Ashton+C.

Wiki Post #1
==Scientists have grown "mini human brains" for the first time. This could lead to a new level of understanding the development of the brain and things that go wrong in the brain, such as alzheimer's disease. Researchers in Austria created a culture of these cells which grew into what are called "cerebral organoids". These consist of several regions of the brain. These brains even consisted of firing neurons and different types of neural tissue.==

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== To begin growing these "mini brains", scientists started with human stem cells. They grew tissue called neuroectoderm, which is the layer of cells in an embryo where all of the parts of the brain and nervous system develop. Pieces of the tissue were then put into a scaffold and put into a spinning bioreactor, a crazy system that circulates oxygen and nutrients to allow them to grow into cerebral organoids. After a month, the pieces had organized themselves into primitive structures that could be recognized as developing brain regions such as a retina, choroid plexus and cerebral cortex. At two months, the organoids reached a maximum size of around 4 millimeters.==

== Zameel Cader, a consultant neurologist at Britain's John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford said that this work was "fascinating and exciting". He said that it extended the possibility of new stem cell technology, and new drugs (which could be good or bad to be honest). ==

Wiki Post #2
== A newly sequenced genome of a quill-like sea creature called a lancelet provides the best evidence yet that vertebrates evolved over the past 550 million years through a four-fold duplication of the genes of more primitive ancestors. The late geneticist Susumu Ohno argued in 1970, that gene duplication was the most important force in the evolution of higher organisms, and Ohno's theory was the basis for original estimates that the human genome must contain up to 100,000 distinct genes, but the Human Genome Project found that today, humans have only 20,000 to 25,000 genes, which shows that if our ancestors' primitive genome doubled and redoubled, most of the duplicate copies of genes must have been lost. An analysis of the lancelet, or amphioxus, genome, that was published in the June 19 issue of //Nature//, shows this to be the true. ==



Lancelet
== "Amphioxus and humans had a common ancestor 550 million years ago, which allows us to use amphioxus as a surrogate for that ancestor in terms of understanding how vertebrate genomes evolved," said Daniel S. Rokhsar, a faculty member in the University of California, Berkeley's Center for Integrative Genomics and program head for computational genomics at the Department of Energy Joint Genome Institute (JGI) in Walnut Creek, Calif. Rokhsar and JGI post-doctoral fellow Nicholas H. Putnam performed the sequencing, assembly and genome-wide analyses of the amphioxus genome and are lead authors of the //Nature// paper. ==

== "If you compare the 23 chromosomes of humans with the 19 chromosomes of amphioxus, you find that both genomes can be expressed in terms of 17 ancestral pieces. So, we can say with some confidence that 550 million years ago, the common ancestor of amphioxus and humans had 17 chromosomal elements." ==

[[image:http://abieleanor.files.wordpress.com/2013/11/dna-image.gif width="304" height="216"]]
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== Interestingly, the sea squirt Ciona intestinalis, a tunicate, was thought to belong to the the earliest chordate lineage because of the sea squirt's very simple body plan. However, a comparison of the lancelet, sea squirt, and human genomes, show that the lancelet lineage diverged before the tunicates and vertebrates. ==

"Sea squirts and their relatives have taken the basic chordate genome and simplified it in various ways, while amphioxus retains those features in its genome," said Rokhsar.
= = Sea Squirt

http://esciencenews.com/articles/2008/06/18/genome.sequence.lancelet.shows.how.genes.quadrupled.during.vertebrate.evolution http://news.oneindia.in/2008/06/19/quadrupling-genes-550-million-years-vertebrate-evolution-1213851900.html

=Wiki Post #3=

=People with higher levels of omega-3 fatty acids may have larger brain volumes in old age.=

=People that have higher levels of omega-3 fatty acids, found in fish oil, may also have larger brain volumes in old age equivalent to preserving one or two more years of brain health, according to a study published on January 22, 2014, online issue of Neurology, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology. Shrinking brain volume is linked to alzheimer's disease as well as normal aging.= =For the study, the levels of omega-3 fatty acids EPA+DHA in red blood cells were tested in 1,111 women who were part of the Women's Health Initiative Memory Study. Eight years later, when the women were an average age of 78, MRI scans were taken to measure their brain volume.= =The women with higher levels of omega-3s had larger total brain volumes eight years later. Those with twice as high levels of fatty acids (7.5 vs. 3.4 percent) had a 0.7 percent larger brain volume.=

="These higher levels of fatty acids can be achieved through diet and the use of supplements, and the results suggest that the effect on brain volume is the equivalent of delaying the normal loss of brain cells that comes with aging by one to two years," said study author James V. Pottala, PhD, of the University of South Dakota in Sioux Falls and Health Diagnostic Laboratory, Inc., in Richmond, Va.=

=Those with higher levels of omega-3 acids also had a 2.7% larger volume in the hippocampus of the brain, which plays an important role in memory. In Alzheimer's disease, the hippocampus starts to waste away before symptoms appear.=



References: https://www.google.ca/search?q=omega+3+brain&espv=210&es_sm=93&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ei=Hn7iUojWFpHKsQSRhYGYDA&ved=0CAkQ_AUoAQ&biw=1920&bih=951#facrc=_&imgdii=_&imgrc=xMPFP5cnc5rkQM%253A%3Bx4Sop7ze-YQreM%3Bhttp%253A%252F%252Fwww.drjockers.com%252Fwpcontent%252Fuploads%252F2012%252F10%252Fbrain.jpg.bmp%3Bhttp%253A%252F%252Fwww.drjockers.com%252F2012%252F10%252Fbrain-boosting-superfoods%252F%3B336%3B336

http://www.precisionnutrition.com/o3s-help-protein-synthesis

http://www.news-medical.net/news/20140123/People-with-higher-levels-of-omega-3-fatty-acids-may-have-larger-brain-volumes-in-old-age.asp