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According to research from Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH), the ingredient that gives hot sauce its heat could play a role in the future of weight loss.
Ali Tavakkoli, MD, BWH Department of Surgery, and his team have published a study investigating whether two surgeries called vagal de-afferentation-which uses capsaicin, the component responsible for the chili pepper’s burning sensation-and vagatomy can achieve weight loss and reduce the risk of obesity-related diseases with fewer side effects when compared to today’s bariatric surgical options.
The study is published in the May issue of Digestive Diseases and Sciences. The study is accompanied by an editorial by Edward A. Fox, PhD, Purdue University.
The introduction of real time PCR (qPCR) revolutionized the world of molecular biology and provided scientists with a tool for obtaining truly quantitative nucleic acid data. While qPCR remains one of the most robust tools available on the bench, its resolution power is limited to changes in DNA concentration that are higher than 50%. This limitation is mainly due to the compounding of errors derived from each step in the quantification process. That’s where Droplet Digital PCR enters the picture.
Droplet Digital PCR alleviates the compounding error effect by partitioning samples into 20,000 droplets such that each copy of DNA is encapsulated in its own bubble. Subsequent amplification reactions are then carried out individually which leads to reduce background noise and therefore a more sensitive measurement of low concentrations of nucleic acid that may not have been detectable using qPCR.
Bio-Rad Laboratories‘ Frank Bizouarn recently published an outstanding article in Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology News detailing the benefits of ddPCR including a real life example. The article covers how ddPCR works and its use in gene-expression analysis, copy number variation determination and rare event detection.
A very scary, yet eye openning, article appeared in The Chronicle of Higher Education recently. The article, which is titled “The Future of the Ph.D.” discusses the downfall of the coveted tenure faculty position, and how only 30 percent of of the teaching faculty are tenured and tenure-track academics.
The author also highlights the dismal plight of female graduate students who dare to succumb to their maternal instincts during the course of their graduate studies.
The article finishes with the thought provoking question “Is the Ph.D. worth saving?”
In the journal Science this week (online May 3, 2012), UCSF researchers demonstrated that the brain activity is critical for memory formation and recall. Moreover, they showed that the brain patterns through which the rats see rapid replays of past experiences are fundamental to their ability to make decisions. Disturbing those particular brain patterns impaired the animals’ ability to learn rules based on memories of things that had happened in the past.
Seeking to understand how the recall of specific memories in the brain guides our thinking, neuroscientist Loren Frank, associate professor of physiology and a member of the Keck Center for Integrative Neuroscience at UCSF, and his colleagues built a system for detecting the underlying patterns of neuronal activity in rats. They fitted the animals with electrodes and built a system that enabled them to detect a specific pattern, called a sharp-wave ripple, in the hippocampus. Whenever they detected a ripple, they would send a small amount of electricity into another set of electrodes that would immediately interrupt the ripple event, in effect turning off all memory replay activity without otherwise affecting the brain.
