Apr 7, 2017

Effects of Emotion on ProsopagnosiaAllaskah Osmondson '17

Prosopagnosia, also known as ‘face-blindness’, is a disease in which the affected individual is unable to recognize and identify faces. It is both developmental and acquired, in the case of acquired the individual had sustained some kind of brain injury to the portion of the brain that deals with facial recognition, with developmental the individual has no, visible, brain injury, but is unable to recognize the identity of faces. This study explores whether prosopagnosia is affected by facial emotion. The study tested this question by exposing a patient, PS, who has acquired prosopagnosia, to different stimuli. These stimuli included different facial emotions and face vs house photos. In the facial emotion study the authors exposed the patient to the target photo, and seven distracter photos and the patient’s goal was to identify the target photo in the least amount of time. In the face vs house study the authors exposed the patient to side by side photos of a house and a face, then the image goes black and comes back with minor changes to either the house, face, or house and face. The patient then is challenged to tell which image(s) had differences. It was no surprise that the patient with prosopagnosia was better at noticing the differences between the house photos than the face photos. Similarly, in the experiment with the facial emotion the patient with prosopagnosia performed as expected. She was much quicker at identifying faces with emotion (happy, sad) than faces without emotion (neutral emotion). All-in-all patient PS performed as expected in each experiment.

Association of Feeding and Birth Mode on the Intestinal Microbiome in 6-Week Old InfantsJordan Schiffler '17The human body is home to nearly 40 trillion microorganisms, the majority of which live in the digestive tract. These microorganisms make up an essential community, the microbiome. The microbiome is considered beneficial to the human host, contributing to nutrition and digestion, aiding in immune response, and protecting the human host from pathogens. There is a growing health concern around the establishment of the microbiome in newborns, particularly those in the intestinal tract. Both Caesarean section and breastfeeding alternative, formula, have been associated with adverse health effects including obesity, infection, asthma and diabetes. A large amount of research has examined differences in the microbiome as a mechanism behind these adverse effects. An increasing amount of studies looked at the difference in infant gut microbiota between Caesarean section versus vaginal delivery and separately between breast-fed infants and formula-fed infants. However, little is known about the combination of diet and delivery mode and their impact on the microbiome of infants. There have been no published studies about combination diets of both breast and formula-fed infants and its impact on the microbiome. To investigate this area of study, Madan Et. al performed a cohort birth study of 102 infants. They examined the microbial composition through the utilization of infant stool samples provided at the 6-week postnatal follow-up visit. The stool samples went through DNA extraction and were sequenced using 16S rRNA. Through UniFrac analyses, the researchers were able to conclude that delivery mode was more strongly associated with infant microbiome than diet at 6 weeks. Also, they concluded that the microbiome was more alike between combination formula and exclusive formula than combination feeding and breast milk, which supports the World Health Organization’s promotion of exclusive breastfeeding. This data highlights the importance of diet and delivery mode on the microbiome in the intestinal tract of 6-week old infants.

A Link between Metabolism, Longevity, and TrpV1 in MiceSam Gordenier '17

While it seems unlikely that a pain receptor responsible for detecting heat would have a negative impact on the metabolism and lifespan of an organism, tests done on lab mice suggests that there is a link between metabolic rates, lifespan, and certain pain receptors. The transient receptor potential cation channel subfamily V member 1(TRPV1) is a protein responsible for the regulation of body temperature, detection of direct heat on skin, and primarily the sensation of heat from capsaicin. By studying knockout mice that lack the TRPV1 encoding gene, researchers have narrowed down the pain receptor’s role in metabolism and lifespan. Due to TRPV1’s role and effect on calcium-signal cascading, over activity of TRPV1 causes production of calcitonin related-gene peptides (CRGP) that innervate neurons in the pancreas, and build up over time. This causes a decrease in insulin release, leading to a slower metabolism in later stages of the life of mice, and results in many metabolic deficiencies that shorten the lifespan of lab mice. TRPV1 KO mice lived, on average, 12-16% longer than mice that still had the TRPV1 protein, and their metabolic profiles resembled the profiles of younger mice, even at old age.