and generating more humans. But with only 20 people, the population might be genetically too small. Creating babies from genetically similar individuals, like cousins, can lead to birth defects. Within a few populations, intermixing might doom the entire project, just like inbreeding doomed the once powerful Habsburg Dynasty. How can we avoid this?

The question is not only critical to our hypothetical journey to Mars, but also to survival of critically endangered species. Very few individuals of hawksbill turtle, tigers and many other remain. How can we avoid in-breeding defects in such animals in near future. The answer to that might lie in the champions of regeneration, freshwater planarians. Planarians are known for their amazing capacity to regenerate a full animal from any part of their body. But also, as Longhua and colleagues found out, can avoid their genome from becoming similar after multiple rounds of in-breeding. How can these animals achieve such feat, please listen to Longhua to know more:


For more information, please refer to:
Widespread maintenance of genome heterozygosity in Schmidtea mediterranea.
Guo L., et al., Nature Ecology & Evolution, 2016.

Further information can be found here:
The joy of figuring things out: a story of worms, haplotypes & genetic ancestry.