Could it be possible to reduce the risk of developing depression by 23 percent simply by waking up an hour earlier?

That's what new research reported in JAMA Psychiatry has suggested. Scientists analyzed genetic, health, and sleep data from 840,000 people, and found that chronotype, or the time a person tends to go to sleep, has a significant influence on the risk of depression. It's also probably one of the first studies to find out exactly how much change has to happen to make a difference.

"We have known for some time that there is a relationship between sleep timing and mood, but a question we often hear from clinicians is: How much earlier do we need to shift people to see a benefit?" said senior study author Celine Vetter, an assistant professor of integrative physiology at the University of Colorado at Boulder. "We found that even one-hour earlier sleep timing is associated with significantly lower risk of depression."

Previous work has found that people that like to stay up late are at a much greater likelihood of depression than people who like to wake up early, regardless of how long people stay asleep. However, we also know that mood disorders are linked to sleep problems, so it's been difficult to figure out whether one problem causes the other or how else they are associated.

Now researchers have been able to use massive DNA databases including the UK Biobank and 23andMe to get a better sense of what these connections mean. A statistical tool called "Mendelian randomization" can help scientists decipher cause and effect relationships.

In this work, the researchers looked at 340 variations that are commonly found in the human genome, including small changes in PER2, the so-called clock gene, which is thought to affect a person's chronotype. The study suggested that anywhere from 12 to 42 percent of a person's sleep time preferences are due to genetic factors.

To get an even closer look at sleep times, the study also assessed data from 85,000 volunteers that wore sleep trackers for a week and 250,000 who completed sleep-preference questionnaires. It showed that the average midpoint of sleep (halfway between sleep time and wake time) was 3 a.m., while about a third of volunteers self-identified as early risers, nine percent as night owls, and the remainder were in the middle. This work revealed genetic variants that tended to predispose people to be early risers.

After identifying those variants, the researchers looked at them in another group of volunteers and found that the individuals carrying genetic variants predisposing them to like getting up early were also less likely to be depressed.

For each earlier sleep-midpoint hour, there was a 23 percent reduction in depression risk. That would suggest that if a person that tends to go to bed at one a.m. began going to bed at midnight instead, they would cut their risk of depression by 23 percent and a bedtime of eleven p.m. would reduce it by almost 40 percent. The study did not determine whether getting up earlier would also have any benefit. But it seems that most people, even those that aren't self-identified night owls, can reduce depression risk by heading to bed earlier.

The researchers can't explain this effect yet. It may be because people that go to sleep earlier also get up earlier and are exposed to more light, which has many downstream effects on hormones. It might also have something to do with the circadian rhythm. There may also be a social component. "We live in a society that is designed for morning people, and evening people often feel as if they are in a constant state of misalignment with that societal clock," noted lead study author Iyas Daghlas, M.D.

More work will be needed to confirm the connection between earlier bedtimes and reduced depression risk, Daghlas noted. "But this study definitely shifts the weight of evidence toward supporting a causal effect of sleep timing on depression."

Vetter suggested that if people are trying to go to bed earlier, it may be advisable to "Keep your days bright and your nights dark. Have your morning coffee on the porch. Walk or ride your bike to work if you can, and dim those electronics in the evening."

Sources: AAAS/Eurekalert! via University of Colorado at Boulder, JAMA Psychiatry

Robotic Exoskeleton May Improve Response to Exercise-based Rehabilitation in People With Severe MS

Robots are most often found in science fiction. Recently, however, researchers are using robot-like technology to help people with severe disability caused by multiple sclerosis (MS), a condition estimated to affect nearly 3 million people worldwide.

According to a recent study published in Multiple Sclerosis and Related Disorders, researchers at the Kessler Institute have completed a proof-of-concept study examining the efficacy of an exercise program using robotic exoskeleton technology, called robotic-exoskeleton assisted exercise rehabilitation (REAER), which could be used to improve the quality of life of individuals with severe MS. 

Standard rehabilitation treatment for people with MS involves a range of exercise training, including walking. Evidence suggests that these approaches can help manage MS symptoms, particularly for those who experience mobility and cognition issues. 

“Exercise is really powerful behavior that involves many brain regions and networks that can improve over time and result in improved function,” noted Dr. Sandroff, a senior research scientist at the Kessler Foundation.

The study conducted by Kessler Foundation researchers attempts to enhance understanding about the efficacy of rehabilitation efforts for people with severe MS, as current rehabilitative approaches are often ineffective for this patient population or lack evidence proving their effectiveness.

The study, which enrolled 10 participants with severe MS, compared the use of traditional walk-based rehabilitation treatment with the REAER program on symptom management over 4 weeks. Specifically, researchers looked at things like how far participants could walk and a participant’s cognitive processing abilities.

Findings, while preliminary, showed favorable results for the use of REAER. Over the four weeks, participants showed significant improvements in cognitive processing, mobility, and connectivity between areas of the brain, such as the thalamus and ventromedial prefrontal cortex.

"This [research] is particularly exciting because therapy using robotic exoskeletons shows such promise for improving the lives of people with co-occurring mobility and cognitive disability, a cohort that likely has the greatest potential to benefit from this new technology," said Dr. Androwis, the study's lead author.

Source:eurekalert.org

Inhalable Anti-COVID Nanobodies Show Promising Results in Hamsters

 Nanobodies are small fragments of monoclonal antibodies that from a therapeutic perspective are more stable and cheaper to produce. Researchers have shown for the first time that inhalable nanobodies against SARS-CoV-2 can prevent and treat severe COVID in a hamster model of the disease.

The immune systems of camels, dromedaries, llamas, and alpacas feature this unique miniature antibody, which has been of particular interest to researchers for their application as therapeutic biologics. While most antibodies have both heavy and light chains, nanobodies have only heavy chains, making them around a tenth of the size of a monoclonal antibody.

In the study, small inhaled doses of the experimental nanobody treatment called Nanobody-21, or PiN-21, neutralized the coronavirus in infected animals, reducing the number of infectious viral particles in their respiratory tracts by a million-fold. Additionally, breathing in PiN-21 also had a protective effect when the hamsters were administered the treatment at the time of the infection. Even ultra-low doses of the nanobody were found to be effective, shielding the animals against inflammation and damage to their respiratory tracts.

“Inhalation treatment quickly reverses animals’ weight loss after infection, decreases lung viral titers by 6 logs leading to drastically mitigated lung pathology, and prevents viral pneumonia,” wrote the authors.

Senior author of the study, Yi Shi said: “By using an inhalation therapy that can be directly administered to the infection site—the respiratory tract and lungs—we can make treatments more efficient.” 

“We are very excited and encouraged by our data suggesting that PiN-21 can be highly protective against severe disease and can potentially prevent human-to-human viral transmission.”

The physical characteristics of nanobodies make them particularly well suited to be delivered as aerosols—tiny particles that when breathed in, reach deep into the intricate lung structures. With their dual function as both a treatment and a prophylactic, nanobodies may represent an urgently-needed complementary approach to vaccination.

The research team, which consists of nanobody, infectious disease, and aerobiology experts, is continuing to explore PiN-21 as a potential clinical drug candidate.

Culled from labroots.com

Crohn's Disease Flareups Could be Diagnosed Using Engineered Organism

 In an important step toward the clinical application of synthetic biology, Rice University researchers have engineered a bacterium with the capability of diagnosing a human disease.

An engineered strain of the gut bacteria E. coli senses pH and glows when it encounters acidosis, an acidic condition that often occurs during flareups of inflammatory bowel diseases like colitis, ileitis and Crohn's disease. The pH-sensing circuit was discovered by Rice researcher Kathryn Brink.

Researchers at the University of Colorado then used the Rice-created organism in a mouse model of Crohn's disease to show that acidosis activates a signature set of genes. The corresponding genetic signature in humans has been observed during active inflammation in Crohn's disease patients. The U.S. National Science Foundation-funded results are published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Study co-author Jeffrey Tabor's lab engineered the pH-sensing bacterium. "We think it could be added to food and programmed to warn patients when a flareup is just beginning," said Tabor.

Over their 3.5 billion-year history, bacteria have evolved countless specific and sensitive genetic circuits to sense their surroundings. Tabor and colleagues developed a biohacking toolkit that allows them to mix and match the inputs and outputs of these bacterial sensors.

Study co-authors Sean Colgan and Ian Cartwright read about the pH sensor and contacted Tabor to see if it could be adapted for use in a mouse model of Crohn's disease.

"It turns out that measuring pH in the intestine through noninvasive ways is difficult," said Colgan. Brink spent a few weeks splicing the necessary sensor circuits into an organism and sent it to Colgan's lab.

"Correlating intestinal gene expression with the bacterial pH-sensing bacteria proved to be a useful and valuable set of biomarkers for active inflammation in the intestine," Colgan said.

Added David Rockcliffe, a program director in NSF's Division of Molecular and Cellular Biosciences, "Engineering organisms is a growing technology that has the potential to be transformative to our health and wellness practices by allowing us to pursue avenues of investigation that were previously unimagined."

Culled from National Science Foundation

What is Python Programming Language?

Python is an interpreted, object-oriented, high-level programming language with dynamic semantics. It can be used for a wide variety of applications- back end development, software development, data science and writing system scripts.

Python was conceived in the late 1980s by Guido van Rossum at Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI) in the Netherlands as a successor to ABC programming language, which was inspired by SETL, capable of exception handling and interfacing with the Amoeba operating system. Its implementation began in December 1989.

Python is an open-source programming language and can be downloaded  for free at python.org

Example of a simple Python program

New study has scientists re-evaluating brain size and mammalian intelligence

Scientists at Stony Brook University and the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior have pieced together a timeline of how brain and body size evolved in mammals over the last 150 million years. The findings, published in Science Advances, show that brain size relative to body size -- long considered an indicator of animal intelligence --has not followed a stable scale over evolutionary time.

The team of scientists, including biologists, evolutionary statisticians and anthropologists, compared the brain mass of 1,400 living and extinct mammals. For the 107 fossils examined -- among them ancient whales and the most ancient Old World monkey skull ever found -- they used endocranial volume data from skulls instead of brain mass data. The brain measurements were then analyzed along with body size to compare the scale of brain size to body size over deep evolutionary time.

According to the U.S. National Science Foundation-funded study, "big-brained" humans, dolphins and elephants, for example, attained their proportions in different ways. Elephants increased in body size, but surprisingly, even more in brain size.

Dolphins, on the other hand, generally decreased in body size, while brain size increased. Great apes showed a wide variety of body sizes, with a general trend toward increases in brain and body size. In comparison, ancestral hominins, which represent the human line, showed a relative decrease in body size and increase in brain size compared to great apes.

The authors say that these complex patterns urge a re-evaluation of the paradigm that comparing brain size to body size for any species provides a measure of the species' intelligence.

"This study highlights the power and importance of comparative phylogenetic analyses to provide new insights into the evolution of complex traits," says Christopher Schneider, a program director in NSF’s Division of Environmental Biology. "The findings dramatically alter our understanding of how brain and body size have evolved."

Culled from National Science Foundation