Muscle-strengthening exercises may lower risk of death

 

• The authors of a new meta-analysis of prior studies wanted to determine how much time adults should spend doing muscle-strengthening exercises each week.
• They conclude that doing 30–60 minutes of these exercises each week lowers the risk of all-cause death, cardiovascular disease, and cancer.
• They also report that up to 1 hour of muscle-strengthening exercises a week reduces the risk of developing diabetes.
• However, limitations in the data mean that more research is necessary to clarify the results.

Although the health benefits of aerobic exercise are well-established, there has been less research into the health benefits of muscle-strengthening exercises.

Recently, a group of researchers from Japan set out to investigate.

The study, which appears in the British Journal of Sports Medicine, took data from existing studies to learn more about how these exercises affect health.

The findings showed that adults who do 30–60 minutes of muscle-strengthening exercises each week have a 10–20% reduction in mortality risk, alongside a reduced risk of other health conditions.

Exercise recommendations 

Being physically active is important for maintaining good physical and mental health.

The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS)Trusted Source recommends that adults participate in 150–300 minutes of moderate intensity or 75–150 minutes of vigorous intensity aerobic physical activity each week to ensure “substantial health benefits.”

Aerobic exercises improve heart healthTrusted Source. Some examples include swimming, cycling, walking, and rowing.

Additionally, the HHS recommends that adults do muscle-strengthening exercises on 2 days of each week. Some types of exercises that strengthen the muscles include weightlifting, using resistance bands, and doing bodyweight exercises, such as pushups, situps, and squats.

The HHS notes that “nearly 80% of adults are not meeting the key guidelines for both aerobic and muscle-strengthening activity.”

Muscle-strengthening exercise study 

The goal of this study was to use previously published research to determine how much time adults should spend per week doing muscle-strengthening exercises to improve overall health.

The researchers used data from 16 relevant observational studies published between 2012 and 2020 to determine the health benefits of these exercises. They focused on studies with participants who did not have any major health issues.

Each study that the authors reviewed had data from thousands of participants, and one of the studies included data from almost 480,000 people. The included studies followed the participants for a minimum of 2 years.

According to the authors, “All studies focused on muscle-strengthening exercises such as resistance/strength/weight training and calisthenics, but not on muscle-strengthening activities such as carrying heavy loads and heavy gardening.”

After analyzing the data, the authors determined that muscle-strengthening activities were associated with a 10–17% lower risk of all-cause mortality. There was also a similar risk reduction for cardiovascular disease, diabetes, total cancer, and lung cancer.

While there were reductions in overall cancer and lung cancer cases, the researchers did not find a risk reduction for other cancers, such as colon, kidney, bladder, and pancreatic cancer.

Dr. Anton Bilchik spoke with Medical News Today about the study findings. Dr. Bilchik is a surgical oncologist, professor of surgery, chief of medicine, and director of the gastrointestinal research program at Saint John’s Cancer Institute in Santa Monica, CA.

“This study is important because it is a meta-analysis of 16 prospective cohort studies that demonstrates that muscle-strengthening activity reduces the risk of developing cardiovascular disease, cancer, and diabetes,” said Dr. Bilchik.

“The maximum risk reduction was 10–20% if 60 minutes [each] week of muscle-strengthening was performed. There was, however, no association with specific cancers, such as colon, kidney, bladder, and pancreas.”

Source: Medical News Today

Ebola vaccine provides long lasting protection

 

• A new study has examined antibody response among individuals who have received the Ebola vaccine and live in areas of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) that are experiencing outbreaks of Ebola disease.
• Specifically, the researchers analyzed antibody response at various time intervals following vaccination with a single dose of the Ebola vaccine in an at-risk population in the DRC.
• They discovered compelling evidence of robust and persistent antibody response among vaccinated individuals in the affected areas.

The World Health Organization (WHO)Trusted Source defines the Ebola virus disease (EVD) as a “rare but severe, often fatal illness in humans.”

Its symptoms commonly include fever, fatigue, muscle pain, a sore throat, and headaches. Vomiting, diarrhea, and rashes usually follow.

In some cases, EVD symptoms include internal and external bleeding, such as bloody stool or bleeding gums.

At the moment, Ebola vaccines are one part of an important scientific strategy to overcome EVD. Alongside them are treatmentTrusted Source with medications that the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has approved and supportive therapy, such as oral rehydration and intravenous fluids.

A collaborative study between American and Congolese scientists has recently examined the antibody response in Ebola-vaccinated individuals in the DRC, which is one of the first places where scientists discovered EVD.

The study authors have published their findings in the peer-reviewed journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

A collaborative approach

The new study involved experts at the University of California, Los Angeles’s Fielding School of Public Health in partnership with their colleagues in the DRC.

The team enrolled a total of 608 participants between August and September 2018.

The scientists excluded children under 1 year of age and people who were pregnant or breastfeeding,

Eligible study participants were contacts or “contacts of contacts” of confirmed EVD cases or frontline healthcare workers in EVD-affected or potentially affected areas.

During the recruitment period for the study, the Ebola vaccine — rVSVΔG-ZEBOV-GPTrusted Source — was not yet licensed by the FDA. As such, its administration was part of a compassionate useTrusted Source, also known as expanded access, protocol process. In science, this is a situation in which an individual with an immediately life threatening or serious condition gains access to an investigational medical product outside of a clinical trial.

At each study visit, the scientists administered questionnaires to the participants, conducted basic physical assessment tests, and collected blood samples.

The study visits for each participant occurred at the following time intervals:

• day 0, at least 30 minutes after vaccination and after monitoring for potential adverse effects
• between day 21 and 28 after vaccination
• 6 months postvaccination

Overall, 58% of the study participants were aged 20–39 years, and 64% were male.

Of the participants, 32% reported having contact with a confirmed, probable, or suspected EVD case, while 66% reported no contact. The remaining 2% were unaware of their EVD contact history.

Source: Medical News Today

'Math neurons' identified in the brain

 The brain has neurons that fire specifically during certain mathematical operations. This is shown by a recent study conducted by the Universities of Tübingen and Bonn. The findings indicate that some of the neurons detected are active exclusively during additions, while others are active during subtractions. They do not care whether the calculation instruction is written down as a word or a symbol. The results have now been published in the journal Current Biology.

Most elementary school children probably already know that three apples plus two apples add up to five apples. However, what happens in the brain during such calculations is still largely unknown. The current study by the Universities of Bonn and Tübingen now sheds light on this issue.

The researchers benefited from a special feature of the Department of Epileptology at the University Hospital Bonn. It specializes in surgical procedures on the brains of people with epilepsy. In some patients, seizures always originate from the same area of the brain. In order to precisely localize this defective area, the doctors implant several electrodes into the patients. The probes can be used to precisely determine the origin of the spasm. In addition, the activity of individual neurons can be measured via the wiring.

Some neurons fire only when summing up

Five women and four men participated in the current study. They had electrodes implanted in the so-called temporal lobe of the brain to record the activity of nerve cells. Meanwhile, the participants had to perform simple arithmetic tasks. "We found that different neurons fired during additions than during subtractions," explains Prof. Florian Mormann from the Department of Epileptology at the University Hospital Bonn.

It was not the case that some neurons responded only to a "+" sign and others only to a "-" sign: "Even when we replaced the mathematical symbols with words, the effect remained the same," explains Esther Kutter, who is doing her doctorate in Prof. Mormann's research group. "For example, when subjects were asked to calculate '5 and 3', their addition neurons sprang back into action; whereas for '7 less 4,' their subtraction neurons did."

This shows that the cells discovered actually encode a mathematical instruction for action. The brain activity thus showed with great accuracy what kind of tasks the test subjects were currently calculating: The researchers fed the cells' activity patterns into a self-learning computer program. At the same time, they told the software whether the subjects were currently calculating a sum or a difference. When the algorithm was confronted with new activity data after this training phase, it was able to accurately identify during which computational operation it had been recorded.

Prof. Andreas Nieder from the University of Tübingen supervised the study together with Prof. Mormann. "We know from experiments with monkeys that neurons specific to certain computational rules also exist in their brains," he says. "In humans, however, there is hardly any data in this regard." During their analysis, the two working groups came across an interesting phenomenon: One of the brain regions studied was the so-called parahippocampal cortex. There, too, the researchers found nerve cells that fired specifically during addition or subtraction. However, when summing up, different addition neurons became alternately active during one and the same arithmetic task. Figuratively speaking, it is as if the plus key on the calculator were constantly changing its location. It was the same with subtraction. Researchers also refer to this as "dynamic coding."

"This study marks an important step towards a better understanding of one of our most important symbolic abilities, namely calculating with numbers," stresses Mormann. The two teams from Bonn and Tübingen now want to investigate exactly what role the nerve cells found play in this.

The study was funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) and the Volkswagen Foundation.

Source: ScienceDaily

Scaling laws in enzymes may help predict life ‘as we don’t know it'

 The only references we have for "life" are the forms we know on Earth. Astrobiologists suspect that the search for alien life, and even for the origins of life on Earth, may require a broader scope. A NASA-funded team of researchers is developing tools to predict the features of life as we don't know it. In a new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the team identifies universal patterns in the chemistry of life that do not appear to depend on specific molecules.

"We want to have new tools for identifying and even predicting features of life as we don't know it," says Santa Fe Institute External Professor Sara Imari Walker (Arizona State University), a co-author on the paper. "To do so, we are aiming to identify the universal laws that should apply to any biochemical system. This includes developing quantitative theory for the origins of life, and using theory and statistics to guide our search for life on other planets."

On Earth, life emerges from the interplay of hundreds of chemical compounds and reactions. Some of these compounds and reactions are found universally across Earth's organisms. Using the Integrated Microbial Genomes and Microbiomes database, the team investigated the enzymes -- the functional drivers of biochemistry -- found in bacteria, archaea, and eukarya to reveal a new kind of biochemical universality.

Enzymes can be categorized into a taxonomy of broad functional classes -- groups designated by what they do, from using water molecules to break chemical bonds (hydrolases) to rearranging molecular structures (isomerases) to joining large molecules together (ligases). The team compared how the abundance of enzymes in each of these functional categories changed in relation to the overall abundance of enzymes in an organism. They discovered various scaling laws -- almost algorithmic relationships -- between the number of enzymes in different enzyme classes and the size of an organism's genome. They also found that these laws don't depend on the particularenzymes in those classes.

"Here we find that you get these scaling relationships without needing to conserve exact membership. You need a certain number of transferases, but not particular transferases," says SFI Professor Chris Kempes, a co-author on the paper. "There are a lot 'synonyms,' and those synonyms scale in systematic ways."

On Earth, organisms use DNA and, through RNA, create proteins. But will the macromolecules of DNA, RNA, and proteins help us identify life across the universe, understand the origins of life on Earth, or develop synthetic biology? "As a team, we think that's not likely," says Kempes. The functions those macromolecules serve, however, and the metabolic scaling relationships observed in organic, Earth-based life, just might be. "Even if life elsewhere used really different molecules, these sort of functional categories and scaling laws might be conserved throughout the universe," says Kempes.

Additional authors on this study are first author Dylan Gagler (New York University Langone Health); Hyunju Kim, Bradley Karas, John Malloy, and Veronica Mierzejewski (Arizona State University); and Aaron Goldman (Oberlin College and the Blue Marble Space Institute for Science).

Source: ScienceDaily

Immunotherapy drug bolsters head and neck cancer treatment

 A University of Cincinnati clinical trial that added an immunotherapy drug to standard of care treatment regimens has shown increased survival rates for head and neck cancer patients with intermediate risk features.

Trisha Wise-Draper, MD, led the trial and was the lead author on a paper detailing its findings that was recently published in Clinical Cancer Research, a journal of the American Association for Cancer Research.

Targeting the immune checkpoint

Wise-Draper said the trial focused on adding a drug, pembrolizumab, to patients' typical standard care of treatments. Pembrolizumab, sold under the brand name Keytruda, is an antibody used in cancer immunotherapy that treats a variety of cancers, including head and neck. The drug targets a pair of receptors that usually work to turn off the human immune system when the immune system has finished a job of fighting off a foreign substance that causes sickness.

"Once the virus or infection is cleared, you have to have a way to turn your own immune system off, to tell it that the infection is gone and it's time to calm down," explained Wise-Draper, associate professor of medicine in the Division of Hematology/Oncology in UC's College of Medicine, Head and Neck Center of Excellence co-leader, medical director of the University of Cincinnati Cancer Center Clinical Trials Office and Lab and a UC Health physician.

Tumor cells have learned to kick the receptors that shut the immune system system off into overdrive, which blocks immune cells from recognizing that tumor cells are foreign objects that the body should attack. Pembrolizumab, however, blocks the interaction and keeps immune cells working, which in turn leads to the immune cells attacking cancerous cells like they are supposed to.

The drug has been developed as a treatment for multiple cancers, and Wise-Draper said it has shown early success as a treatment for head and neck cancers that have spread or returned after initial treatment, with early studies reporting effectiveness for about 20% of patients treated.

"And although we're careful to say cure, it does result in what is called 'durable responses,'" she said, explaining that means patients have a good response to treatment much longer than expected, sometimes for years, "which was a huge advancement over chemotherapy where they may have only been effective for say nine to 10 months at most," Wise-Draper said.

The hypothesis

With the early data looking promising, the UC clinical trial was seeking to find if the drug would work as an initial treatment that would prevent the cancer from recurring. Patients with head and neck cancer -- that are treated with the standard surgery, radiation and potentially chemotherapy if risk factors warrant it -- typically see the cancers return about 30%-50% of the time, Wise-Draper said.

"So instead of waiting for them to come back, could we try to prevent them from coming back? If the cancer came back, they were much harder to cure the second time and had a lot of failure in that group," she said. "So we asked if we could add this immunotherapy, the pembrolizumab, and decrease that risk of cancer coming back."

Wise-Draper said the trial was also designed to examine why some patients respond to pembrolizumab while others do not. To accomplish this goal, tissue and blood samples were collected before and after administering the drug to analyze factors that contributed to patients responding to the treatment.

The trial

Patients enrolled in the trial were given one dose of the drug before surgery and were evaluated for risk status and grouped into intermediate- and high-risk groupings after surgery. A patient is considered high risk if part of the tumor is still left behind after surgery or is not contained in a lymph node.

All patients continued to receive the appropriate standard of care (radiation alone for intermediate risk or radiation and chemotherapy for high risk), with six more doses of pembrolizumab also administered after surgery.

Wise-Draper said the drug caused tumors to begin to die before surgery in nearly 50% of patients, a better rate than what was found when the drug was given for metastatic or recurrent head and neck cancer.

"We could see that a lot of these tumors were dying even after that first dose of pembrolizumab," Wise-Draper said. "That was pretty exciting, because that was higher than we expected."

Less than 70% of patients in the intermediate group who were treated with radiation alone after surgery were typically disease free one year following treatment, but more than 95% of patients in the trial reported one-year disease-free survival when treated with both radiation and pembrolizumab.

"We had a huge improvement in that, so we saw that pembrolizumab was definitely increasing their chance of survival, at least compared to historical controls," Wise-Draper said.

In the group of patients where the drug began to kill the tumor prior to surgery, 100% reported one-year disease-free survival.

"It was a really strong predictor of patients who are going to do well on this treatment," Wise-Draper said. "Hopefully that is going to help us design trials to better understand who is going to respond and who is not."

A reliable predictor for patients that will likely do well on the treatment will also help determine how treatments can be adjusted for patients who receive surgery, pembrolizumab, chemotherapy and radiation and do not respond well to the treatment.

"That's really where the research is going now is trying to understand what are those biomarkers between the responders versus the nonresponders and how we can develop new and better targeted therapies," Wise-Draper said. "We have a couple of identified markers that will help us going forward, but we're still doing a lot of research in that area."

Next steps

Harvard University researchers have conducted a study similar to UC's that showed similar success, and the successful findings of these trials show that a randomized Phase III clinical trial is worth pursuing. Pharmaceutical company Merck is in the process of conducting a randomized trial comparing patients who receive pembrolizumab in addition to their standard of care versus patients who receive the standard of care only.

"That will be a much larger study that will help show if pembrolizumab truly benefits these groups," Wise-Draper said of the Merck study.

Research at UC into pembrolizumab as a head and neck cancer treatment is ongoing, with a next round of research being designed to learn how treatments can be more personalized to each patient. Tumor characteristics and biomarkers that can help predict whether a patient will respond to a certain treatment can be analyzed before surgery, with more specific treatment plans hopefully leading to better results.

Source: ScienceDaily

A microbial compound in the gut leads to anxious behaviors in mice

 A Caltech-led team of researchers has discovered that a small-molecule metabolite, produced by bacteria that reside in the mouse gut, can travel to the brain and alter the function of brain cells, leading to increased anxiety in mice. The work helps uncover a molecular explanation for recent observations that gut microbiome changes are associated with complex emotional behaviors.

The research was conducted primarily in the laboratory of Sarkis Mazmanian, Luis B. and Nelly Soux Professor of Microbiology and affiliated faculty member with the Tianqiao and Chrissy Chen Institute for Neuroscience at Caltech. A paper describing the study appears on February 14 in the journal Nature.

Decades of research have shown that the communities of bacteria that inhabit the intestines of animals (the microbiome) influence the immune system and metabolism; studies in the last few years have linked the microbiome to brain function and mood. People with certain neurological conditions have distinctly different gut bacteria communities. Further, studies in mice have shown that manipulating these communities can alter neurodevelopmental and neurodegenerative states, either ameliorating or exacerbating symptoms.

"It's been really difficult to show causation between something that's happening in the gut and the brain, rather than just associations between the disease states and the presence or absence of certain microbes," says Brittany Needham, first author of the new study and a postdoctoral scholar in the Mazmanian lab. "We were interested in trying to understand the molecular messages that are going between the gut and the brain, and how these signals may lead to changes in behavior."

This study focused on a bacterial metabolite (a by-product of microbes) called 4-ethylphenyl sulfate, or 4EPS. Initially produced by microbes in the intestines, 4EPS is then absorbed into the bloodstream and circulates throughout the body in both humans and mice. In 2013, the Mazmanian lab showed that this particular molecule was present in higher levels in mice with altered neurological development, specifically, a mouse model of autism and schizophrenia. Though other aspects of the altered microbiome differed from the healthy microbiome, 4EPS levels were by far the most different. Additionally, in a screen of human blood samples from 231 individuals, 4EPS levels were about seven times higher in children on the autism spectrum than in neurotypical children.

In this work, the team focused on the effects of 4EPS on mouse models of anxiety. While anxiety disorders in humans are complex, animal models provide a way to study the precise changes in the brain and body that lead to anxious behaviors. "Anxiety" in mice is measured by their willingness to explore or hide in a new space as well as the time spent in a risky environment. Bold mice will explore a new space, sniffing around, but anxious mice will hide, as if facing a predator, instead of exploring.

The study compared two groups of laboratory mice: one group was colonized with a pair of bacteria that were genetically engineered to produce 4EPS; the control group of mice were colonized with bacteria that were identical except lacked the ability to produce 4EPS. Then, the mice were introduced to a new arena, and researchers measured each mouse's behavior.

The mice with 4EPS spent much less time exploring the area and more time hiding as compared to their non-4EPS counterparts, indicating higher levels of anxiety. Brain scans of the 4EPS mice also showed that some of the brain regions associated with fear and anxiety were more activated in addition to overall changes in brain activity and functional connectivity.

Looking closer at brain cells within these altered regions, the team found that particular cells called oligodendrocytes were altered. These cells are important in part because they produce a protein called myelin, which acts as a protective coating around neurons and nerve fibers called axons, like insulation around an electrical wire. The team found that in the presence of 4EPS, oligodendrocytes are less mature and consequently produce less myelin, leading to thinner insulation around axons.

However, when the 4EPS mice were treated with a drug known to increase myelin production in oligodendrocytes, the drug was able to overpower the negative effects of 4EPS -- the mice regained normal myelin production, and the anxious behaviors were reduced.

In a related study appearing simultaneously in the journal Nature Medicine, Needham showed that treating mice with an oral drug to soak up and remove 4EPS from their systems led to reductions in anxious behaviors. This result enabled a small clinical study that also gave humans the drug in an open-label trial (no placebo or control group). Sequestering 4EPS in the human gut led to reduced levels of 4EPS in the blood and urine, and many of the 26 study participants displayed overall decreased levels of anxiety.

"It's an exciting proof-of-concept finding that a specific microbial metabolite alters the activity of brain cells and complex behaviors in mice, but how this is happening remains unknown," says Mazmanian. "The basic framework for brain function includes integration of sensory and molecular cues from the periphery and even the environment. What we show here is similar in principle but with the discovery that the neuroactive molecule is of microbial origin. I believe this work has implications for human anxiety or other mood conditions."

The next steps for the work are to examine the mechanisms through which 4EPS affects oligodendrocytes -- which proteins it may be interacting with, whether 4EPS is affecting changes directly in the brain, or if it is affecting another part of the body and those effects are making their way up to the brain. Also, it will be critical to show that the human data have an effect in a well-powered and controlled clinical trial, which is now underway.

In addition to Needham and Mazmanian, Caltech co-authors are former research technician Mark Adame; research technician Joseph Boktor; former postdoctoral scholar Wei-Li Wu (now of National Cheng Kung University in Taiwan); postdoctoral scholar Claire Rabut; EM scientist Mark Ladinsky; lecturer in chemistry Son-Jong Hwang; graduate student Jessica Griffiths; Pamela Bjorkman, David Baltimore Professor of Biology and Bioengineering, Merkin Institute Professor, and executive officer for biology and biological engineering; and Mikhail Shapiro, professor of chemical engineering and Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator.

Additional co-authors are Masanori Funabashi of Stanford University and Daiichi Sankyo RD Novare Co.; Zhuo Wang, Yumei Guo, and Daniel Holschneider of USC; Jillian Haney and Daniel Geschwind of UCLA; Qiyun Zhu of UC San Diego and Arizona State University; Rob Knight of UC San Diego; and Michael Fischbach of Stanford University.

Source: ScienceDaily

Key brain mechanisms for organizing memories in time

 In a scientific first, researchers at the University of California, Irvine have discovered fundamental mechanisms by which the hippocampus region of the brain organizes memories into sequences and how this can be used to plan future behavior. The finding may be a critical early step toward understanding memory failures in cognitive disorders such as Alzheimer's disease and other forms of dementia.

Combining electrophysiological recording techniques in rodents with a statistical machine learning analysis of huge troves of data, the UCI researchers uncovered evidence suggesting that the hippocampal network encodes and preserves progressions of experiences to aid in decision-making. The team's work is the subject of a paper published recently in Nature Communications.

"Our brain keeps a pretty good record of when specific experiences or events occur. This ability helps us function in our daily life, but before this study, we didn't have a clear idea of the neuronal mechanisms behind these processes," said corresponding author Norbert Fortin, UCI associate professor of neurobiology and behavior. "Where it connects with everybody is that this type of memory is strongly impaired in a variety of neurological disorders or simply with aging, so we really need to know how this brain function works."

The project, which took more than three years to complete, involved experimental and data analysis phases. The researchers monitored the firing of neurons in rats' brains as they underwent a series of odor identification tests. By presenting five different smells in various sequences, the scientists were able to measure the animals' memory of the correct sequence and detect how their brains captured these sequential relationships.

"The analogy I would think about is computing," Fortin said. "If I were to stick electrodes in your brain -- we can't; that's why we use rats -- I could see which cells are firing and which ones are not firing at any given moment. That provides us with some insight into how the brain represents and computes information. When we record activity patterns in a structure, it's like we're seeing zeros and ones in a computer."

Obtained in millisecond intervals over several minutes, neuronal activity and inactivity measurements present a dynamic picture of the brain's functioning. Fortin said that he and his colleagues were, in some ways, able to "read the minds" of their subjects by viewing the "coding" of the cells -- which ones were firing and which were not -- in rapid succession.

"When you're thinking about something, it moves quickly," he said. "You're not stuck on that memory for long. Right now, it's being represented, but we can see how that changes very quickly."

Fortin knew early on that the readings of hippocampal activity would result in enormous quantities of raw data. From the beginning stages of the project, he enlisted the participation of statisticians in the Donald Bren School of Information & Computer Sciences.

"The neuroscience questions we had at the time in my lab were way too advanced for the statistical knowledge we had. That's why we needed to involve partners with data science expertise," Fortin said.

"These emerging neuroscience studies rely on data science methods because of the complexity of their data," said senior co-author Babak Shahbaba, UCI Chancellor's Fellow and professor of statistics. "Brain activities are recorded at millisecond scale, and these experiments run for more than an hour, so you can imagine how fast the amount of data grows. It gets to a point that neuroscientists need more advanced techniques to accomplish what they had imagined but weren't able to implement."

He noted that when neurons encode information such as memories, scientists can get a glimpse of that process by examining the pattern of spiking activity across all recorded neurons, known collectively as an ensemble.

"We found that we could treat these neural patterns as images, and this unlocked our ability to apply deep machine learning methods," Shahbaba said. "We analyzed the data with a convolutional neural network, which is a methodology used frequently in image processing applications such as facial recognition."

This way, the researchers were able to decode the firing of neurons to retrieve information.

"We know what the signature for odor B looks like, just as we know the ones for A, C and D," Fortin said. "Because of that, you can see when those signatures reappear at a different moment in time, such as when our subjects are anticipating something that has yet to happen. We're seeing these signatures being quickly replayed as they're thinking about the future."

Shahbaba said that the tools and methodologies developed during this project can be applied to a wide range of problems, and Fortin may extend his line of inquiry into other brain regions.

The study is an example of the power of convergence research at institutions such as UCI, Shahbaba said: "I could directly see the difference this is making for our students. Researchers in Norbert's neuroscience group are taking data science classes and can now ask some really important scientific questions they could not investigate in the past, and my own students are thinking fundamentally about the scientific method in an unprecedented way."

He added, "Through this collaboration, we are training the next generation of scientists, who have the required skills to conduct interdisciplinary research."

Fortin and Shahbaba were joined on the project by Pierre Baldi, UCI Distinguished Professor of computer science; Lingge Li, who earned a Ph.D. in statistics at UCI in 2020; Forest Agostinelli, who earned a Ph.D. in computer science at UCI in 2019 and is now an assistant professor at the University of South Carolina; Mansi Saraf and Keiland Cooper, UCI Ph.D. students in neurobiology and behavior; Derenik Haghverdian, a UCI Ph.D. student in statistics; and Gabriel Elias, a postdoctoral project scientist at UCI. Funding was provided by the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation and the Whitehall Foundation.

Source: ScienceDaily