Deans' stroke musings: Synchrotron Techniques and Research: Objectives at the K-Edge (Novel Investigations of the Role of Sulfur in Stroke Pathogenesis using Synchrotron Bas

Changing stroke rehab and research worldwide now.Time is Brain! trillions and trillions of neurons that DIE each day because there are NO effective hyperacute therapies besides tPA(only 12% effective). I have 523 posts on hyperacute therapy, enough for researchers to spend decades proving them out. These are my personal ideas and blog on stroke rehabilitation and stroke research. Do not attempt any of these without checking with your medical provider. Unless you join me in agitating, when you need these therapies they won't be there.

What this blog is for:

My blog is not to help survivors recover, it is to have the 10 million yearly stroke survivors light fires underneath their doctors, stroke hospitals and stroke researchers to get stroke solved. 100% recovery. The stroke medical world is completely failing at that goal, they don't even have it as a goal. Shortly after getting out of the hospital and getting NO information on the process or protocols of stroke rehabilitation and recovery I started searching on the internet and found that no other survivor received useful information. This is an attempt to cover all stroke rehabilitation information that should be readily available to survivors so they can talk with informed knowledge to their medical staff. It lays out what needs to be done to get stroke survivors closer to 100% recovery. It's quite disgusting that this information is not available from every stroke association and doctors group.

Wednesday, January 25, 2012

Synchrotron Techniques and Research: Objectives at the K-Edge (Novel Investigations of the Role of Sulfur in Stroke Pathogenesis using Synchrotron Bas

I didn't understand this one but someone will. From the 2011 Canadian Stroke Congress.
page 66 here:
http://www.strokecongress.org/2011/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/CSC_Abstracts.pdf
Our goal is to use synchrotron radiation and sophisticated spectroscopic techniques to generate spatial maps of sulfur distribution and its chemical forms in rodent models of stroke, to guide the development of biomarkers of stroke pathology, provide insight into current neuroprotective treatments, and aid in designing novel treatment strategies. Thiols, disulfides, and sulfoxides have been strongly implicated with peroxidative damage following stroke, and taurine may play a pertinent role as a neurotransmitter/modulator for several key neuronal pathways.
We will reveal our initial results of an explorative study of the capabilities of X-ray absorption spectroscopy (XAS), at the sulfur K-edge, to investigate the role of sulfur containing molecules in the brain following ischemic insult.
Initial experiments were conducted at the Stanford synchrotron radiation lightsource (SSRL), using XAS at thesulfur K-edge (2460-2490 eV). Air-dried, formalin-fixed, freeze-dried, and frozen tissue sections (10-μm-thick) were analysed to determine the most suitable sample preparation method. Characteristic spectral signatures
were determined for micro-dissected brain regions (brain stem, cerebellum, hippocampus), and the sulfur speciation compared between control (sham operated) and diseased animals at 12 hours or 7 days post global cerebral ischemia (rat 2-vessel occlusion model). The results reveal for the first time, in-situ, the thiol, disulfide,
sulfoxide, taurine, and sulfate composition of healthy and postischemic brain tissue. Our results parallel those obtained with conventional assays, with the advantage that our method will shortly be applied with an imaging capability to determine spatial distribution across brain regions of varying susceptibility to ischemia (Canadian
Light Source). Future studies will image the distribution of the sulfur species, at sub-cellular resolution (< 1 μm), in the same tissue sample. Specifically, this method will allow thiol/disulfide ratios, sulfoxide accumulation, and the role of taurine as a neurotransmitter/modulator in ischemic brain injury and neuroplasticity to be studied as never before.