1: A new whole animal connectome dropped this month, this time for a three-day-old larva of the annelid worm Platynereis dumerilii. It contains 9162 cells, 1642 neurons, and 28,717 presynaptic sites. This is the third whole animal synaptic connectome mapped after
How do you interpret data shown in the figure for 3d reconstructions of different nervous system modules? It is a beautiful connection of interspersed and colorful lines, but what can be drawn just from looking at the figure?
Fantastic question. Most broadly it's basically a clustering exercise, which is helpful for exploring the data and understanding it, but risks oversimplifying. My main takeaway from it is that there are different aspects of the nervous system that can be decomposed into different functional roles in a seemingly coherent manner.
It's also interesting that the ciliomotor system seems to be one of the most central modules. This controls the movement of cilia, which are hair-like structures on the surface of the animal that help it to swim. Didn't know about this at all. Reality is surprisingly complex.
I used to believe that vitrification is intrinsically structurally toxic but actually on a second thought I realize researchers in cryopreservations have done highly suboptimal and unoptimized work, the use of antioxidants is often lacking and subpotent e.g. nobody used non-electrophillic nrf2 activation and SkQ1 + other pathways (dna repair stimulation, autophagy, alteration of metabolic rate (research correspondence with ischemia reperfusion), also not only are the cryoprotectants and osmolytes being used generally suboptimal, but most importantly cryoprotectants have inner toxicities that are major and probably mitigeable.
As such the premise that doing brain preservation is impossible might simply comes from the fact almost no one on this planet has proper erudition in cytoprotection.
One of the most potent and yet least known cryoprotection is direct antiapoptotism via signaling
How do you interpret data shown in the figure for 3d reconstructions of different nervous system modules? It is a beautiful connection of interspersed and colorful lines, but what can be drawn just from looking at the figure?
Fantastic question. Most broadly it's basically a clustering exercise, which is helpful for exploring the data and understanding it, but risks oversimplifying. My main takeaway from it is that there are different aspects of the nervous system that can be decomposed into different functional roles in a seemingly coherent manner.
It's also interesting that the ciliomotor system seems to be one of the most central modules. This controls the movement of cilia, which are hair-like structures on the surface of the animal that help it to swim. Didn't know about this at all. Reality is surprisingly complex.
I used to believe that vitrification is intrinsically structurally toxic but actually on a second thought I realize researchers in cryopreservations have done highly suboptimal and unoptimized work, the use of antioxidants is often lacking and subpotent e.g. nobody used non-electrophillic nrf2 activation and SkQ1 + other pathways (dna repair stimulation, autophagy, alteration of metabolic rate (research correspondence with ischemia reperfusion), also not only are the cryoprotectants and osmolytes being used generally suboptimal, but most importantly cryoprotectants have inner toxicities that are major and probably mitigeable.
As such the premise that doing brain preservation is impossible might simply comes from the fact almost no one on this planet has proper erudition in cytoprotection.
One of the most potent and yet least known cryoprotection is direct antiapoptotism via signaling
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12207004/
that and biomimetics
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34321676/
Since nobody has done even a single comprehensive combination therapy, it follows that nobody actually cares about killing death