Month: July 2014

Technion and German Researchers Successfully Develop the World’s Smallest Propeller that may be able to Move within the Human Body

In the future, it will enable the development of a drug delivery system capable of penetrating the cell with the aid of a relatively low magnetic field

German and Technion scientists managed to successfully develop the world’s smallest propeller driven by an external rotating magnetic field. This is what has been reported by the scientific journal “ACS Nano.” The scientists hope that this technology will allow development of a drug delivery system directed at cells with penetration capability with the aid of a relatively low magnetic field in the future.

“Tissue and biological fluids are complex viscoelastic media, with a nanoporous macromolecular structure. We show that nano-sized screw propellers can be accurately navigated in biomimetic gel (i.e.  a synthetic imitation of biological gel),” explains Associate Professor Alex Leshansky from the Faculty of Chemical Engineering. Professor Leshansky co-authored the article with Dr. Morozov and the group of Professor Peer Fisher from the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems in Germany. “The diameter of these nano-screws (that is, propellers similar to bacterial flagellum that are driven by rotation, like a corkscrew) is about 70 nanometers and they are smaller than previously reported nano-propellers as well as any motile microorganism. We have demonstrated that although the nano-propellers are too tiny to be controllably steered in liquids such as water due to random Brownian motion, they are able to move in viscous fluids (such as glycerin) with velocities similar to micro-propellers (that is, propellers the size of micro-meters).  However, nano-propellers that are driven through a gel have a significant advantage: their dimensions are of the same size range as the gel’s mesh size. As a result, within the gel, the nano-propellers actually display significantly enhanced propulsion velocities, exceeding the highest speeds measured in glycerin as compared with micro-propellers, which show very low or negligible propulsion. The nano-screws have a significant potential for applications in extracellular environments, and furthermore, they are sufficiently small to be taken up by cells”

In the illustration:

Picture 1: SEM image (taken by a scanning electron microscope) of a nano-propeller (on the left); a schematic drawing of a nano-propeller moving in gel and its track (on the right). The polymeric mesh structures hinders the larger helices from translating effectively, whereas smaller propellers with a diameter close to the mesh size can pass through the network without being affected by the macroscopic viscoelasticity caused by the entangled polymer chains.

The Board of Governors June events this year marked the inauguration of major new
facilities: the D. Dan and Betty Kahn Mechanical Engineering Building, and the Farkas / Stone Family Facilities. Additional dedications included the Allen and Jewel Prince Molecular Immunology Research Laboratory Complex in the Rappaport Faculty of Medicine; and an apartment in the Zielony Graduate Student Village in honor of Roslyn and Leonard Rosen, and Ira, Shelly, Sydney, Alex and Julia Taub.

Prizes recognized research innovation and academic excellence, and there was a celebration in honor of Amos Horev’s 90th birthday. Gen (Res.) Horev served as Technion president from 1973 to 1982.

Eugene Kandel, Head of the National Economic Council, Prime Minister’s Office, delivered the Yitzhak Modai Annual Lecture on Technology and Economics. Other invited speakers included Aharon Aharon, Senior Director, Apple Israel, who addressed the question: “Israeli High-Tech: Is There a Recipe for Success?” and Prof. Dan Ben-David, Executive Director, Taub Center for Social Policy Studies in Israel, who will spoke on “The Start-Up Nation’s Threat from Within,” as part of a session on education as the key to closing social gaps.

Three new Technion scientists told their personal stories, “Why I Chose Technion.” Another highlight was a visit to the “LABSCAPES” exhibition, where 29 enlarged and stunning views through the microscope are on display in the Elyachar Central Library Gallery.

Roundtable discussion groups were held on key Technion issues: Encouraging Technion faculty and students to begin start-ups; Technion as a global institution; increasing the number of women students and faculty; increasing the number of candidates, nationally, for science and technology studies; and, how to increase support and activity by Technion alumni.

Awards to public figures and Technion supporters:

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Technion breakthrough opens new avenues for Alzheimer’s cure

HAIFA, ISRAEL and NEW YORK (July 10, 2014) – Alzheimer’s disease affects approximately 5.2 million people in the United States alone, and it is the nation’s sixth leading cause of death.  A cure for this insidious killer has so far proven elusive, but that could soon change as a result of a breakthrough at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology that sheds light on a key mechanism in the accumulation of protein plaques in the tissue of Alzheimer’s disease patients.

The findings were published online this week by Nature Chemical Biology.

“Proteins that constitute major building blocks of our body cells continuously pass through quality control,” explains team leader Prof. Michael Glickman, of the Faculty of Biology. “Defective proteins are sent to the proteasome, a molecular machine (found in all of our cells) that eliminates defective proteins by recycling them back to their building blocks. But a small number of them slip through this process. Proteins that evade the proteasome accumulate, and may be harmful when they reach a critical mass, which is often the case at an advanced age.”

The researchers’ breakthrough findings are centered on UBB +1, a mutation prevalent in Alzheimer’s disease patients.  The mutation impairs a protein called ubiquitin* that marks other proteins to be dismantled at the proteasome.

Previously, the prevailing view among scientists was that UBB +1 impairs the functioning of the proteasome itself.  But in her doctoral dissertation under the guidance of Prof. Glickman, Dr. Daria Krutauz found that in the presence of UBB+1, damaged proteins are apprehended on their way to the proteasome, and accumulate without reaching their final recycling destination.  As a result, they have more opportunity to form the deadly plaque associated with Alzheimer’s disease.

“Because our findings run contrary to what was previously believed, this discovery opens new venues for intervention in the hope of developing a cure for Alzheimer’s disease,” says Prof. Glickman.

The research team was comprised of Prof. Michael Glickman, Dr. Daria Krutauz and Lab Manager Noa Reis, in collaboration with team members in the labs of Prof. David Fushman at the University of Maryland, Prof. Steve Gygi at Harvard Medical School and Prof. Ashraf Brik at Ben Gurion University.

In the photos: Prof. Michael Glickman, Dr. Daria Krutauz

* In 2004, Distinguished Professors Avram Hershko and Aaron Ciechanover of the Technion, and Prof. Ernie Rose from the Fox Chase Institute were awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry for their discovery of ubiquitin.

Iron Dome, developed by Technion graduates, again defends Israel.

Read more.

An interdisciplinary research group from the Technion revealed for the first time the optical role of glial cells in the retina for the improvement of vision. Until today, the retina was known for its conversion of light into electric signals as well as the initial processing of the visual information. However, the Technion group showed that the retina is also a sophisticated optical structure.

The research shows how light passes the eye to fall on the retina, only to be separated into colors by funnel-shaped glial (Müller) cells, functioning as optical fibers spanning the retinal depth.

These cells collect and guide efficiently the green-red colors down to the cone photoreceptors, the light detectors responsible for day time color vision, and, at the same time, allowing the blue and violet colors to scatter out to the surrounding rod photoreceptors, active at night time. This color separation improves the daytime peripheral vision up to ten times, without impairing night vision.

The light guiding and color sorting explain why the vertebrate retina has a seemingly inverted structure, with photoreceptors set behind layers of neural cells and cell nuclei, rather than in front of them.

The researchers built a computer model predicting the color guiding in the retinas of humans and other diurnal mammals. This model was validated in the laboratory, where light was measured while passing through the retina, along the glial cells, down to the photoreceptors. Indeed, the experiments showed the concentration of green-red light inside the glial cells, down to the cones, with the blue-violet colors to the nearby rods.

The research was performed by graduate students Amichai Labin and Shadi Safuri, supervised by Erez Ribak and Ido Perlman, from the Faculties of Physics and Medicine, and was published in Nature Communications.

Assistant Professor Avi Avital is taming rats to detect explosives and construct animal models as a working platform for the treatment of diseases such as schizophrenia.

Assistant Professor Avi Avital from the Technion’s Rappaport Faculty of Medicine, is training rats in an attempt to build (along with Professors Moshe Gabish and John Finberg) – a working model for the treatment of neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson’s and Huntington. He recently built a working model to validate symptoms of schizophrenia: “We gave rats a low sub-anesthetic dose of ketamine (a veterinary anesthetic) and exposed them to stress to build a working model for the treatment of schizophrenia – for an understanding of the factors responsible for disease outbreak and experimental platforms for drug development.”

As part of an applied research study, Assistant Professor Avital succeeded in taming rats to detect explosives. “Rats have a highly developed sense of smell and we succeeded in taming them to identify scents of explosive materials,” he said. “The insights from a study of rat models are being implemented in dog training in a collaborative study with the Israel Ministry of Defense and the United States Army (USA).”

“In an extensive mapping study we conducted, we exposed rats to stress at different periods of their lives, and we found that the critical period for exposure to stress is during the same transition period between childhood and adolescence in humans,” he said.

On the account of an NIH grant from the American Defense Department, Assistant Professor Avital built a sophisticated laboratory of behavioral biology, which is studying rats mainly in the area of attention and social interaction, in combination with behavioral aspects of physiological and pharmacological research. In parallel of performing his clinical research, which he conducts at the Emek Medical Center in Afula, he continues his work with dogs. Recently, he developed a device that simulates explosive materials as part of a systematic and safe dog training process. In this field he newly demonstrated the importance of the link between stress level and attention of a dog’s customary ability to execute various tasks. He also found that if the dog detects one type of explosive, he is capable of generalizing and identifying other types of explosives. “We have shown that this ability to generalize is found in the same brain region of both dogs and rats,” he explained.

Assistant Professor Avital developed a way to train rats through behavioral shaping procedures. He clothes rats with a “vest” that is connected to tiny metals imbedded under the rat’s skin (using a minimal-pain procedure). The rat feels a light tap – he taught them that when the tap is felt on the right hand side to turn left, and vice versa. When tapping both shoulders, the rat will stop, etc.

In the study investigating social cooperation, Assistant Professor Avital built a labyrinth that is controlled automatically by software and a camera through which rats learn social cooperation. “Female rats cooperate better than males,” he emphasized.

Assistant Professor Avital’s work is unique because it is beyond translational science (circumspect conclusions of a rat model to humans); he conducts half translational science, that is: he makes inferences from one animal (rats) to another (dogs). Using behavioral, physiological and pharmacological methods, Assistant Professor Avital focuses on attention and social cooperation in all research levels aforementioned.

In the photo:

A lab rat and an illustration depicting the laboratory and Assistant Professor Avital’s work methods.

The video displays a rat dressed in a “vest.”

Pilot study of circadian rhythm changes in human serum lipids and oxidative stress: effects of Pomegranate extract (POMx), Simvastatin, and Metformin therapies in hypercholesterolemic and diabetic patients vs. healthy subjects

The Lipid Research Laboratory, Rambam Health Care Campus, The Rappaport Faculty of Medicine and Research Institute, Technion- Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa

The present pilot study analyzed lipids, oxidative stress and antioxidants and their ability to affect macrophage atherogenicity, in sera from healthy subjects and from hypercholesterolemic or diabetic patients, collected during a 24 hour cycle, before and after treatment with pomegranate extract (POMx), simvastatin, or metformin.

In healthy subjects, but not in hypercholesterolemic patients, HDL-cholesterol levels showed circadian changes with maximal levels in the afternoon. In diabetics, serum LDL-cholesterol levels showed circadian rhythms, with an increase in the afternoon followed by a decrease during the evening. After POMx or metformin treatment, these circadian changes were completely abolished. We conclude that circadian rhythms exist in levels of human serum lipids, glucose, and oxidative stress, as well as in macrophage atherogenicity. Appropriate treatment (antioxidant, hypocholesterolemic, or anti-diabetic) may be indicated according to the circadian pattern.

Tony Hayek1,2#, Mira Rosenblat2#,  Nina Volkova2, Judith Attias3, Riad Mahamid1 , Shadi Hamoud1, Michael Aviram2*

Figure explanation: “The biological clock of blood lipids”.

Circadian changes in blood levels of cholesterol, LDL (“the bad cholesterol”), HDL (“the good cholesterol”) and triglycerides , along 24 hours of the day in healthy subject.