Word: miceli
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...much buzz. A team led by Dr. Gerard Karsenty, chairman of the department of genetics and development at Columbia University Medical Center, found that the skeleton plays a powerful role in the regulation of blood sugar and fat deposits. The discovery, made through an elegant series of experiments in mice, could have important implications for treating and preventing type 2 diabetes and obesity - two conditions that are exploding around the globe...
...suspected just how powerful a role the bones play in so fundamental an activity as regulating sugar. Over a period of three years, Karsenty's team conducted a series of experiments with eight strains of mice, including some genetically altered to lack osteocalcin and some engineered to overeat. He found that osteocalcin significantly impacts how the body handles glucose, its primary fuel, in three ways: by raising the number of insulin-producing beta cells in the pancreas, by directly boosting the output of those cells, and by raising the body's sensitivity to insulin...
Finding a substance that increases beta cells, says Karsenty, "is a holy grail for diabetes research. If what's true for mice proves true for humans, "then we have inside us a hormone that does precisely this." In mice that are programmed to overeat and mice that are fed fatty diets, high levels of osteocalcin prevented both obesity and diabetes. Karsenty is now examining whether giving diabetic mice osteocalcin will reverse the disease...
...mystery may have been solved, by a team of neuroscientists at MIT's Picower Institute for Learning and Memory. Researcher Thomas McHugh and several colleagues have uncovered a specific memory circuit in the brains of mice that is probably the cause of this weird sensation, which turns out to be a sort of memory-based analogue of an optical illusion. Although neuroscientists have realized for some time that memory is made up of many different components--long and short term, episodic (that is to say, memories of events) and fact based, and that it takes place in different parts...
...they used genetic engineering to create a mouse without this crucial gene and devised an experiment to test the hypothesis. The mice were guided into a box where they would get a mild foot shock; they would react by freezing. Then they were guided into a very similar box with no shock. The altered mice would freeze in the safe box as well, and it took them a long time to figure out the difference. Normal mice figured it out pretty quickly...