Springer Nature

During her PhD Maria Luisa Tataranno performed research into early biomarkers of brain development in preterm neonates. Now a fellow of neonatal neurology of the Wilhelmia Children's Hospital in Utrecht, the Netherlands, Maria and her team have published a paper into the associations between early brain activity and changes in brain morphology and microstructure.

In this episode, Maria tells us about her career as a clinical scientist and advocates the early monitoring of preterm neonate brain activity with electroencephalography.

Article link: https://www.nature.com/articles/pr20187

Patients with sickle cell disease often experience severe pain as a result of vaso-occlusive episodes. Typically their pain is managed with opioids, however some patients experience continued and increasing pain, believed to be as a result of opioid-induced hyperalgesia or tolerance. Many patients go on to develop chronic pain which is thought to have a neuropathic component, for which opioids are ineffective.

Ketamine has been suggested as an adjuvant to opioids to treat chronic and acute pain.

In this episode, we meet an Early Career Investigator, Dr. Raissa Nobrega, who has a passion for paediatric pain management and who recently published an exploratory study into the patient characteristics that affect the response to ketamine and opioids in these patients.

Article link: https://www.nature.com/articles/pr2017283

Obesity has been shown to be linked with a host of physiological and psychological problems, such as cancer, diabetes and depression. In adults, obesity has also been shown to be related to decreased cognitive function and structural brain differences. The evidence for this effect on cognition is less well established in children and adolescents. In this episode we meet Dr. Stijn Vantieghem from the ARCS research group at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel who conducted a 30 week weight-loss program for obese adolescents to test its effects on their cognitive function.

Article link;

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41390-018-0047-3

Non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) is the most common cause of chronic liver disease in the United States. It's all been steadily rising, along with rising obesity levels. Currently, early interventions for NAFLD include dietary, lifestyle counselling, and vitamin supplementation.

Recent evidence suggests that the gut microbiota may be involved in the pathophysiology of non-alcoholic fatty liver disease.

In this episode, we hear from ECI Maggie Stanislawski from the University of Colorado on her work to expand the options for early intervention into this condition.

Article link:

https://www.nature.com/articles/pr201832

In this month's episode of the Heredity Podcast we are all about the mouth! First, we discuss the genetics underlying molar teeth development and inhibition with French morphometrician Dr Nicolas Navarro. Following this, Brazilian researcher Dr Maria Marta Pastina explains all about an emerging plant breeding method called genomic selection, and how her team is using it to develop more drought tolerate maize crops.

Finally, make sure to stick around to the end of the episode to hear a short message directed at you, the listener, and discover how you can be featured on the podcast.

Related articles:

Genetic mapping of molar size relations identifies inhibitory locus for third molars in mice

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41437-017-0033-2

Improving accuracies of genomic predictions for drought tolerance in maize by joint modeling of additive and dominance effects in multi-environment trials

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41437-018-0053-6

TB was responsible for 1.8 million deaths in 2015, of which children account for almost 10%. A large proportion of TB patients go undetected in high burden countries due to the poor sensitivity of the smear microscopy used to detect the disease.

Paediatric cases are often harder to detect because children produce lower quality sputum samples needed for the smear microscopy. As a result, many children with TB go untreated, and the vast majority of children treated for TB are treated empirically.

Georgies Mgode, a research fellow at Sokoine University of Agriculture, Morogoro, Tanzania, and his team have tested the use of trained Giant African Pouch rats as an enhanced case finding tool after smear microscopy.

NICU Network Neurobehavioral Scale: 1-month normative data and variation from birth to 1 month

Livio Provenzi is based at the Scientific Institute IRCCS Eugenio Medea in Italy, where he is involved in the Preterm Behavioral Epigenetics Project, a longitudinal research project in very pre-term infants looking at the long and short-term epigenetic and behavioral effects of painful and invasive procedures during the NICU stay.

Livio and his colleagues sought to provide normative neurobehavioral data for healthy infants over the first month of life using the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit Network Neurobehavioural Scale (NNNS).

Acquiring normative comparisons for at-risk populations (e.g. pre-term infants) is key for behavioral studies and for research on early epigenetic biomarkers of developmental risk.

Related article:

https://www.nature.com/articles/pr201825

This month's GenePod focuses on new, extensive data of intragenic deletion/duplication analysis in over 143,000 individuals. Such data are helping to sort out innocent del/dups from those causative of disease and reinforce the need to perform such analysis as part of genomic testing to determine disease etiology.

Related articles:

Prevalence and properties of intragenic copy-number variation in Mendelian disease genes

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41436-018-0033-5

Related articles:

Attention: Direct-To-Consumer patrons: Proceed with caution

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41436-018-0030-8

False-positive results released by direct-to-consumer genetic tests highlight the importance of clinical confirmation testing for appropriate patient care

https://www.nature.com/articles/gim201838

Burst activation of dopamine neurons produces prolonged post-burst availability of actively released dopamine

For years now, scientists have noticed a rather strange phenomenon in animal models: scientists would stimulate dopamine production in the brain, but once the stimulation was over, the dopamine would remain. Bita Moghaddam is chair and professor of behavioral neuroscience at Oregon Health and Science University. She says that when dopamine is released, dopamine transporters take the dopamine back up into cells so it can be synthesized and broken down. So scientists had assumed that the dopamine that remained for those twenty minutes was just leftover dopamine from the original activation. But in theory the dopamine transporters should be more efficient in taking up the dopamine.

Article link:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41386-018-0088-7