This press release contains:
• Summaries of newsworthy papers:
Disease: Novel therapeutic target for multiple sclerosis
Neuroscience: Coloured judgement
• Geographical listing of authors
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[1] Disease: Novel therapeutic target for multiple sclerosis
DOI: 10.1038/srep00079
A metabolic pathway that could represent a new therapeutic strategy for multiple sclerosis (MS) is revealed in a mouse study in Scientific Reports this week.
MS is an inflammatory demyelinating disease of the central nervous system (CNS) and affects millions of individuals worldwide. But the disease’s complex immunopathology means it has proved difficult to identify effective therapeutic targets. Previous research has indicated that fatty acid oxidation may be important for the activity and survival of inflammatory cells, especially under conditions of limited metabolic fuel. Leah Shriver and Marianne Manchester studied the effect of inhibiting fatty acid metabolism in experimental autoimmune encephalomyelitis (EAE), a mouse model of MS. They found that treatment with a small-molecule inhibitor of fatty acid metabolism reduced EAE symptoms and inflammation in mice.
The results suggest that fatty acid metabolism plays a role in MS by sustaining the inflammatory response within the CNS. This metabolic pathway could therefore be a potential therapeutic target for MS.
CONTACT
Marianne Manchester (University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, CA, USA)
Tel: +1 858 534 6624; E-mail: [email protected]
Please link to the freely available scientific paper in online versions of your report (the URL will go live after the embargo ends):
www.nature.com/srep/2011/110901/srep00079/full/srep00079
[2] Neuroscience: Coloured judgement
DOI: 10.1038/srep00080
When detecting potentially dangerous stimuli, such as snakes, human children, unlike adults, appear to attend selectively to their colour rather than their shape, leading to faster decisions but at the expense of precision. The findings are published online in Scientific Reports this week.
Humans are extremely sensitive to biologically threatening stimuli, such as snakes, and it has been suggested that certain basic properties of the human visual system might have evolved precisely because they facilitated the detection of such fear-relevant stimuli. Nobuo Masataka and colleagues investigated the role of colour in the detection of fear-relevant stimuli in human children. The authors showed 111 children, aged between four and six years old, matrices containing either one snake image and eight flower images, or vice-versa. The images were presented either in colour or in grey-scale and participants had to detect the target image as quickly as possible.
As in previous studies on adult humans, all participants detected target snakes faster than target flowers. However, children also responded both to target snakes and target flowers faster when the images were presented in colour than in grey-scale. Conversely, although adults in the previous studies detected target flowers more quickly in colour than in gray-scale, they responded to snake targets equally quickly whether the images were in colour or in grey-scale.
When detecting snakes, human children therefore appear to focus mainly on their colour, which contributes towards a faster but less precise response. Adults, on the other hand, use the distinctive shape of snakes to help identify them as a target, regardless of colour.
CONTACT
Nobuo Masataka (Kyoto University, Inuyama, Japan)
Tel: +81 568 630 552; E-mail: [email protected]
Please link to the freely available scientific paper in online versions of your report (the URL will go live after the embargo ends):
www.nature.com/srep/2011/110901/srep00080/full/srep00080
GEOGRAPHICAL LISTING OF AUTHORS…
The following list of places refers to the whereabouts of authors on the papers numbered in this release. For example, London: 4 - this means that on paper number four, there will be at least one author affiliated to an institute or company in London. The listing may be for an author's main affiliation, or for a place where they are working temporarily. Please see the PDF of the paper for full details.
JAPAN
Inuyama: 2
Nagoya: 2
UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
California
La Jolla: 1
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