SCItations

I heard a great talk yesterday by Dr. Patrik Rorsman from the University of Oxford, who has a new way of thinking about type 2 diabetes. He believes some individuals who develop the disease may have a deficit in insulin exocytosis, but not by the mechanism that anyone would have predicted. It is abundantly clear that type-2 diabetes is not caused by a lack of available insulin in the pancreas. Therefore, Dr. Rorsman hypothesized that the mechanism of exocytic release of insulin may be perturbed in diabetic patients. However, when he made classical measurements to detect exocytic release in primary tissues, such as amperometry of cargo release and monitoring membrane capacitance, he saw no differences between healthy and diseased cells. It wasn’t until he engineered an elegant ATP-sensitive, feedback biosensor into his recording set-up that he detected a difference in exocytosis. What he found suggests that the equilibrium between kiss-and-run and full-fusion exoc...

As I’m reading through the abstracts for Biophysics 2018, I can’t help but get excited about all the cutting-edge research there is to discover at this meeting! Although my schedule is double and triple booked with talks and posters, I’ve bookmarked one of each type of presentation as absolute must-sees. Check it out! Sub-group Saturday talk: Progress in developing (single) inorganic voltage nanosensors Shimon Weiss (Bar Ilan University; UCLA) Nanoscale Biophysics Subgroup; Esplanade, Room 160 Saturday, 1:35 PM Why I’m excited: This is an approach to voltage-imaging that I’m not familiar with. Although great improvements have been made to genetically encoded voltage sensors, non-invasive voltage imaging is another story. I anticipate some impressive movies at this talk of membrane-embedded nanosensors detecting single action potentials! Platform talk: Dissecting function and distribution of sodium channels and gap junctional proteins using super-resolution patch-cla...

Just a quick announcement: The next couple posts are going to be cross-published on the Biophysical Society blog as part of their national meeting. I get to write about exciting, often unpublished biophysics research while I attend the conference. Exciting! You can visit the BPS blog here , or just continue reading on this site. Enjoy!

Last week I learned something wild about our brains and bodies that has to do with the way we taste food. It turns out our body knows when we are eating something nutritive or when we are just eating junk. Okay, I know you’re freaking out right now because somehow your brain is keeping track of when you eat a kale salad vs. a fried chicken thigh – like Santa making his naughty vs nice list – but that’s not quite what I mean. What I mean is that your brain knows when the food you’re eating contains calories or not. The crazy thing is that when your fed and happy, your brain doesn’t care whether you eat energy-rich foods or not and your preferences are dominated by flavor. However, if you find yourself stranded on a desert island going on a week without food, your brain is going to know whether you climbed that tree for the juicy, sweet coconut or whether you slammed that last Sweet-N-Low packet you’ve been saving in your pocket since your plane crashed. This is research I heard ab...