Millions of people worldwide suffer from diseases that lead to paralysis through disruption of signal pathways between the brain and the muscles. Neuroprosthetic devices are designed to restore lost function and could be used to form an electronic ‘neural bypass’ to circumvent disconnected pathways in the nervous system. It has previously been shown that intracortically recorded signals can be decoded to extract information related...
Tag Archives: Functional
Charlie Sheen shows interest in CytoDyn, which just raised $33M to develop ‘functional cure’ for HIV
If you are one of the 1.2 million Americans living with HIV, your treatment options are basically limited to taking a regimen of antiviral pills.
The functional diversity of retinal ganglion cells in the mouse
In the vertebrate visual system, all output of the retina is carried by retinal ganglion cells. Each type encodes distinct visual features in parallel for transmission to the brain. How many such ‘output channels’ exist and what each encodes are areas of intense debate. In the mouse, anatomical estimates range from 15 to 20 channels, and only a handful are functionally understood. By combining...
Plant functional traits have globally consistent effects on competition
Phenotypic traits and their associated trade-offs have been shown to have globally consistent effects on individual plant physiological functions, but how these effects scale up to influence competition, a key driver of community assembly in terrestrial vegetation, has remained unclear. Here we use growth data from more than 3 million trees in over 140,000 plots across the world to show how three key functional...
Functional overlap of the Arabidopsis leaf and root microbiota
Roots and leaves of healthy plants host taxonomically structured bacterial assemblies, and members of these communities contribute to plant growth and health. We established Arabidopsis leaf- and root-derived microbiota culture collections representing the majority of bacterial species that are reproducibly detectable by culture-independent community sequencing. We found an extensive taxonomic overlap between the leaf and root microbiota. Genome drafts of 400 isolates revealed a...