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Neuron :- By Juan Fuentes.
My sister Jan and I went to London to see the Winter Lights and Art Exhibition dotted around Canary Wharf, we also photographed some of the interesting bar / restaurants, plus the occasional architectural detail of other buildings.
When muscles work out, they help neurons to grow, a new study shows. The findings suggest that exercise's biochemical and physical effects could help heal nerves.
Jennifer Chu | MIT News
Publication Date:
November 12, 2024
Two textured green balls have a purple center.
Caption:
In response to biochemical and physical cues of exercise, motor neurons (in purple) exhibit new growth (in green) faster than neurons that experience no exercise-induced cues.
Credits:
Credit: Angel Bu
Two columns show, top, circular neurons. On bottom, they both have many tendrils growing.
Caption:
MIT scientists find that motor neuron growth increased significantly over 5 days in response to biochemical (left) and mechanical (right) signals related to exercise. The green ball represents cluster of neurons that grow outward in long tails, or axons.
Credits:
Credit: Angel Bu
There’s no doubt that exercise does a body good. Regular activity not only strengthens muscles but can bolster our bones, blood vessels, and immune system.
Now, MIT engineers have found that exercise can also have benefits at the level of individual neurons. They observed that when muscles contract during exercise, they release a soup of biochemical signals called myokines. In the presence of these muscle-generated signals, neurons grew four times farther compared to neurons that were not exposed to myokines. These cellular-level experiments suggest that exercise can have a significant biochemical effect on nerve growth.
Surprisingly, the researchers also found that neurons respond not only to the biochemical signals of exercise but also to its physical impacts. The team observed that when neurons are repeatedly pulled back and forth, similarly to how muscles contract and expand during exercise, the neurons grow just as much as when they are exposed to a muscle’s myokines.
While previous studies have indicated a potential biochemical link between muscle activity and nerve growth, this study is the first to show that physical effects can be just as important, the researchers say. The results, which are published today in the journal Advanced Healthcare Materials, shed light on the connection between muscles and nerves during exercise, and could inform exercise-related therapies for repairing damaged and deteriorating nerves.
“Now that we know this muscle-nerve crosstalk exists, it can be useful for treating things like nerve injury, where communication between nerve and muscle is cut off,” says Ritu Raman, the Eugene Bell Career Development Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering at MIT. “Maybe if we stimulate the muscle, we could encourage the nerve to heal, and restore mobility to those who have lost it due to traumatic injury or neurodegenerative diseases.”
Raman is the senior author of the new study, which includes Angel Bu, Ferdows Afghah, Nicolas Castro, Maheera Bawa, Sonika Kohli, Karina Shah, and Brandon Rios of MIT’s Department of Mechanical Engineering, and Vincent Butty of MIT’s Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research.
Muscle talk
In 2023, Raman and her colleagues reported that they could restore mobility in mice that had experienced a traumatic muscle injury, by first implanting muscle tissue at the site of injury, then exercising the new tissue by stimulating it repeatedly with light. Over time, they found that the exercised graft helped mice to regain their motor function, reaching activity levels comparable to those of healthy mice.
When the researchers analyzed the graft itself, it appeared that regular exercise stimulated the grafted muscle to produce certain biochemical signals that are known to promote nerve and blood vessel growth.
“That was interesting because we always think that nerves control muscle, but we don’t think of muscles talking back to nerves,” Raman says. “So, we started to think stimulating muscle was encouraging nerve growth. And people replied that maybe that’s the case, but there’s hundreds of other cell types in an animal, and it’s really hard to prove that the nerve is growing more because of the muscle, rather than the immune system or something else playing a role.”
In their new study, the team set out to determine whether exercising muscles has any direct effect on how nerves grow, by focusing solely on muscle and nerve tissue. The researchers grew mouse muscle cells into long fibers that then fused to form a small sheet of mature muscle tissue about the size of a quarter.
The team genetically modified the muscle to contract in response to light. With this modification, the team could flash a light repeatedly, causing the muscle to squeeze in response, in a way that mimicked the act of exercise. Raman previously developed a novel gel mat on which to grow and exercise muscle tissue. The gel’s properties are such that it can support muscle tissue and prevent it from peeling away as the researchers stimulated the muscle to exercise.
The team then collected samples of the surrounding solution in which the muscle tissue was exercised, thinking that the solution should hold myokines, including growth factors, RNA, and a mix of other proteins.
“I would think of myokines as a biochemical soup of things that muscles secrete, some of which could be good for nerves and others that might have nothing to do with nerves,” Raman says. “Muscles are pretty much always secreting myokines, but when you exercise them, they make more.”
“Exercise as medicine”
The team transferred the myokine solution to a separate dish containing motor neurons — nerves found in the spinal cord that control muscles involved in voluntary movement. The researchers grew the neurons from stem cells derived from mice. As with the muscle tissue, the neurons were grown on a similar gel mat. After the neurons were exposed to the myokine mixture, the team observed that they quickly began to grow, four times faster than neurons that did not receive the biochemical solution.
Animation of green circles expanding during two stimulations: biochemical and mechanical.
MIT scientists find that motor neuron growth increased significantly over 5 days in response to biochemical and mechanical signals related to exercise. The green ball represents cluster of neurons that grow outward in long tails, or axons.
Credit: Angel Bu
“They grow much farther and faster, and the effect is pretty immediate,” Raman notes.
For a closer look at how neurons changed in response to the exercise-induced myokines, the team ran a genetic analysis, extracting RNA from the neurons to see whether the myokines induced any change in the expression of certain neuronal genes.
“We saw that many of the genes up-regulated in the exercise-stimulated neurons was not only related to neuron growth, but also neuron maturation, how well they talk to muscles and other nerves, and how mature the axons are,” Raman says. “Exercise seems to impact not just neuron growth but also how mature and well-functioning they are.”
The results suggest that biochemical effects of exercise can promote neuron growth. Then the group wondered: Could exercise’s purely physical impacts have a similar benefit?
“Neurons are physically attached to muscles, so they are also stretching and moving with the muscle,” Raman says. “We also wanted to see, even in the absence of biochemical cues from muscle, could we stretch the neurons back and forth, mimicking the mechanical forces (of exercise), and could that have an impact on growth as well?”
To answer this, the researchers grew a different set of motor neurons on a gel mat that they embedded with tiny magnets. They then used an external magnet to jiggle the mat — and the neurons — back and forth. In this way, they “exercised” the neurons, for 30 minutes a day. To their surprise, they found that this mechanical exercise stimulated the neurons to grow just as much as the myokine-induced neurons, growing significantly farther than neurons that received no form of exercise.
“That’s a good sign because it tells us both biochemical and physical effects of exercise are equally important,” Raman says.
Now that the group has shown that exercising muscle can promote nerve growth at the cellular level, they plan to study how targeted muscle stimulation can be used to grow and heal damaged nerves, and restore mobility for people who are living with a neurodegenerative disease such as ALS.
“This is just our first step toward understanding and controlling exercise as medicine,” Raman says.
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Paper
“Actuating Extracellular Matrices Decouple the Mechanical and Biochemical Effects of Muscle Contraction on Motor Neurons”
Ritu Raman
Department of Mechanical Engineering
School of Engineering
NEURON intelligence has been unable to determine how this angel came into possession of the lost lance of Longinus.
A Mandelbrot fractal created with the Fractal Science Kit fractal generator. See www.fractalsciencekit.com/ for details.
Superposición de dos imágenes:
Base.- Microfotografía de una preparación de Cerebro de Rata. Tinción: Método Rápido de Golgi.
Superpuesta.-Fragmentos de Tela de Araña de ventana abandonada.
Two pictures Overlap.
Base.- Microphotography of Rat Brain slide. Stain: Golgi Method.
Overlap.- Spider Web fragments, from abandoned window.
- Esta no es una fotografía científica.
Pienso, que es una fantasía
humorístca para valoración estética.
- This is not a scientific photo. I know
is a humoristic fantasy for aesthetic
valuation.
My Website : Twitter : Facebook : Instagram : Photocrowd
I'd happened upon it once before but didn't have my camera with me so it was good to visit the Neuron Pod during last October's London Flickr Group Whitechapel photowalk. I'm sure there are better photos to be taken of this strange alien looking porcupine made of rusty steel but the weather really wasn't playing ball.
Our next photowalk is planned for Saturday 15th March, more info here if you're interested in coming along : www.flickr.com/groups/londonflickrgroup/discuss/721577219...
Click here to see more of London architecture : www.flickr.com/photos/darrellg/albums/72157635041185106
From the Guardian, "Based on a nerve cell, the architect’s posthumous addition to London’s Blizard laboratory complex is so lovable, you almost want to give it a cuddle
Thrusting its bristly bottom out into the road, a curious spiny creature has landed in the backstreets of Whitechapel, London. Standing like an intergalactic porcupine, covered with long glowing quills that sway gently in the breeze, it is a startling thing to encounter in this unremarkable corner of hospital buildings and curry houses.
This is the £2m Neuron Pod, one of the last posthumous works of architect Will Alsop, who proves that he is still eminently capable of making mischief from beyond the grave. The project marks the latest addition to Queen Mary University of London’s campus, an informal science learning space for the armies of schoolchildren who benefit from the teaching hospital’s lively education programme. It is a classroom, but not as we know it."
© D.Godliman
if we could see each
neuron as a mother cell,
the sheath
communicating, reverberating with
the music of
the spheres -
the colourshape of an orchid, her lips singing networks
over her columns and into other networks, leaving
stigmata behind. and only the conductor can call and
harness this excitability into a symphony of sheer
beauty, knowing the
nuances
of the deliveries of incipiens mediam
finem. a lesson in the delicate strands - intimations - of
immortality.
Then and only then, when we understand
the lessons of orchids and neurons, will we see and be
healed. and everything -
everything -
will look as it never has
before.
[eep©]
The Neuron Pod, part of the Blizard Institute of Cell and Molecular Science in Whitechapel. It houses the Centre of the Cell, a science education centre.
It was designed by architect Will Alsop and opened in 2019.
Serie 2 - 1.
Collage demencial. / Cracy collage.
Los Canales de Marte se convierten en neuronas !.
El color verde es propio de estos seres tan simpáticos e inteligentes.
Mars Channels become neurons !.
Green colour is distintive of these so nice and intelligent beings.
100+ Morons Lacking 100+ Billion Neurons - IMRAN™
Million Unmasked March. 150 marchers. This was definitely a successful march, in support of Darwin. You see, they actually meant it would be a march of people with special “thinking” powers and better information sources compared to us ordinary, educated, “sheeple” people who believe in science, facts, and, you know, common sense. Each of these marchers probably has only up to 1 million (no-)brain cells (morons), compared to ~100 billion brain cells (neurons) in a normal human brain. 😄
© 2020 IMRAN™
#covidiots #CoronaVirus #pandemic #neurons #morons #humor #science #brain #intelligence
"Dopo alcuni slanci eleganti, sono saltate. Per i primi microsecondi è stato perfetto. Dentro di me ho provato la stessa perfezione, pare che sia una storia di "neuroni specchio": quando guardiamo qualcuno compiere un'azione, nella nostra testa si attivano gli stessi neuroni attivati da chi compie l'azione, senza che noi facciamo nulla. Un tuffo acrobatico senza muoversi dal divano, sgranocchiando patatine: è per quello che ci piace guardare lo sport in tivù.."