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Asked by anon-220346 on 12 Jun 2019.
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Rebecca Moon answered on 12 Jun 2019:
Much of my work is based on the theory that increasing maternal vitamin D intake during pregnancy will improve offspring bone health and muscle strength. We have been doing a big trial involving other 1000 pregnant women and their children to try to determine if this is true by randomly allocating half of them to vitamin D supplementation and the other half to a placebo tablet. We have then been comparing the two groups of children including taking detailed scans of the skeletons and measurements of the child’s size and muscle strength.
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Kaitlin Wade answered on 12 Jun 2019:
One of the theories that I am trying to answer is whether we can use human genetic to understand the causal links between the gut microbiome and colorectal cancer. This is an interesting question because the gut microbiome is something that we can change (with, say, diet, pro/prebiotics and antibiotics) so if it’s a causal risk factor for cancer then maybe we can use this to prevent at least some of the disease from developing.
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Matthew Bareford answered on 13 Jun 2019:
Yes, I’m currently leading a small project on Alzheimers disease, where I am trying to identify protein markers in blood that may indicate some ones risk factor of developing the disease and for prognosis/treatment research.
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David Wilson answered on 13 Jun 2019:
Yes, i’m thinking a lot about how bile ducts, tubes in you liver, form when your developing as a foetus or baby. There’s a few different ways that tubes form in your body when your developing. Sometimes you get a sheet of cells that roll up into a tube like you would do with a piece of paper. Other times a group of cells form and they decide to form a lumen, which is another name for an inside of a tube. I’m trying to work out which of these systems is occurring or if something completely different is happening.
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Nina Rzechorzek answered on 14 Jun 2019:
My research is focused on the mechanisms of daily timekeeping in brain cells, and in particular how brain cell clocks interact and deal with the temperature changes that occur naturally in the brain. A defining feature of circadian rhythms is that they run at the same speed across a range of physiological temperatures (it would be a disaster if your cellular clocks sped up every time you did some exercise, or slowed down when your body temperature drops during sleep). Remarkably though, cellular clocks are synchronized by daily changes in body temperature—so how is it that they sense and respond to these temperature changes whilst keeping the same rhythm? This is even more baffling for the brain, where regional temperature changes occur all the time with neuronal activity. Two key questions that I am trying to answer are:
(1) How does the temperature of different brain regions vary by time of day?
(2) How do brain cell clocks keep time in the face of these dynamic changes in brain temperature?I predict that healthy brain temperature will vary by time of day in a diurnal manner (like body temperature, but over a wider range); I expect it to be higher during the daytime when our brains are most active. For several reasons, I also expect it to be higher in some women compared to men, and for the variation in brain temperature to ‘dampen’ with ageing. I hypothesise that a disruption in brain temperature rhythms may be related to the development of neurodegenerative disorders such as dementia.
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