A Guest Blog by Dr Adele Murrell, University of Bath, UK At the beginning of this year, Jeff Mann (Murdoch’s Children’s institute Australia published a visions and reflections article questioning the definition of “Epigenetics” (Mann, 2014). The concept has gone from the ‘Waddington marble running down a valley to simulate progenitor cells being channelled along… Read more »
What have dogs ever done for us? Humans and dogs have a long history of co-existence and companionship, and our four-legged friends can have a profound impact on our wellbeing in a number of ways. The company of dogs has long been thought to reduce anxiety and improve health outcomes, to the extent that Florence… Read more »
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When we think of the brain, our first thought is of grey matter: the squishy yellowy-grey folded tissue that makes up the cortex. But what about the seemingly useless white matter lurking underneath, with its tougher exterior and long pale branches? There’s more to it than meets the eye… What is white matter? White matter… Read more »
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Brain research, in many ways, can be regarded a field still in its infancy, making it ripe for the exaggerated claims, myths and stereotypes that threaten to discredit the value of real scientific progress. To celebrate Brain Awareness Week and shed light on some of the major recent advances that are set to change lives… Read more »
This post was jointly written by Elizabeth Bal, Natalia Manrique and Anna Perman Inside each of our heads is a vital organ that determines what we remember, shapes how we see the world, and controls our bodily movements with and without our conscious control. What greater understanding of this fascinating machine could achieve in terms… Read more »
We would like to welcome Professor Robin Weiss to the editorial team as Reviews Editor for Retrovirology. Professor Weiss is Emeritus Professor of Viral Oncology at University College London, and is currently working on immune responses to HIV in relation to HIV vaccine development. His laboratory works on neutralizing llama antibody fragments as tools for HIV… Read more »
The media is full of research about how our brains work, but how can we know whether to believe the spin that the news puts on neuroscience findings? In this guest post, we asked Professor Gina Rippon, a neuroscientist from Aston University to give us her take on how to sort the neurotrash from the… Read more »
One of the greatest challenges of current medicine is predicting how a patient will respond to a given drug. In an ideal world, where time, money and – most importantly – the patient’s well-being and survival are not an issue, we would simply either keep trying different treatments until hitting the jackpot, or perhaps harvest… Read more »
Today is the start of Brain Awareness Week, which has been led by the Dana Alliance for Brain Initiatives since 1996. Running from today until 16th March, the week seeks to raise awareness of the benefits and advancement of brain research around the world. It’s great to see that this year, many leading research… Read more »
Under normal conditions skeletal muscle satellite cells (muSCs) are in a quiescent state, but when stimulated by damage, they re-enter the cell cycle to generate new fibers or self-renew to reconstitute the muSC pool. During aging muSC mediated regeneration is deeply impaired, leading to loss of skeletal muscle mass and strength (sarcopenia). Previous publications have… Read more »