This week’s Nature publication by researchers of Probiodrug AG and the University of Virginia has received broad coverage in the international media. In Germany and Austria, it made major news in TV (ARD, MDR, ORF) and radio stations (dlf, MDR, dradio), while in the US Rudy Tanzi, neurogeneticist of Harvard Medical School and an advisor on the Alzheimer problem to US-President Barack Obama, was quoted in ScienceNews as saying: “This opens up a whole new view of the disease.”

Alzheimer researcher Thomas Bayer, Professor of Molecular Psychiatry  at the University of Goettingen added in MDR INFO that the publication was “a very important contribution”, demonstrating that very small amounts of pGlu Abeta were able to drag normal Abeta peptides along into the deadly cascade and that tau protein was essential for the toxic function.  » Read more...

Angioplasty is the most common medical intervention in the world today – more than 2 million coronary artery patients are treated  each year with balloon dilations or stents to widen coronary arteries with the goal to restore normal blood flow to the heart. While the procedure is beneficial in the first place, restenosis is a frequent event in the months after the intervention. It occurs in 10-20% of patients who received coronary artery stents and in up to 50% of patients who had undergone balloon angioplasty. In patients receiving drug-eluting stents (DES), restenosis rate is about 5%. However, these stents in the long run pose the risk of thrombosis. So far, no causal treatment of restenosis is available.  » Read more...

How to improve user attention to your website? This is a crucial question because visitors decide in less than five seconds on whether to proceed and look further or to just click away.

Based on insights of neuroscience, the German company Whitematter Labs GmbH has developed EyeQuant, a  patent-pending neurotechnology that helps companies optimize user attention.

The web-based tools identify the most eye-catching elements of a website using a predictive neuroscience model of human attention. The technology is based on eye-tracking data gathered in studies with several hundred human subjects conducted by visual neuroscientist Peter Koenig and his Neurobiopsychology Lab at the University of Osnabrueck, Germany.

The analysis can be performed by uploading screenshots to the EyeQuant website and is answering crucial questions: what will users see at first glance? Which elements of the website garner most attention? What are the regions of interest?  » Read more...

All biomolecules operate and interact in aqueous solutions, surrounded by a characteristic hydration shell. Virtually any conformational change of a biomolecule, e.g. the formation of a protein-protein complex or the binding of a small molecule, results in a change of the individual hydration shell.

A German company called NanoTemper Technologies has found a way to easily monitor these specific changes in the hydration shell and to derive quantitative information on interactions, conformational changes and macromolecular stability. The beauty of the concept termed Microscale Thermophoresis (MST) lies in its ability to observe and measure various parameters, such as affinities and binding energetics, at conditions which almost fully mirror the native environment of the biomolecules found in cells.  » Read more...

Patients suffering from the autoimmune disease systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) develop autoantibodies to chromatin and often to neutrophil proteins as well. As immune complexes of these antibodies can be deposited in kidneys, they contribute to the frequent and dangerous organ manifestation of lupus nephritis.

Recent studies suggest that neutrophil extracellular traps (NETs) might act as a source of autoantigens. NETs consist of chromatin as well as granule proteins and play an important role in immune defense after their release from neutrophils to sites of infection. Degradation of NETs is mainly promoted by DNase1 digestion which is impaired in a subset of SLE patients. A strong correlation between NET degradation status and lupus nephritis, e.g. glomerulonephritis, has been shown and therefore offers a new diagnostic method for detecting an increased risk of SLE patients to develop renal manifestations.  » Read more...