Junk food not only hurts your health but also your memory, according to a new study.

The study by Margaret Morris, the head of pharmacology at the University of NSW, has found that eating a diet loaded with saturated fat and sugar may have an immediate effect on the brain's cognitive ability and may cause memory loss.

Morris examined memory in rats and found that exposure to junk food over just six days reduced spatial recognition or ability to notice when an object had been moved to a new location, Sydney Morning Herald reported.

Morris found that after consuming a high sugar and fat diet for one week, the hippocampus, the brain structure which is critical for learning and memory, had increased inflammation.

The study also suggested that the damage was not reversed when the rats were switched back to a healthy diet.

Researchers, who are trying to understand the biology of the malaria parasite, have discovered a potential weakness- low levels of DNA methylation in Plasmodium's genome "that may be critical to the survival of the parasite."

DNA methylation is a biochemical process involving the modification of DNA that plays an important role in development and disease.

Lead researcher Karine Le Roch, an associate professor of cell biology at University of California said the DNA methylation enzyme found in Plasmodium is quite different than the one in humans.

The researcher said that because it is different they can eventually find a way to target it and shut it down. If a drug can be developed that specifically inhibits the methylation enzyme, it could kill the parasite in infected humans.

Le Roch's ultimate goal is to map the regulatory networks controlling the entire life cycle of the Plasmodium parasite. She reasons that researchers really need to understand the entire biology of the parasite and how it replicates.

Plasmodium's life cycle is very complex as it lives in both humans and mosquitoes. The parasite moves to the salivary glands of an infected mosquito.

Once the mosquito bites a human, the parasite is injected into the blood stream and quickly reaches the liver cells, where it rapidly reproduces asexually, creating thousands of new parasites that move into red blood cells, their favorite food source. The parasite is transmitted from humans to mosquitoes when a mosquito draws blood from an infected human.

The study was published in the journal Cell Host and Microbe.

A compound found in a medicinal tea brewed from the bark of a tree could help fight AIDS, scientists have found.

The tea used by tribal healers on the South Pacific island of Samoa to treat hepatitis contains the compound prostratin, extracted from the bark of the mamala tree.

Scientists have found a way to isolate the compound and synthesise it so it is 100 times more potent.

The new version of prostratin shows promise in laboratory tests for both preventing HIV from infecting human cells and awakening dormant HIV viruses that are hiding inside human latently infected cells.

Latent HIV cell reservoirs are untouchable by today`s antiviral medicines. Antiviral medicines reduce active virus levels in patients` blood and keep patients healthy.
But when patients stop the medication, the hibernating HIV in reservoirs awakens to resupply active virus. Prostratin flushes HIV out of its cellular sanctuaries so that antiviral drugs can attack and hopefully eradicate the HIV from the body.

Speaking at the American Chemical Society`s meeting in Indianapolis, Paul A Wender from Stanford University described efficient new ways of making prostratin.

Wender and colleagues first developed a way to make the tea ingredient, prostratin, in large amounts from readily available ingredients.

He described how that initial synthesis broke down a major barrier to probing prostratin`s antiviral effects. Until then, scientists had to extract prostratin from the bark of the Samoan mamala tree, and only tiny and variable amounts were so obtained.

Samoa is where another scientist, Paul Cox, in 1987 heard a native healer praise mamala bark tea as a remedy for viral hepatitis. It led scientists at the National Cancer Institute to analyse the bark and identify prostratin as a key ingredient.

Wender`s synthesis of prostratin opened the door to research on the substance and enabled his team to change prostratin`s architecture.

"We now have made synthetic variants of prostratin, called analogs, that are 100 times more potent than the natural product," Wender said.

Wender`s group also synthesised bryostatin, a substance that occurs naturally in sea creatures called bryozoans, and appears even more effective for AIDS and have applications for Alzheimer`s disease and cancer.

"Bryostatin has shown great promise in laboratory experiments as the basis for development of potentially transformative medicines for cancer, Alzheimer`s disease and the eradication of HIV/AIDS," Wender said.

Researchers have designed simpler and more readily synthesised analogs of bryostatin which are up to 1,000-fold more potent in flushing HIV out of its hiding places than prostratin.

A new study has suggested that the brain changes associated with meditation and stress reduction could play an important role in slowing the progression of age-related cognitive disorders such as Alzheimer's disease.
First author Rebecca Erwin Wells, MD, MPH, who conducted her research as a fellow in Integrative Medicine at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) and Harvard Medical School, said that they know that as people age, there's a high correlation between perceived stress and Alzheimer's disease, so they wanted to know if stress reduction through meditation might improve cognitive reserve.
Wells evaluated adults between the ages of 55 and 90 in BIDMC's Cognitive Neurology Unit. 14 adults diagnosed with mild cognitive impairment were included in the study.
Participants were randomized two to one either to a group who participated in Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) using meditation and yoga, or a control group who received normal care.
The study group met for two hours each week for eight weeks. They also participated in a day-long mindfulness retreat, and were encouraged to continue their practice at home for 15 to 30 minutes per day.
All participants underwent a functional MRI (fMRI) at baseline and then again after eight weeks to determine if there were any changes in the structures of the brain or in brain activity. The neuroimaging was conducted at Massachusetts General Hospital's Martinos Center.
The results of fMRI imaging showed that the group engaged in MBSR had significantly improved functional connectivity in the areas of the default mode network. Additionally, as expected, both groups experienced atrophy of the hippocampus, but those who practiced MBSR experienced less atrophy.
The study has been published online in journal Neuroscience Letters.

Researchers have successfully discovered genetic differences between 'identical' monozygotic twins.

So far there have been only theoretical considerations against the experimental finding and dogma that monozygotic twins are genetically fully identical.

Forensic laboratories around the world had accepted these analytical restrictions, but a multidisciplinary Eurofins team in the Eurofins flagship Genomics laboratory in Ebersberg, Germany, wanted to push these limits of DNA testing. They used the unique combination of leading forensics and genomics labs available at Eurofins to reach this milestone.

The Eurofins scientists applied Eurofins' ultra-deep next generation sequencing and associated bioinformatics techniques. They sequenced DNA from sperm samples of two twins and from a blood sample of the child of one twin.

Bioinformatics analysis revealed five mutations, so called Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms (SNPs) present in the twin father and the child, but not in the twin uncle. The SNPs were confirmed by classical Sanger sequencing.

The results give experimental evidence for the hypothesis that rare mutations will occur early after or before the human blastocyst has split into two, the origin of twins, and that such mutations will be carried on into somatic tissue and the germ line.

The genetic differences found and the method used provide a solution to solve forensic and paternity cases involving monozygotic twins as originator of DNA traces in crime, or as alleged fathers. Eurofins is the first to offer such a test.

The study is published in the journal Forensic Science International.