[Editors] MIT Research Digest, December 2007

[Elizabeth Thomson]

MIT News Office
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Room 11-400
77 Massachusetts Avenue
Cambridge, MA  02139-4307
Phone: 617-253-2700
http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/www

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MIT Research Digest, December 2007
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For Immediate Release
TUESDAY, DEC. 4, 2007
Contact: Elizabeth A. Thomson, MIT News Office -- Phone: 617-258-5402  
-- Email: thomson at mit.edu

A monthly tip-sheet for journalists of recent research advances
at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Latest research news: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/research.html
RSS -- research feed: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/mitresearch-rss.xml


IN THIS ISSUE: Toward Bolstering Brainpower * Study Aid
Prenatal Arsenic Exposure * 'Micro' Livers * Greenhouse Emissions
Nano Tumor Tacklers * Neural Communications * Thermoelectric Materials
'Cocktail' for the Brain * Targeting Breast Cancer * Stem-Cell Therapies
Toward Understanding Malaria * ...and Tuberculosis * Geriatric Health  
Care
Real-Estate Drop * Fruit Fly Genetics * Lung Cancer * Protein  
Architecture

TOWARD BOLSTERING BRAINPOWER
Bolstering disintegrating neural connections may help boost  
brainpower in Alzheimer's disease patients, MIT researchers and  
colleagues report in a Nov. issue of Neuron. The researchers zeroed  
in on the enzymes that manipulate a key scaffolding protein for  
synapses, the connections through which brain cells communicate.  
Synapses are weakened and lost in neurodegenerative diseases such as  
Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease. “We identified a major  
underlying mechanism through which synapses are strengthened and  
maintained,” said Morgan Sheng, Menicon Professor of Neuroscience at  
MIT's Picower Institute for Learning and Memory. “The enzymes  
involved could be good targets for potential drug treatments.” This  
research is supported by the NIH.
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2007/scaffold-1107.html
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STUDY AID
Imagine you are taking an introductory biology course. You're  
studying for an exam and realize it would be helpful to revisit the  
professor's explanation of RNA interference. Fortunately for you, a  
digital recording of the lecture is online, but the 10-minute  
explanation you want is buried in a 90-minute lecture. A new search  
engine developed at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial  
Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) could help with this dilemma. Created  
by a team led by MIT associate professor Regina Barzilay of the  
Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and  
principal research scientist James Glass, the Web-based technology  
allows users to search hundreds of MIT lectures for key topics.  
Although the prototype system focuses on MIT (web.sls.csail.mit.edu/ 
lectures/), the technology could eventually be applied to lectures  
from around the world. “Our goal is to develop a speech and language  
technology that will help educators provide structure to these video  
recordings, so it's easier for students to access the material,” said  
Glass, who is head of CSAIL's Spoken Language Systems Group. The  
researchers presented their project, currently funded by the NSF, at  
the Interspeech 2007 conference.
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2007/lectures-tt1107.html
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PRENATAL ARSENIC EXPOSURE
The children of mothers whose water supplies were contaminated with  
arsenic during their pregnancies harbored gene expression changes  
that may lead to cancer and other diseases later in life, MIT  
researchers and colleagues reported in a new study. In addition to  
establishing the potential harmful effects of these prenatal  
exposures, the study also provides a possible method for screening  
populations to detect signs of arsenic contamination. This is the  
first time evidence of such genome-wide changes resulting from  
prenatal exposure has ever been documented from any environmental  
contaminant. It suggests that even when water supplies are cleaned up  
and the children never experience any direct exposure to the  
pollutant, they may suffer lasting damage. The research was published  
in the Nov. 23 issue of PLoS Genetics (published by the Public  
Library of Science). The research at MIT was led by Leona Samson,  
Director of MIT's Center for Environmental Health Sciences and the  
American Cancer Society Professor in the Departments of Biological  
Engineering and Biology. This research was funded by the National  
Institutes of Environmental Health Sciences and the Chulabhorn  
Research Institute.
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2007/arsenic-1122.html
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'MICRO' LIVERS
MIT researchers have devised a novel way to create tiny colonies of  
living human liver cells that model the full-sized organ. The work  
could allow better screening of new drugs that are potentially  
harmful to the liver and reduce the costs associated with their  
development. Liver toxicity is one of the main reasons pharmaceutical  
companies pull drugs off the market. The drugs slip through approval  
processes due in part to the shortcomings of liver toxicity tests.  
The new technology arranges human liver cells into tiny colonies only  
500 micrometers (millionths of a meter) in diameter that act much  
like a real liver and survive for up to six weeks. Sangeeta Bhatia,  
associate professor in the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences  
and Technology and MIT's Department of Electrical Engineering and  
Computer Science, and a colleague describe their model liver tissue  
and its behavior in the Nov. 18 online issue of Nature Biotechnology.  
This work was funded by the NSF, the National Institute of Diabetes  
and Digestive and Kidney Diseases, the MIT Deshpande Center, and the  
David and Lucile Packard Foundation.
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2007/liver-1119.html
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GREENHOUSE EMISSIONS
U.S. greenhouse gas emissions could grow more quickly in the next 50  
years than in the previous half-century, and technological change may  
cause increased emissions rather than control them, according to a  
new study by an MIT economist and his colleague. What's more,  
technology itself cannot be relied on as the most efficient tool for  
reducing carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions or solving the global energy  
crisis, said Professor Emeritus Richard Eckaus of the MIT Department  
of Economics and his co-author, Ian Sue Wing, of Boston University.  
Their paper, "The Implications of the Historical Decline in U.S.  
Energy Intensity for Long-Run CO2 Emission Projections," was  
published in the November issue of Energy Policy. In it, the pair  
portray the changing interplay among technology, energy use and CO2  
emissions based on a simulation of the U.S. economy. This work was  
supported by the DOE and the Harvard Kennedy School.
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2007/eckaus-1113.html
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NANO TUMOR TACKLERS
MIT scientists have devised remotely controlled nanoparticles that,  
when pulsed with an electromagnetic field, release drugs to attack  
tumors. The innovation, reported in an online issue of Advanced  
Materials, could lead to the improved diagnosis and targeted  
treatment of cancer. In earlier work the team, led by Sangeeta  
Bhatia, an associate professor in the Harvard-MIT Division of Health  
Sciences & Technology and in MIT's Department of Electrical  
Engineering and Computer Science, developed injectable multi- 
functional nanoparticles designed to flow through the bloodstream,  
home to tumors and clump together. Clumped particles help clinicians  
visualize tumors through magnetic resonance imaging. With the ability  
to see the clumped particles, Bhatia's co-author in the current work,  
Geoff von Maltzahn, asked the next question: “Can we talk back to  
them?” The answer is yes, the team found. The system that makes it  
possible consists of tiny particles (billionths of a meter in size)  
that are superparamagnetic, a property that causes them to give off  
heat when they are exposed to a magnetic field. Tethered to these  
particles are active molecules, such as therapeutic drugs. The  
research was supported by the David and Lucile Packard Foundation,  
the National Cancer Institute, and the University of California  
Biotechnology Research and Educational Program.
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2007/nanodrugs-1120.html
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NEURAL COMMUNICATIONS
MIT researchers have identified a family of proteins key to the  
formation of the communication networks critical for normal brain  
function. Their research could lead to new treatments for brain  
injury and disease. The team, led by MIT biology professor Frank  
Gertler, found that a certain family of proteins is necessary to  
direct the formation of axons and dendrites, the cellular extensions  
that facilitate communication between neurons. The work focuses on  
cellular outgrowths called neurites, which are the precursors to  
axons and dendrites. Understanding how neurites form could eventually  
lead to therapies involving stimulation of neurite growth, said  
Gertler. “You could use these insights to help repair injuries to the  
top of the spinal column, or treat brain injuries or  
neurodegenerative disorders,” he said. The research was funded by the  
NIH and the Stanley Center for Psychiatric Research at the Broad  
Institute of MIT and Harvard.
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2007/nerves-1119.html
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THERMOELECTRIC MATERIALS
Breathing new life into an old idea, MIT Institute Professor Mildred  
Dresselhaus and co-workers are developing innovative materials for  
controlling temperatures that could lead to substantial energy  
savings by allowing more efficient car engines, photovoltaic cells  
and electronic devices. Novel thermoelectric materials have already  
resulted in a new consumer product: a simple, efficient way of  
cooling car seats in hot climates. The devices, similar to the more- 
familiar car seat heaters, provide comfort directly to the individual  
rather than cooling the entire car, saving on air-conditioning and  
energy costs. The research is based on the principle of  
thermoelectric cooling and heating, which was first discovered in the  
early 19th century. Dresselhaus and colleagues are now applying  
nanotechnology and other cutting-edge technologies to the field. She  
described her work toward better thermoelectric materials in an  
invited talk on Monday, Nov. 26 at the annual meeting of the  
Materials Research Society in Boston. Her research on thermoelectric  
materials is sponsored by NASA.
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2007/nanoenergy-1120.html
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'COCKTAIL' FOR THE BRAIN
MIT researchers have shown that a cocktail containing three compounds  
normally in the blood stream promotes growth of new brain connections  
and improves cognitive function in rodents. The treatment is now  
being tested in Alzheimer's patients and could hold promise for other  
brain diseases and injuries. The mixture, which includes a type of  
omega-3 fatty acid, is part of a new approach to attacking  
Alzheimer's. That approach focuses on correcting the loss of  
synapses, or connections between neurons, which characterizes the  
disease. For the past 30 years, researchers have tried targeting the  
clumps of misfolded proteins, known as amyloid beta plaques, found in  
the brains of Alzheimer's patients. However, that approach has not  
yielded any effective treatments for the disease, which affects an  
estimated four million to five million Americans. The current work  
was led by Richard Wurtman, the Cecil H. Green Distinguished  
Professor of Neuropharmacology and senior author of a paper on the  
work in the November issue of Brain Research. The research was funded  
by the NIH and the Center for Brain Sciences and Metabolism  
Charitable Trust.
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2007/alzheimers-1126.html

TARGETING BREAST CANCER
Treating breast cancer with a type of heat therapy derived from MIT  
radar research can significantly increase the effectiveness of  
chemotherapy, according to results from the fourth clinical trial of  
the technique reported online Nov. 25 in the journal Cancer Therapy.   
In this study, large tumors treated with a combination of  
chemotherapy and a focused microwave heat treatment shrunk nearly 50  
percent more than tumors treated with chemotherapy alone. The  
microwave treatment is based on technology originally developed at  
MIT in the late 1980s as a tool for missile detection by Dr. Alan  
Fenn, a senior staff member at MIT's Lincoln Laboratory. “It appears  
that heating the tumors drastically increased the effectiveness of  
the chemotherapy,” said Dr. William Dooley, director of surgical  
oncology at the University of Oklahoma and the principal investigator  
of the study. “The tumors shrank faster and died faster using the  
additional microwave hyperthermia on top of the chemotherapy.”
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2007/cancer-radar-1128.html
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STEM-CELL THERAPIES
Stem cell therapies for the brain could be much more complicated than  
previously thought, an MIT research team's latest finding suggests.  
In a study published in Public Library of Science (PloS) Biology in  
Nov., MIT scientists reported that adult stem cells produced in the  
brain are preprogrammed to make only certain kinds of connections-- 
making it impossible for a neural stem cell originating in the brain  
to be transplanted to the spinal cord, for instance, to take over  
functions for damaged cells. Some researchers hope to use adult stem  
cells produced in the brain to replace neurons lost to damage and  
diseases such as Alzheimer's. The new study calls this into question.  
"It is wishful thinking to hope that adult stem cells will be able to  
modify themselves so that they can become other types of neurons lost  
to injury or disease," said Carlos Lois, assistant professor of  
neuroscience in MIT's Picower Institute for Learning and Memory. This  
work is supported by the NIH.
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2007/stemcells-1130.html
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TOWARD UNDERSTANDING MALARIA
The malaria parasite has been studied for decades, but surprisingly  
little is known about how it behaves in humans to cause disease. Now  
an international team including scientists at the Broad Institute of  
MIT and Harvard has for the first time measured which of the  
parasite's genes are turned on or off during actual infection in  
humans, unearthing surprising behaviors and opening a window on the  
most critical aspects of parasite biology. The work is reported in  
the Nov. 28 advance online edition of Nature. The study's conclusions  
spring from the genomic analysis of parasites in their natural state,  
derived directly from patients residing in Senegal, and also from the  
researchers' use of innovative computational approaches to interpret  
their results. These computational methods helped to identify three  
distinct biological states of the malaria parasite: an active growth- 
based state, a starvation response and an environmental stress  
response, presumably related to the body's inflammatory reaction to  
the parasite. This physiological diversity was previously unknown and  
may help explain the widely varying course of the disease in  
different patients, from mild, flu-like illness to coma and even death.
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2007/malaria-1128.html

...AND TUBERCULOSIS
An international collaboration led by researchers in the US and South  
Africa announced Nov. 20 the first genome sequence of an extensively  
drug resistant strain of the bacterium Mycobacterium tuberculosis,  
one linked to more than 50 deaths in a recent tuberculosis (TB)  
outbreak in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. As part of this work,  
genomes of multi-drug resistant and drug sensitive isolates were also  
decoded. Initial comparisons of the genome sequences reveal that the  
drug-resistant and drug-sensitive microbes differ at only a few dozen  
locations along the four-million-letter DNA code, revealing some  
known drug resistance genes as well as some additional genes that may  
also be important to the spread of TB. "Tuberculosis is a major  
threat to global public health that demands new approaches to disease  
diagnosis and treatment," said Megan Murray, one of the project's  
principal investigators, an associate member of the Broad Institute  
of MIT and Harvard and an associate professor at the Harvard School  
of Public Health. "By looking at the genomes of different strains, we  
can learn how the tuberculosis microbe outwits current drugs and how  
new drugs might be designed."
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2007/tuberculosis-1126.html

GERIATRIC HEALTH CARE
Despite the lack of formal training and monetary compensation,  
families have become a part of the geriatric health care workforce,  
researchers at the MIT Workplace Center at the Sloan School of  
Management have concluded in a new report. "We call family caregivers  
a 'shadow workforce' because the care they are providing is largely  
unseen and unrecognized, especially inside health care institutions,"  
said Ann Bookman, executive director of the MIT Workplace Center.  
This point is underscored in the report, "Caring for the Caregivers,"  
which was prepared for the Massachusetts Executive Office of Elder  
Affairs. The report presented 10 recommendations for improving  
resources for elder caregivers in Massachusetts, such as expanding  
support services, training and wellness programs for caregivers, and  
making elder care information more accessible so that families can  
get help before a crisis arises.
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2007/eldercare-tt1128.html

REAL-ESTATE DROP
The value of U.S. commercial real estate owned by big pension funds  
fell 2.5 percent in the third quarter of 2007, according to an index  
produced by the MIT Center for Real Estate. The drop in the MIT  
quarterly transaction-based index (TBI) may not only spell the end of  
a five-year rally that saw commercial property prices effectively  
double, but it may also signal that weakness in the housing market is  
spilling over into commercial real estate. "The fall in our index is  
the first solid, quantitative evidence that the subprime mortgage  
debacle, which hit the broader capital markets in August, may be  
spreading to the commercial property markets," stated MIT Center for  
Real Estate Director David Geltner. The TBI decline in the third  
quarter of 2007 marks its first quarterly downturn since the third  
quarter of 2003, when prices fell 2.4 percent. The last time prices  
fell more than in the third quarter of 2007 was in the fourth quarter  
of 2001 (9/11, recession), when they fell 3.9 percent.
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2007/commercial-1114.html

FRUIT FLY GENETICS
In work that reveals important clues in the evolution of genes, an  
international consortium of MIT scientists and colleagues has  
analyzed the genomes of twelve species of the fruit fly Drosophila in  
one of the first large-scale comparisons of multiple animal genomes.  
The researchers' approach may also help unlock the secrets of other  
genomes, including our own. The work appears in a Nov. issue of  
Nature and in more than 40 accompanying papers in Genome Research and  
other journals. "Having the sequences of many closely related species  
allows us to study the evolutionary forces that have shaped the fruit  
fly's family tree, and to discover the working parts of the fly  
genome in a systematic way," said Manolis Kellis, associate member of  
the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard and one of the project  
leaders. Kellis is also an assistant professor of electrical  
engineering and computer science at MIT, and is affiliated with the  
Institute's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2007/fruitfly-1109.html
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LUNG CANCER
An international team of scientists has produced the most  
comprehensive view yet of the abnormal genetic landscape of lung  
cancer, the world's leading cause of cancer deaths. Appearing in a  
Nov. advance online issue of Nature, the research reveals more than  
50 genomic regions that are frequently gained or lost in human lung  
tumors. While one-third of these regions contain genes already known  
to play important roles in lung cancer, the majority harbor new genes  
yet to be discovered. Flowing from this work, the scientists  
uncovered a critical gene alteration--not previously linked to any  
form of cancer--that is implicated in a significant fraction of lung  
cancer cases, shedding light on the biological basis of the disease  
and a potential new target for therapy. "This view of the lung cancer  
genome is unprecedented, both in its breadth and depth," said senior  
author Matthew Meyerson, a senior associate member of the Broad  
Institute of MIT and Harvard and an associate professor at Dana- 
Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard Medical School. "It lays an  
essential foundation and has already pinpointed an important gene  
that controls the growth of lung cells. This information offers  
crucial inroads to the biology of lung cancer and will help shape new  
strategies for cancer diagnosis and therapy."
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2007/lung-cancer-tt1107.html
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PROTEIN ARCHITECTURE
Researchers at MIT studying the architecture of proteins have finally  
explained why computer models of proteins' behavior under mechanical  
duress differ dramatically from experimental observations. This work  
could have vast implications in bioengineering and medical research  
by advancing our understanding of the relationship between structure  
and function in these basic building blocks of life. In a paper  
published as the cover article of an issue of the Proceedings of the  
National Academies of Science, the scientists, who work with  
atomistic models--accurate representations of nature that use  
fundamental laws of atomistic interactions as their basis--show for  
the first time the basic rupture mechanisms of protein structures  
when protein strands unfold in response to pressure. "We have for the  
first time simulated the behavior of protein structures under  
conditions that correspond to those in living biological systems,"  
said Markus Buehler, an assistant professor in MIT's Department of  
Civil and Environmental Engineering. This work was funded by the NSF,  
the Army Research Office, and an MIT Presidential Graduate Fellowship.
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2007/atomistic-tt1107.html
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