Exploring potential developmental origins of common neurodegenerative disorders.

In the United States, it is now estimated that 6.7 million people over the age of 65 are afflicted by Alzheimer's disease (AD), over 1 million people are living with Parkinson's disease (PD), and over 200 000 have or are at risk for developing Huntington's disease (HD). All three of these neurodegenerative diseases result in the ultimate death of distinct neuronal subtypes, and it is widely thought that age-related damage is the single biggest contributing factor to this neuronal death.

METTLing in Stem Cell and Cancer Biology.

The methyltransferase-like (METTL) family is a diverse group of methyltransferases that can methylate nucleotides, proteins, and small molecules. Despite this diverse array of substrates, they all share a characteristic seven-beta-strand catalytic domain, and recent evidence suggests many also share an important role in stem cell biology. The most well characterized family members METTL3 and METTL14 dimerize to form an N-methyladenosine (mA) RNA methyltransferase with established roles in cancer progression.

Medical decision-making with tables and graphs: The role of cognition, emotions, and analytic thinking.

The shift from one-way to two-way communication in healthcare decision-making has heightened the need to understand the role of display formats including tables and graphs as decision aids. In this paper, we investigate cognitive and affective influences on decision-making involving display formats. We find that a display format's impact on decision quality is mediated by two distinct components of cognition (verbatim and gist knowledge), and that tables compared to bar graphs improve decision quality.

Membrane Stretch Gates NMDA Receptors.

NMDARs are ionotropic glutamate receptors widely expressed in the CNS, where they mediate phenomena as diverse as neurotransmission, information processing, synaptogenesis, and cellular toxicity. They function as glutamate-gated Ca-permeable channels, which require glycine as coagonist, and can be modulated by many diffusible ligands and cellular cues, including mechanical stimuli. Previously, we found that, in cultured astrocytes, shear stress initiates NMDAR-mediated Ca entry in the absence of added agonists, suggesting that more than being mechanosensitive, NMDARs may be mechanically activated.

Age-related neurodegeneration and cognitive impairments of NRMT1 knockout mice are preceded by misregulation of RB and abnormal neural stem cell development.

N-terminal methylation is an important posttranslational modification that regulates protein/DNA interactions and plays a role in many cellular processes, including DNA damage repair, mitosis, and transcriptional regulation. Our generation of a constitutive knockout mouse for the N-terminal methyltransferase NRMT1 demonstrated its loss results in severe developmental abnormalities and premature aging phenotypes. As premature aging is often accompanied by neurodegeneration, we more specifically examined how NRMT1 loss affects neural pathology and cognitive behaviors.