NL
DE
For our weekly Research Newsletter, which is sent to about 4000 recipients, we are welcoming submissions of news items about your own research. In the newsletter, we try to take our readers into the wonderful things that are happening here in the field of science and inform them about essential information on a weekly basis. To help you a little bit with preparing your news item, we prepared a guideline.
Guideline news item
Write approximately 300 words about your current study. A publication is not necessary. In case you are writing about a publication please keep in mind that the item will appear in the 'Research news' section of the Newsletter once the publication is available and at a maximum of 2 weeks after publication. This is because all readers should be able to view the publication after reading the Research item.
In these 300 words, you write for a general audience of fellow scientists and clinicians from all Radboudumc backgrounds. Try to keep their knowledge level in mind while writing. The research item should be written more informally than an abstract (generally, confidence intervals, etc. are unnecessary). Avoid or minimize jargon as much as possible.
Your research item should contain:
-
Basic information about the study or publication, such as the main finding(s) or conclusion(s), the date published, the journal published, and the Radboudumc department that published it.
-
Some background information about the motivation for the project and the methods employed.
-
What the implications of the finding(s) is/are and what you/your department plan(s) to study next.
-
In case of publication: full reference + link to the publication
-
When ready, send your item to us!
Example
Cola light might be in vogue, but it never quite hits the same sweet spot as the original. Despite evidence that the brain reacts when sugar is detected on the tongue, a finding that led to the invention of artificial sweeteners, our brain is still able to differentiate between sugar and sweetener.
We set out to research the reasons behind this phenomenon, in the hopes of eventually furthering the development of healthier, but just as pleasing, sugar replacements. Our group, led by professor name from the department of name, in collaboration with the department of name published the results in the Journal of name on January 25th.
We employed an in vivo study design in which we used mice whose tongue-based sugar receptors were disabled. To our surprise, the mice still preferred sugar to artificial sweeteners. This caused us to hypothesize that the receptors in the tongue are not the only ones who tell the brain about the presence of sugar in our bodies. By directly inserting the sugar in the gut, we discovered a new sugar-fueled pathway between the brain and the gut independent of the well-known sugar receptors in the tongue. When we disabled this link as well, the mice suddenly were completely indifferent to sugar.
Consuming large amounts of sugar is disadvantageous for your health and plays a huge role in the obesity epidemic. Our results could potentially eventually cause us to develop sweeteners that do hit the sweet spot and cause the brain to react as it does to sugar while reducing caloric intake. At the moment, we have already set up a secondary study to research the specific substances the brain reacts to. We hope to look back on this one day as a great first step towards improving our public health.
Read the study here: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7185044/
Tan HE, Sisti AC, Jin H, Vignovich M, Villavicencio M, Tsang KS, Goffer Y, Zuker CS. The gut-brain axis mediates sugar preference. Nature. 2020 Apr;580(7804):511-516. doi: 10.1038/s41586-020-2199-7. Epub 2020 Apr 15. PMID: 32322067; PMCID: PMC7185044.
