Major Biology Discoveries From 2022

Our identities are based on our memories. Alzheimer's disease and other forms of dementia are so sad and cruel because of their importance. It is why we are so desperate for science to deliver a cure for Alzheimer's and why it is so frustrating and tragic that useful treatments have been slow to come to fruition. There was great excitement surrounding the announcement that a new drug slowed the progression of the disease. If lecanemab is approved by the FDA, it will be the second Alzheimer's treatment that counteracts amyloid-beta.

Researchers are debating whether lecanemab will make a difference for patients. Lecanemab is a bright spot in the history of Alzheimer's research. The leading alternative theories for what causes the disease are getting a boost from a deeper understanding of the biology.

Plato wrote about the gift of memory, the mother of the Muses, and compared it to a wax stamp in the soul in one of his Socratic dialogues. Science has vastly improved on our understanding of memory since Plato's time, and we can be thankful. In the past year, researchers have made exciting strides towards learning how and where in the brain different parts of our memories reside. Good and bad memories can be distinguished by biochemical mechanisms.

We think about memory in purely neurological terms because we are animals with brains. The California Institute of Technology published work in early 2022, suggesting that cells in developing tissues may have some records of their predecessors. Stem cells rely on stored information when faced with decisions about how to specialize There were many surprises in biology over the past year, including insights into how the brain adjusts to food insufficiency and how cells follow a path through the body. Before the revelations of the coming year give us a new perspective on ourselves, it is worth taking a look at some of the best work of that time.

Many people connected to Alzheimer's disease hoped that the year would be a banner one. Two new drugs addressing the root cause of the disease will be revealed in major clinical trials. The results were not as good as expected. One of the drugs, lecanemab, showed potential for slowing the cognitive decline of some patients but was also linked to sometimes fatal side effects.

Three decades of research focused on the theory that Alzheimer's disease is caused by plaques of amyloid that build up between brain cells and kill them There is mounting evidence that amyloid is only one component in a much more complex disease process that involves damaging inflammation and malfunctioning of cells. Most of these ideas have been around for a long time, but are just starting to get attention.

According to a preprint published last spring, aggregations of proteins around cells are beginning to look like an almost universal phenomenon in aging tissues and not a condition peculiar to amyloid and Alzheimer's disease. Aging for cells may be a factor in worsening problems with the management of genes.

Neuroscience knows a lot about how memories form. The neural activity that leads to those experiences strengthens the synaptic connections between the neurons. It is possible to re-evoke the electrical patterns of our experiences when they are needed because of the lasting changes in our neural circuits. The details of that process have not been made public. Researchers at the University of Southern California used to watch a fish learn to associate unpleasant heat with a light cue when they visualized those changes in a living brain. They were surprised that the process deleted other sphinxes.

There is more to a memory than the information it contains. There is an emotionalvalence to memories that categorizes them as either positive or negative. Researchers reported last summer that levels of a single molecule released by neuron seem to act as flags for that labeling.

The first cells appeared 3.8 billion years ago. There must have been collections of molecule doing things before cells. Over the past decade, researchers in Japan have been conducting experiments to see if a single type of replicating molecule could evolve into a bunch of different replicators. The Japanese scientists found that different molecules co-evolving into competing hosts and parasites made this happen. The diverse molecule had started working together in a more stable environment. Their research suggests that the foundations of cellular life could have been laid byRNAs and other molecules.

It doesn't have to be the first step in the origin-of-life hypothesis. Nick Lane and other evolutionary biologists continued to find evidence that systems of "proto-metabolism" may have arisen in the porous materials near hydrothermal vents.

A single fertilized egg cell can grow into an adult human body with 30 trillion cells in more than 200 specialized categories. It is the epitome of development mysteries. For the majority of the past century, the main explanation has been that chemical gradients in various parts of the developing body guide cells to where they are needed and tell them how to differentiate into different parts of the body.

Chemicals seem to be just one part of the answer. Cells use chemical clues to guide their navigation, but they also use physical tension in the tissues surrounding them like tightrope walkers, according to recent work. Cell location is not the only thing that physical tension does. There are mechanical forces inside an embryo that help induce sets of cells to become specific structures, such as feathers.

Synthetic biologists, who take an engineering approach to the study of life, made important progress in understanding the genetics of how cells differentiate. Stem cells could be transformed into a number of more specialized cell types with the help of an artificial network of genes. The success of their model proves that whatever the real system is, it doesn't need to be complicated.

evolution devised an emergency strategy to help brains cope with long periods of food deficiency because the brain is the most energy hungry organ in the body.

The visual cortex uses less energy at its synapses in this state. It's a neat solution for stretching the brain's energy resources but there's a catch The low-power mode makes the visual system process less precise.

Our sense of smell has been improved by an engineering view of the brain. The ability of computers to recognize smells has been improved. Chemicals alone can be used to define the smells we associate with. The smell of the molecule is reflected by the metabolism that creates it. Neural networks that included information about metabolism were able to better classify smells.

A living human brain is difficult to study because of the skull's obstruction and the ethical considerations of the experiment. Researchers are growing isolated brain tissue in the laboratory in order to createoids that are similar to real brains. Sergiu Paca and his colleagues showed how far the similarities go by implanting human brain organoids into rats. The human cells helped the animal's sense of smell. Paca noted in an interview that the importance of providing neurons with inputs and outputs is important. The work shows how to develop better models for human brains.

The family of carbon crystals includes fullertubes.