Looking at tissue sections to see their normal histology in my new pathology module. Next week we’re looking at cancerous tissues to see the difference. 🔬🦠
Warfarin is an anticoagulant normally used in the prevention of thrombosis and thromboembolism, the formation of blood clots in the blood vessels and their migration elsewhere in the body respectively. It was initially introduced in 1948 as a pesticide against rats and mice and is still used for this purpos. In the early 1950s, warfarin was found to be effective and relatively safe for preventing thrombosis and thromboembolism in many disorders. It was approved for use as a medication in 1954 and has remained popular ever since; warfarin is the most widely prescribed oral anticoagulant drug in North America.
You can also get a warfarin ID bracelet to speak on the behalf of those who cannot speak for themselves in an emergency!
ATP synthase is a molecule responsible for oxidative phosphorylation. It is composed of a head, stalk, and rotor.
The head is the red/yellow component of the animation, and is the site of the conversion of ADP + Pi to ATP. The head is composed of 3 pairs of alpha-beta subunits that each form an active site, to create a total of 3 active sites. Each alpha subunit has a split proton channel – one opens to the intermembrane and the other to the matrix. Through the center of the alpha-beta subunit pack is a gamma subunit.
The head is connected to the rotor by the stalk, where the gamma subunit is paired with other subunits (blue, purple, and green parts of the animation).
The rotor is the brown portion of the animation, a c-ring formation composed of c subunits that contract within the membrane.
The green arm in the animation is part of the molecule, and helps keep the head stationary while the other pieces rotate.
The mechanism of ATP synthase relies on the protonation and deprotonation of the c subunits within the c-ring of the rotor. Protonation on the intermembrane side and deprotonation on the matrix side moves protons from a high concentration to a low concentration. Each protonated c subunit goes all the way around the ring before deprotonation. Every full rotation of the c-ring will cause the stalk to also turn, meaning the stalk and rotor move in tandem (brown and blue/purple/green move together). Rotation of the stalk causes the alpha-beta subunits within the head to change shape and the active site will generate 1 ATP molecule. One entire rotation will generate 3 ATP molecules.
Ten core principles necessary for the remodeling of your brain to take place:
1. Change is mostly limited to those situations in which the brain is in the mood for it.
If you are alert, on the ball, engaged, motivated, ready for action, the brain releases the neurochemicals necessary to enable brain change. When disengaged, inattentive, distracted, or doing something without thinking that requires no real effort, your neuroplastic switches are “off.”
2. The harder you try, the more you’re motivated, the more alert you are, and the better (or worse) the potential outcome, the bigger the brain change.
If you’re intensely focused on the task and really trying to master something for an important reason, the change experienced will be greater.
3. What actually changes in the brain are the strengths of the connections of neurons that are engaged together, moment by moment, in time.
The more something is practiced, the more connections are changed and made to include all elements of the experience (sensory info, movement, cognitive patterns). You can think of it like a “master controller” being formed for that particular behavior which allows it to be performed with remarkable facility and reliability over time.
4. Learning-driven changes in connections increase cell-to-cell cooperation which is crucial for increasing reliability.
Merzenich explains this by asking you to imagine the sound of a football stadium full of fans all clapping at random versus the same people clapping in unison. He explains, “The more powerfully coordinated your [nerve cell] teams are, the more powerful and more reliable their behavioral productions.”
5. The brain also strengthens its connections between teams of neurons representing separate moments of successive things that reliably occur in serial time.
This allows your brain to predict what happens next and have a continuous “associative flow.” Without this ability, your stream of consciousness would be reduced to “a series of separate, stagnating puddles,” explains Merzenich.
6. Initial changes are temporary.
Your brain first records the change, then determines whether it should make the change permanent or not. It only becomes permanent if your brain judges the experience to be fascinating or novel enough or if the behavioral outcome is important, good or bad.
7. The brain is changed by internal mental rehearsal in the same ways and involving precisely the same processes that control changes achieved through interactions with the external world.
According to Merzenich, “You don’t have to move an inch to drive positive plastic change in your brain. Your internal representations of things recalled from memory work just fine for progressive brain plasticity-based learning.”
8. Memory guides and controls most learning.
As you learn a new skill, your brain takes note of and remembers the good attempts, while discarding the not-so-good trys. Then, it recalls the last good pass, makes incremental adjustments, and progressively improves.
9. Every movement of learning provides a moment of opportunity for the brain to stabilize – and reduce the disruptive power of – potentially interfering backgrounds or “noise.”
Each time your brain strengthens a connection to advance your mastery of a skill, it also weakens other connections of neurons that weren’t used at that precise moment. This negative plastic brain change erases some of the irrelevant or interfering activity in the brain.
10. Brain plasticity is a two-way street; it is just as easy to generate negative changes as it is positive ones.
You have a “use it or lose it” brain. It’s almost as easy to drive changes that impair memory and physical and mental abilities as it is to improve these things. Merzenich says that older people are absolute masters at encouraging plastic brain change in the wrong direction.
Genetically modified organisms get a bad rap for many reasons, but we’ve actually been genetically altering what we eat since the dawn of human history.
Right now her focus is on rice. It’s one of our basic crops and without it, we would struggle to feed much of the world.
With climate change, we’re seeing an increase in flooding in places like India and Bangladesh, which makes it harder to grow this important food staple.
So Ronald and her lab have developed a flood-tolerant strain of rice. It’s known as Sub1a or “scuba rice” and millions of farmers in South Asia are now growing it in their fields.
Today is National Food Day, a day dedicated to hunger awareness. But as we focus on food insecurity, we need to talk more about how global warming will make the problem worse.
As our climate continues to heat up, it has huge impacts on what foods we are able to grow. Will our crops be able to survive droughts and floods? The University of California leads six labs that are working to develop other climate-resilient crops including chickpea, cowpea and millet.
