Article 1984Brain Science**
January 30, 2023day
Science Times
nature: a molecular system that can both think and act
*:Principle. 
Neurons are like the building blocks of thought, and each neuron serves a variety of purposes. How neurons do this has become a rapidly evolving field of research in recent decades, and complex neural network models have become very common in today's digital computers. Recently, a group of scientists showed how a self-assembling molecule can act like a neural network.
The researchers designed 917 square DNA paving blocks, which can self-assemble into three different shapes, namely the letters H, A, and M, in the solution of the test tube. Studies have shown that this molecular system is assembled into different shapes with the same components, just as the same neurons encode multiple different memories. For molecules that are present in all shapes, but are "co-located" in only one shape, when their concentrations are high, they lead to nucleation of a certain shape.
Why does the virus make you sneeze?
*: Biocom.
Sneezing is protective and removes nasty, potentially harmful substances from the body. Diana Bautista, a neurophysiologist at the University of California, Berkeley, and colleagues suspect that SARS-CoV-2 may play a more direct role. Infected cells secrete large amounts of the viral protein PLPRO. Previous studies have shown that other proteases produced by plants, bacteria, and even humans can also stimulate sensory neurons that cause sneezing.
The researchers sprayed PLPRO into the nose of a mouse and found that it stimulated a group of sensory neurons called nociceptors, producing sensations of pain and itching. PLPRO activates nociceptors by prompting protein channels to allow calcium to enter, but it does not act directly on the channels. Researchers believe it targets a different receptor that they haven't identified yet. The study was published in:biorxivAbove.
brain：A newly discovered tau protein may be involved in the pathogenesis of Alzheimer's disease
*: Alzheimer's disease.
Tau protein aggregates abnormally in the brains of patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD), but the early stages of tau misfolding and aggregation are not well understood. Recently, researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital and Boston Children's Hospital used advanced proteomic methods to identify a new form of soluble tau protein, which may involve the early stages of tau protein.
Experimental results have shown that in the brains of Alzheimer's patients, a form of soluble tau protein is not present in classical tau protein aggregates, but has many of the same toxicity. It is similar to the insoluble tau found in Alzheimer's disease aggregates at the molecular level, but appears to be an incomplete morphology.
Nature: UCSD team uses neural implants to capture deep brain images
*: Brain-computer interface community.
Recently, researchers at the University of California, San Diego have developed a neural implant that provides high-resolution data on deep neural activity by recording on the surface of the brain. The implant consists of a thin, transparent, flexible polymer strip that adheres to the surface of the brain. The strip is embedded with a high-density graphene microelectrode array that enables up to 256 channels. They have developed the densest array of clear electrodes of any surface nerve implant to date. High-density arrays enable the recording of neural activity over large areas with high spatial resolution.
CMI: The Critical Role of Macrophages in Lung Injury Through Inflammatory Responses After Trauma or Stroke
*：inature
Distal organ injury is a common secondary complication of sterile tissue injury and is the main cause of poor prognosis. Recently, Tang Jing of Guangdong Medical University and Hong Xiaoyang of the General Hospital of the People's Liberation Army reported the key role of macrophages in lung injury after trauma or stroke through inflammatory response. The study found that the recruitment of macrophages that consume intratissue macrophages, rather than destroying monocytes**, can reduce lung damage after trauma or stroke. The results of the study showed that the release of a circulatory alarm from a distant site of sterile tissue injury activates the epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) by binding to the advanced glycation end product (RAGE) receptor on the membrane, triggering an inflammatory response in macrophages in the lungs. Targeting the RAGE-EGFR signaling pathway in tissue macrophages is a potential approach for secondary complications of aseptic injury.
NeuroPsychologia: A training task actually "short-circuited" our brains?!
*: Institute of Psychology and Behavior, Tianjin Normal University.
Our cognitive control is not fixed, on the contrary, it can be continuously strengthened through daily exercise and practice. Cognitive control is closely related to bilingual language control, but will the improvement of cognitive control affect the language-related brain activity of bilinguals? A recent study found that compared with the control group, the experimental group did not significantly improve the behavioral performance after 8 days of cognitive control training, but the connection strength from the frontal lobe to the subcortical region (i.e., Lai IFG LCN, DACC pre-SMA lthal) was reduced in the language control posttest. These results suggest that cognitive control training improves the neural efficiency of frontal-subcortical region synergy to achieve cognitive control in the general domain.
Lancet Psychiatry: Which Antipsychotic Prevents** Is Most Effective? A network meta-analysis combining randomized controlled studies and real-world data
*: Yimaitong Psychiatry.
Up to 80% of patients with psychiatric spectrum disorder in the real world do not meet the criteria for inclusion in randomised controlled trials (RCTs) for prevention, and their outcomes are worse than those of eligible patients. A recent online meta-analysis is the largest to date to assess the efficacy of antipsychotics, combining real-world and RCT data from individual patients for the first time. In terms of specific drugs, oral olanzapine is more effective than haloperidol, performs well in the overall assessment, and has the best prophylactic effect among antipsychotics with both real-world and RCT data**; Antipsychotic long-acting injections should also be used earlier, as they outperform RCTs in the real world.
Nature Communications: A metagenomic binning algorithm based on multi-view contrastive learning
*: Fudan Institute of Brain-inspired Intelligence Science and Technology.
Recently, researcher Zhu Shanfeng's team proposed a binning method based on multi-view contrastive learning, called comebin. Comebin takes full advantage of data augmentation to generate multiple fragments (views) of each contig and obtain high-quality embeddings of heterogeneous features such as sequence coverage and k-mer distribution through contrastive learning. Experimental results show that Comebin performs better than the current state-of-the-art binning method on multiple simulated and real-world datasets, especially in recovering near-intact genomes from real-world samples.
Reviewer: Simon