UC Science Today

The human body is an incredibly complex and efficient system and when it’s homeostatic – that is, internally stable, all is well. But for patients with multiple sclerosis, the symptoms can be devastating.

"We think of our bodies as following our commands and especially, our nervous systems. We really think our nervous system, in many ways, as the physical manifestation of ourselves and so for these things not to work for many patients is understandably really disorienting."

Dr. Ari Green of the University of California, San Francisco is part of a team that’s identified eight FDA-approved drugs that may stimulate nervous system repair in multiple sclerosis. The most effective of the drugs is an over-the-counter antihistamine, which is being moved quickly into clinical trial as a potential therapy for MS.

"That was one of the reasons why we wanted to pursue evaluation of FDA-approved compounds. They’ve already been discovered. That biology is known, it’s just not known how that biology affects individual classes of cells."

There are about 80 thousand synthetic industrial compounds that have been made in the last century. That includes everything from plastics to flame retardants to pesticides.

"The problem with industrial compounds is that many of them have structures that are not commonly seen in nature. So, organisms simply have not had a chance to evolve defenses against these compounds."

Amro Hamdoun of the University of California, San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography is studying how these compounds move through the environment and ultimately, how they may affect human health. To do this, his lab is looking at the sea urchin.

"This is an organism that has been used for more than 100 years in basic cell and developmental biology researcher and it has a fully sequenced genome so that we can manipulate the drug transporters and study their functions and their interactions in the lab very readily. I like to say it is a bit like a marine fruit fly."

If nothing is done to slow down climate change and overfishing, a team of Australian scientists warn that the Earth’s coral reefs could be extinct within 100 years or less. At the University of California, San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography, coral reef ecologist Jennifer Smith produced the first global assessment of its kind about how overfishing of plant-eating fish impacts the reef ecosystem.

"I think this provides us with a really powerful tool to take to governments and management agencies around the world. Overfishing of these really important fish is happening at a global level, it’s kind of a wake-up call for people that are in a position of power to make decisions. So, hopefully it will be an important and powerful tool that we can use to bring to policymakers to elicit some sort of major change in the way that we view these important fish."

It’s been well studied that cats have an innate ability to orient themselves in order to land on their feet after falling. They do this by rotating different parts of their body in different directions. Evolutionary biologist Robert Dudley of the University of California, Berkeley says they developed this reflex because they originally lived in trees.

"It turns out that most things that live in trees – remember, small cats are ancestrally arboreal. They are tree dwellers. So think of a leopard or any of the small tropical cats. They are running and chasing after prey all the time in shrubs and trees. Even foxes in California, the native fox is actually – can climb trees. I mean, there are lots of things that go into the trees to get away from predators that chase things down or sleep up there or whatever. So things that are living in trees tend to have a very well developed aerial righting reflex so as to stay in the canopy if you’re falling. And so, these are evolutionary adaptations that reflect in part the ancestry of the particular animal but also the particular ecological context that it’s evolved within."

Biomanufacturing could make manned space missions a lot more practical. These were the findings of a new study led by Amor Menezes of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. The process involves using microbes, singled-celled organisms that can produce supplies such as fuel and food from the available resources on extraterrestrial locations such as Mars.

"The biological technology, it's basically the same process, but instead of using a fuel manufacturing plant, we would actually take a bioreactor with us and have microbes in that bioreactor, and they would be producing the methane and the oxygen that would be required. So it's a simple substitution of a technology that's already there that's non-biological with a technology that is biological."

Menezes says that the advantage of using biological technologies is that it can cut costs by significantly reducing mass onboard long flights to Mars.

"Depending on certain scenarios as envisioned by NASA, so we follow the same scenarios, you can actually get significant mass savings."

One of the workhorses of cognitive neuroscience is thebrain map, which connects specific regions of the brain to our behaviors. Dr. Ming Hsu of the University of California, Berkeley says that the idea of brain mapping dates back to the Civil War.

"For the first time you have modern artillery and basically rifles that travel at speeds fast enough to produce very focal damage to the brain yet the person is still alive so that doctors can examine them.So before if you get a lesion to the brain, you’re probably dead. After the Civil War and onwards, you can actually live with damage to the brain."

Doctors saw that damage to specific parts of the brain led to specific deficits in cognition and behavior as opposed to global declines.

"So you get damage to parietal cortex, some part of your visual system may be affected. Damage to other parts of the brain results in very focal language deficits."

Testing environmental chemicals is an area of intensive investigation. Basically, researchers want to determine not only if a compound is harmful, but if it will be persistent. Biologist Amro Hamdoun of the University of California, San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography says they’re taking a cue from the medical field by looking for interaction between the compounds and proteins that are called drug transporters.

"If they are bound and expelled by the drug transporters, they are not used as pharmaceutical because they are not likely to get into our bloodstream and be effective. So, in our lab, we are trying to apply this same principle from pharmaceutical science to the science of environmental compounds and predict which compounds are going to be problematic."

Hamdoun likes to say the cells are a little bit like nightclubs.

"A cell really has to decide what gets in and what doesn’t. And in that analogy, you can think of these drug transporters as being a bit like the bouncers of a cell."

Engineers at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory are teaming up with neurosurgeons at UCLA and industry partners to develop an implantable neural device that can restore memories in patients with traumatic brain injuries, and even Alzheimer’s disease. Research engineer Angela Tooker says this neural implant work was leveraged by the lab’s successful role with the artificial retina.

"Neural implants, as kind of the class, have been around for a while, but the artificial retina’s kind of the first huge push to get them into humans. There were zero commercially-available devices to restore sight. There weren’t even any major efforts on the research side at universities to do that either."

The neural implant in the brain would essentially work by stimulating neurons in the brain to bridge a gap and to help restore memory. The next step is to test the device in humans.

"The technology is mostly there. We have all of the right tools, we’ve just got to get them all put together."

After that, Tooker says it’s a matter of working with the surgeons.

Scientists have analyzed what are believed to be the very first samples of interstellar dust brought back from NASA’s Stardust mission. Research physicist Andrew Westphal, who leads the analysis at the Space Sciences Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley, says one of the advantages of bringing back these small particles is to study them using instruments such as synchrotrons.

"These are gigantic particle accelerators that generate light and, for example, one of these instruments we use is just down the hill from us in Berkeley, the Advanced Light Source, which is basically an x-ray microscope the size of a small shopping mall. We’ve also used the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility in Grenoble, France, which is an x-ray microscope the size of a very large shopping mall."

Westphal says that using these instruments revealed each particle’s individual properties, a finding that would not have been possible by using telescopes.

"We’re seeing for the first time the diversity and complexity of individual particles and we’re not looking at them through telescopes but now through microscopes."

A new University of California, San Francisco study is the first to find that drinking soda is linked to telomere shortening. These are the protective caps at the ends of our chromosomes that affect how quickly cells age. When this happens, we are prone to age-related diseases such as heart disease, diabetes, and some types of cancer. Lead author Dr. Cindy Leung says that although their study surveyed healthy adults, it’s also possible that soda consumption is associated with telomere shortening in children.

"We know that childhood is a really critical window for our telomeres to develop. If we’re marketing sugary beverages to children and they’re drinking them at such high levels, it could really put them on this accelerated aging trajectory before they even hit adolescence."

Fortunately, Leung says that telomere shortening is reversible.

"Drinking less sugary beverages would be one way to either halt or slow down their telomere shortening process. And also we, as a society, should promote other health behaviors that would help to lengthen our telomeres."