Unusual Suspects: Guided Imagery Fertility Treatments and the Red Queen Theory

http://www.dreamhawk.com/prem6.htm

The success of using meditation, visualization and journaling techniques to heal and cultivate fertility has been strongly documented by Alice Domar in Healing Mind, Healthy Woman and by Niravi Payne in The Language of Fertility. Fifty percent of women who have participated in Domar's groups, in which meditation, relaxation, and journaling techniques are employed, were able to conceive and give birth. In contrast, only 20% of women who solely used traditional "infertility treatments" were able to conceive. Niravi Payne's work focuses on illuminating and healing family secrets and beliefs surrounding fertility. Her program also reports increased pregnancy and birth rates for her clients.

Looking forward to Ignite Boulder 2 where I'll speak with the author.

http://www.pnas.org/content/97/15/8409.abstract

Research Link: Minds+Machines - Why We are Soft Spacesuits for Our RNA

Blogger's Note: If this update were a song, it would be "Life is a Highway"...

Memories may be stored on your DNA

• 02 December 2008 by Devin Powell, Washington DC
• Magazine issue 2684. Subscribe and get 4 free issues.
• For similar stories, visit the The Human Brain and Genetics Topic Guides

REMEMBER your first kiss? Experiments in mice suggest that patterns of chemical "caps" on our DNA may be responsible for preserving such memories.

To remember a particular event, a specific sequence of neurons must fire at just the right time. For this to happen, neurons must be connected in a certain way by chemical junctions called synapses. But how they last over decades, given that proteins in the brain, including those that form synapses, are destroyed and replaced constantly, is a mystery.

Now Courtney Miller and David Sweatt of the University of Alabama in Birmingham say that long-term memories may be preserved by a process called DNA methylation - the addition of chemical caps called methyl groups onto our DNA.

Many genes are already coated with methyl groups. When a cell divides, this "cellular memory" is passed on and tells the new cell what type it is (coding for type) - a kidney cell, for example. Miller and Sweatt argue that in neurons, methyl groups also help to control the exact pattern of protein (RNA directing traffic lights on genetic highway - DNA are the cars) expression needed to maintain the synapses that make up memories.

They started by looking at short-term memories. When caged mice are given a small electric shock, they normally freeze in fear when returned to the cage. However, then injecting them with a drug to inhibit methylation seemed to erase any memory of the shock. The researchers also showed that in untreated mice, gene methylation changed rapidly in the hippocampus region of the brain for an hour following the shock. But a day later, it had returned to normal, suggesting that methylation was involved in creating short-term memories in the hippocampus (Neuron, DOI: 10.1016/j.neuron.2007.02.022).

To see whether methylation plays a part in the formation of long-term memories, Miller and Sweatt repeated the experiment, this time looking at the uppermost layers of the brain, called the cortex.

They found that a day after the shock, methyl groups were being removed from a gene called calcineurin and added to another gene. Because the exact pattern of methylation eventually stabilised and then stayed constant for seven days, when the experiment ended, the researchers say the methyl changes may be anchoring the memory of the shock into long-term memory, not just controlling a process involved in memory formation.

"We think we're seeing short-term memories forming in the hippocampus and slowly turning into long-term memories in the cortex," says Miller, who presented the results last week at the Society for Neuroscience meeting in Washington DC.

"The cool idea here is that the brain could be borrowing a form of cellular memory from developmental biology to use for what we think of as memory," says Marcelo Wood, who researches long-term memory at the University of California, Irvine.

From issue 2684 of New Scientist magazine, page 12. Subscribe and get 4 free issues.

Research Link: RNA "A Molecular Multi-Tasker"

http://www.ploscompbiol.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pcbi.1000176

From Genome Technology, 12.2.08:

A review by Australian researchers discusses the challenges in differentiating protein-coding and noncoding RNA. They go through a variety of strategies such as comparing open reading frame length or conservation, as well as structural and experimental approaches. They also wonder if this is a false dichotomy. "Looking ahead, we must also be prepared to cast off our historical biases toward what appears now to be an increasingly false dichotomy, and instead embrace the likelihood that RNA is a molecular multi-tasker," they write.

Research Update: Gender, mRNA, and Aging Gray Matter

Gender and the Aging Brain

By Richard Shank

From "Aging in Action (Mather Lifeways)"

Researchers at the University of California at Irvine report that the brains of men and women age differently. Their postmortem study indicates that, not only do the genes of men’s brains change earlier than in women’s brains, but the types of changes that occur also differ between the sexes.

The research involved collecting brains from people who had died between the ages of 20 and 99. The researchers isolated mRNA (messenger RNA) which carries instructions for building the proteins that helps the brain communicate with the rest of the body. (Active genes produce higher levels of mRNA). They discovered that disease-susceptible parts of the brain have the least amount of change in gene activity with age. The area of the brain responsible for perception (postcentral gyrus) changes the most.

Men showed more changes in metabolic activity while women showed greater change in genes that establish neural connections and control information exchange. This implies that the energy levels in the brain are more likely to decline in men, and that lifestyle and medical interventions should be targeted toward enhancing metabolic function in the brain of men.

Source: Cotman, C. Berchtold, N. October 2008. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

Like the new format? Tell us what you think: askaia@matherlifeways.com

Research Update: Search for LUCA and RNA

Parallel adaptations to high temperatures in the Archaean eon.

Boussau B, Blanquart S, Necsulea A, Lartillot N, Gouy M.

[1] Laboratoire de Biométrie et Biologie Evolutive, CNRS, Université de Lyon, Université Lyon I, 43 Boulevard du 11 Novembre, 69622 Villeurbanne, France [2] These authors contributed equally to this work.

Fossils of organisms dating from the origin and diversification of cellular life are scant and difficult to interpret, for this reason alternative means to investigate the ecology of the last universal common ancestor (LUCA) and of the ancestors of the three domains of life are of great scientific value. It was recently recognized that the effects of temperature on ancestral organisms left 'genetic footprints' that could be uncovered in extant genomes. Accordingly, analyses of resurrected proteins predicted that the bacterial ancestor was thermophilic and that Bacteria subsequently adapted to lower temperatures. As the archaeal ancestor is also thought to have been thermophilic, the LUCA was parsimoniously inferred as thermophilic too. However, an analysis of ribosomal RNAs supported the hypothesis of a non-hyperthermophilic LUCA. Here we show that both rRNA and protein sequences analysed with advanced, realistic models of molecular evolution provide independent support for two environmental-temperature-related phases during the evolutionary history of the tree of life. In the first period, thermotolerance increased from a mesophilic LUCA to thermophilic ancestors of Bacteria and of Archaea-Eukaryota; in the second period, it decreased Nature. 2008 Nov 26. [Epub ahead of print] . Therefore, the two lineages descending from the LUCA and leading to the ancestors of Bacteria and Archaea-Eukaryota convergently adapted to high temperatures, possibly in response to a climate change of the early Earth, and/or aided by the transition from an RNA genome in the LUCA to organisms with more thermostable DNA genomes. This analysis unifies apparently contradictory results into a coherent depiction of the evolution of an ecological trait over the entire tree of life.

PMID: 19037246 [PubMed - as supplied by publisher]

Dr. Thomas Starzl was always known for the way he immersed himself in his work.

http://www.post-gazette.com/healthscience/20000612starzl3.asp

In a 1998 article in the New England Journal of Medicine, Starzl and Swiss immunologist and Nobel Prize winner Rolf Zinkernagel proposed that tolerance for a transplanted organ occurs because certain cells in the recipient's immune system that would have attacked the donated organ instead commit suicide, a process known as apoptosis.

They said the same process permits certain infections, such as Hepatitis C, to linger in the body for decades.

Starzl theorizes that in transplantation, this cellular suicide won't occur unless the patient's body is first allowed to mount an immune response to the foreign organ. If that's true, giving patients high amounts of anti-rejection drugs right after a transplant may doom their chances of ever being weaned off the drugs, he said.

Not everyone agrees with Starzl's model, but no researcher contacted was willing to voice his criticisms openly, which may be a testament to the power Starzl still wields in scientific circles.

Starzl himself is convinced that other scientists have come to accept the theory. "The requests for reprints [of the New England Journal paper] have been overwhelming, more than any other [paper] that I can remember," Starzl said. "A lot of people were threatening to write angry letters and criticism, but [the journal] never received one single line."