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U. T. Dallas Nanotechnologists Demonstrate Artificial Muscles Powered by Highly Energetic Fuels

University of Texas at Dallas (UTD) nanotechnologists have made alcohol- and hydrogen-powered artificial muscles that are 100 times stronger than natural muscles, able to do 100 times greater work per cycle and produce, at reduced strengths, larger contractions than natural muscles. Among other possibilities, these muscles could enable fuel-powered artificial limbs, "smart skins" and morphing structures for air and marine vehicles, autonomous robots having very long mission capabilities and smart sensors that detect the environment and self-actuate to change it.

While humans on long, strenuous missions are able to carry the food that powers their bodies, today's most athletically capable robots cannot freely move about, since they are wired to stationary electrical power sources. Though batteries can be used for autonomous robots, they store too little energy and deliver it at too low a rate for prolonged or intense activity. To solve these problems, the team from UTD's NanoTech Institute developed two different types of artificial muscles that, like natural muscles, convert the chemical energy of an energetic fuel to mechanical energy.

The breakthroughs are described in the March 17 issue of the prestigious journal Science.

The development of these revolutionary muscles was motivated by a visit of Dr. John Main from the Defense Advanced Projects Agency (DARPA) to Dr. Ray H. Baughman, Robert A. Welch Professor of Chemistry and director of the UTD NanoTech Institute. During the visit, Main described his visions of exotic applications of breakthrough technology: artificial muscles for autonomous humanoid robots to help protect military personnel, exo-skeletons to provide super-human strength to soldiers or astronauts and artificial limbs that act like natural limbs -- all of which are able to perform lengthy missions by using shots of alcohol as a highly energetic fuel.

The new muscles simultaneously function as fuel cells and muscles, according to Baughman, corresponding author of the Science article. A catalyst-containing carbon nanotube electrode is used in one described muscle type as a fuel cell electrode to convert chemical energy to electrical energy, as a supercapacitor electrode to store this electrical energy and as a muscle electrode to transform this electrical energy to mechanical energy. Fuel-powered charge injection in a carbon nanotube electrode produces the dimensional changes needed for actuation due to a combination of quantum mechanical and electrostatic effects present on the nanoscale, Baughman said.

In another of the described artificial muscles — currently the most powerful type — the chemical energy in the fuel is converted to heat by catalytic reaction of a mixture of fuel and oxygen in air. The resulting temperature increase in this "shorted fuel-cell muscle" causes contraction of a shape memory metal muscle wire that supports this catalyst. Subsequent cooling completes the work cycle by causing expansion of the muscle.

"The shorted fuel cell muscles are especially easy to deploy in robotic devices, since they comprise commercially available shape memory wires that are coated with a nanoparticle catalyst. The major challenges have been in attaching the catalyst to the shape memory wire to provide long muscle lifetimes, and in controlling muscle actuation rate and stroke," said Baughman. "Students and scientists of all ages will be working on optimizing and deploying our artificial muscles, from high school students in our NanoExplorer program to retired technologists in our NanoInventor program."

Patent applications for the artificial muscles are pending.

Applications opportunities, Baughman said, are diverse, and range from robots and morphing air vehicles to dynamic Braille displays and muscles that are powered by the fuel/air mixture provided to an engine and actuate to regulate this mixture. The more than 30 times higher energy density obtainable for fuels like methanol, compared to that for the most advanced batteries, can translate into long operational lifetimes without refueling for autonomous robots. This refueling requires negligible time compared with that required for recharging batteries. Since all muscles will not be used at the same time, temporarily inactive muscles of the first muscle type can be used as ordinary fuel cells and as supercapacitors to provide for the electrical needs of, for example, autonomous robots and prosthetic limbs. The properties of the two types of fuel-powered muscles can be merged to provide the benefits of both, Baughman said.

The fuel-powered muscles can be easily downsized to the micro- and nano-scales, and arrays of such micro-muscles could be used in "smart skins" that improve the performance of marine and aerospace vehicles. By replacing metal catalyst with tethered enzymes, it might eventually be possible to use artificial muscles powered by food-derived fuels for actuation in the human body – perhaps even for artificial hearts.

The UTD breakthroughs resulted from the insights of NanoTech Institute scientists from many different countries: Dr. Alan G. MacDiarmid, Nobel Prize winner and the James Von Ehr Distinguished Chair in Science and Nanotechnology, from New Zealand; research scientist Dr. Von Howard Ebron and recent UTD Ph.D. recipient Dr. Joselito Razal from the Philippines; graduate student Jiyoung Oh from South Korea; research scientist Dr. Mikhail Kozlov from the Ukraine; research associate Dr. Zhiwei Yang and recent UTD Ph.D. recipient Dr. Hui Xie from China; and Interim Dean of Natural Sciences and Mathematics Dr. John P. Ferraris, recent UTD Ph.D. recipient Dr. Daniel J. Seyer, graduate student Lee J. Hall and Baughman, all from the United States.

The research leading to the discoveries was funded by DARPA, an agency of the U.S. Department of Defense, the Robert A. Welch Foundation and the coordinated support efforts of the Strategic Partnership for Research in Nanotechnology and the U.S. Air Force.

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National Cancer Institute Funds Nanotechnology Center

Imagine if a device were small enough to slip into living cancer cells and report on what's going on inside of them. The National Cancer Institute has envisioned just this scenario and has established eight centers for honing the tiny tools of nanotechnology — devices that can be 1/10,000th of a cross-section of human hair — to reveal, monitor and treat cancer. One of these Centers of Cancer Nanotechnology Excellence is to be based at the medical school.

On Feb. 27, the NCI announced that it has allotted roughly US$20 million over five years to a center to be led by professor of radiology and bioengineering Sanjiv Sam Gambhir, MD, PhD, who directs the Molecular Imaging Program at Stanford. Associate professor of materials science and of electrical engineering Shan Wang, PhD, will be working closely with him on this grant.

NCI Centers of Cancer Nanotechnology Excellence are research alliances of cancer centers, medical institutions, schools of engineering and physical sciences, nonprofit organizations and private corporations. Their mission is to integrate nanotechnology into cancer research. "It's the team science approach," said Gambhir.

The groups that will be included with the Stanford Center for Cancer Nanotechnology Excellence Focused on Therapy Response are: UCLA, Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, the University of Texas-Austin, General Electric Global Research and Intel Corp. Within Stanford, faculty from the Schools of Humanities & Sciences, Engineering and Medicine will combine their collective expertise to develop novel methods to use nanotechnology to detect cancer and evaluate therapies. In addition, outreach to the community will be done through the Canary Foundation, which is focused on early cancer detection.

The team, said Gambhir, was chosen to represent scientists from more than a dozen disciplines, including chemistry, materials science, cancer biology, immunology, clinical oncology, radiology and molecular imaging. He added that more than half of the team has already been actively involved in nanotechnology research, and that the new center gives them the opportunity to interact with investigators whose primary focus is cancer research.

"The first year, the biggest challenge is going to be getting these people working together," he said, referring to how unusual it is for people of such divergent scientific backgrounds to be collaborating. "It involves people speaking different languages."

Gambhir's background has prepared him to lead such an interdisciplinary venture. He has training in physics, applied mathematics, cell and molecular biology, medicine, nuclear medicine and molecular imaging. He runs a research lab in the Clark Center and sees patients in the nuclear medicine clinic.

The Stanford center will not be developing nanodevices that will be used to treat people. It will aim its efforts at either imaging disease (in vivo) or detecting what is going on inside patients by evaluating blood or tissue samples (ex vivo, or in vitro).

"There are a lot of people at work already on in vitro diagnostics—taking blood and other samples and trying to determine what disease state you are in—and others who are involved with in vivo molecularly imaging a living person," Gambhir explained. "The marriage between the two subdisciplines gives this grant a lot of potential." In its grant application, the group wrote, "Either the ex vivo or in vivo strategy alone will not be optimal; both together will likely provide significant synergy."

Gambhir's work to date has focused on the in vivo side, working on new molecular imaging strategies for small animals and patients. Becoming involved with a nanotechnology center will add another aspect to his multipronged attack on uncovering the mysteries of the things that go wrong in cancer.

Gambhir's lab has already begun exploring some of the frontiers of nanotechnology research, progressing the furthest with quantum dots, or qdots—tiny crystals that have pieces of protein attached to their surfaces that allow them to latch on to cancer cells and produce multicolored signals.

Much of his current work using qdots is in predicting and monitoring the response to therapy in animal models. He said that this work should lead to new ways to test drug efficacy in small-animal cancer models, thereby accelerating the process of bringing better drugs to the clinic.

If approved for human use, the same nanoparticles should also become useful for assessing a patient's response to therapy and in the early diagnosis of cancer, when maybe only a few cells are cancerous. The best methods available now can detect cancer only when a million or so cells have turned malignant.

Gambhir and his team of more than 15 research labs will pursue a number of avenues for diagnosing cancer, in ways that Gambhir said he couldn't even imagine yet. "Just by bringing these teams of scientists together in our planning meetings," he said, "we have come up with ideas for going after cancer detection that we would not have thought of individually."

The center will receive $3.83 million for 2006, with the NCI to decide later the exact amount for each remaining year. Other Stanford researchers involved in the project are: Hongji Dai of the Department of Chemistry; Rob Tibshirani of the Departments of Health Research & Policy and of Statistics; Michael Kelly, Bob Sinclair and Robert Wilson of the Department of Materials Science and Engineering; Dean Felsher and P.J. Utz of the Department of Medicine; Garry Nolan of the Departments of Microbiology & Immunology and of Molecular Pharmacology; Xiaoyuan Chen, Samira Guccione, David Paik, Sylvia Plevritis, Jianghong Rao and Meike Schipper of the Department of Radiology, and Ed Myers, Yoshio Nishi and Mary Tang of the Stanford Nanofabrication Facility.

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New Research Programs for Global Climate and Energy Project

Global Climate and Energy Project (GCEP) Director Franklin M. Orr Jr. announced several new research programs and two one-year exploratory research efforts totaling close to US$8 million at Stanford and outside the university. The new research activities will focus on solar energy, biohydrogen generation, advanced combustion, and geologic storage of carbon dioxide. Investigators will use the support to conduct fundamental research in energy technologies aimed at significantly reducing greenhouse gas emissions on a global scale.

The new programs will bring the total number of GCEP-supported research programs to 30 with funding of approximately $45.5 million. These additional research programs will include investigation of new materials for low-cost, highly efficient photovoltaic cells, and sequestration of carbon dioxide in coal beds:

The research by Swartz will continue his innovative work already funded by GCEP on developing an organism that can convert solar energy into chemical energy stored as hydrogen.

For the first time, GCEP also announced one-year exploratory research efforts, intended to allow investigators the opportunity to evaluate the potential of their research concepts. The two activities selected are:

Launched at Stanford in December 2002, GCEP is a collaborative effort of the scientific and engineering communities at academic research institutions and in industry. Its purpose is to conduct fundamental, pre-commercial research that will foster the development of global energy solutions that significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The GCEP sponsors—ExxonMobil, GE, Schlumberger and Toyota—intend to invest $225 million over a decade or more in the project.

 

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New Center at UTD Designed to Help Executives Improve Workplace Skills

A new center at The University of Texas at Dallas (UTD) School of Management is designed to help executives hone their workplace skills while achieving a widely acknowledged certification.

Participants at the Birkman Learning Center at UTD will receive training in the well-known Birkman Method, a multidimensional assessment which integrates behavioral, motivational and occupational data with the goal of improving workplace and employee performance.

Matthew Zamzow, director of training for Birkman International, which is based in Houston, said this is the first time the company has offered on an on-going basis its certification training for consultants away from its home office. Zamzow said there are a number of reasons Birkman, which was established more than 50 years ago, believed the time was right to expand its base of operations and UTD's School of Management offered a prime location.

Dr. Robert Hicks, director of SOM's Executive and Professional Coaching Program, is a certified Birkman consultant. Hicks, who is a licensed psychologist specializing in industrial and organizational psychology, said offering Birkman training complements other programs in the school's executive coaching curriculum.

"Dr. Hicks was looking for different opportunities to enhance UTD's executive education programs," Zamzow said. He also noted that UTD's location, near a major airport hub, makes it easy for his company's clients to come for training sessions and will offer both the university and Birkman cross-development opportunities.

He said UTD students may learn about Birkman and decide to get certification in that methodology; meanwhile those coming to UTD specifically for training or to update their certification will be exposed to UTD's executive education offerings and may wish to continue their studies in other School of Management programs. In addition, Zamzow said, there are long-term partnership opportunities for the school and Birkman, possibly with students using the Birkman instrument as part of their research. "We are hoping to capitalize on that in the future," he said.

About 60 percent of those who hold Birkman certifications are independent management consultants and the remaining 40 percent are internal consultants, Zamzow said. Hicks said that the Birkman assessments have "a wide variety of uses for organizations and individuals within organizations."

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UW-Madison to Launch New Influenza Research Institute

In an effort to bolster what is already recognized as one of the world's top programs of influenza research, representatives of UW-Madison announced plans Wednesday to launch a new Institute for Influenza Viral Research.

The US$9 million initiative includes the development of 20,000 square feet of new research space for flu research, including specialized lab facilities, in existing space at University Research Park.

The new program, according to Associate Dean for Research Policy William Mellon, builds on a UW-Madison research strength, and is essential as influenza - especially emerging strains of avian influenza - poses a significant public-health challenge.

The new institute will house the research program of UW-Madison School of Veterinary Medicine researcher Yoshihiro Kawaoka, a professor of pathobiological sciences. It will include laboratory and support space, and limited office space. Included in the lab space are specialized facilities for Biosafety Level 2, Level 3 and Level 3-Agriculture, which denote enhanced safety features. Such space is required in order to work safely with influenza viruses; the university already operates several such facilities on campus.

Kawaoka and his group are recognized worldwide as leaders in the study of influenza, one of the world's most important human and animal diseases. The World Health Organization recently designated Kawaoka's program as "one of the world's preeminent influenza projects."

Studies conducted by Kawaoka's group during the last five years have sharpened the ability of vaccine manufacturers and drug companies to react quickly to flu virus as new strains emerge.

In particular, a 1999 study that revealed methods for making flu virus using a technique known as "reverse genetics," and a 2006 discovery that showed how flu viruses organize their genetic material to create infectious particles, are helping fuel a global effort to prepare for a possible avian influenza pandemic. Methods devised in these studies are now widely used to produce vaccines for new strains of flu more quickly, and to reveal new molecular targets for antiviral drugs.

New space is needed for the program as funding for programs of influenza research is growing rapidly and the specialized space required to conduct such research on the UW-Madison campus is constrained.

Kawaoka's research portfolio now encompasses an estimated $7 million in existing grants and contracts covering several years. The new institute, which will house as many as 28 current and new personnel, will further enhance the university's ability to attract research support and top-flight researchers, according to James Tracy, UW-Madison School of Veterinary Medicine associate dean for research.

The new UW-Madison initiative is occurring against a backdrop of heightened concern over influenza, especially avian or "bird" flu. That strain, known as H5N1, has spread rapidly in birds from Asia to Western Europe and Africa. The virus has been transmitted from infected poultry to people in some instances, and, if the virus evolves to become easily communicable from person to person, a global pandemic is feared.

The University Research Park setting for the new institute, which is being funded through a partnership between UW-Madison and the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation, was chosen because space was readily available and construction there can proceed at a far faster pace than can construction on the UW-Madison campus. The new facility is expected to be completed by fall 2007.

Accelerating the pace of research into the most basic properties of the flu virus is a priority, Mellon says, because it is one of society's best defenses against a virus that may soon pose a significant risk to humans.

Because influenza viruses are constantly changing their genetic makeup to infect animals and humans and fool the immune system, vaccines and drugs must constantly be changed to keep up with them. New vaccines must be developed every few years for newly emerged strains of flu virus, and the shifting makeup of the virus can render antiviral drugs ineffective.

The new facility will be constructed according to standards established by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and will undergo routine federal inspection for safety and security.

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UCR Researchers Grow Bone Cells on Carbon Nanotubes

Researchers at the University of California, Riverside have published findings that show, for the first time, that bone cells can grow and proliferate on a scaffold of carbon nanotubes.

The paper, titled Bone Cell Proliferation on Carbon Nanotubes, appears in the March 8 edition of Nano Letters, a journal of the American Chemical Society. Lead author, Laura Zanello, is an assistant professor of biochemistry at UCR and was joined by UCR colleagues, graduate students Bin Zhao and Hui Hu, and Robert C. Haddon, distinguished professor of chemistry and of chemical and environmental engineering.

Zanello's paper builds on previous research by Haddon which showed that carbon nanotubes could be chemically compatible with bone cells.

Zanello's experiment put Haddon's findings to the test and found that the nanotubes, 100,000 times finer than a human hair, are an excellent scaffold for bone cells to grow on.

"In the past scientists have been plagued by toxicity issues when combining carbon nanotubes with living cells," Zanello said. "So we have been looking for the most pure nanotubes we could get to reduce the presence of heavy metals that are frequently introduced in the manufacturing process."

She credited Haddon's graduate student Zhao, now a postgraduate researcher at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, with manufacturing highly pure nanotubes for her to work with.

Some of the carbon nanotubes were chemically treated and others were not, then they were combined with rat bone cells to determine which combination or combinations worked best. Non-treated and electrically-neutral nanotubes emerged as the best scaffolds for bone growth.

Because carbon nanotubes are not biodegradable, they behave like an inert matrix on which cells can proliferate and deposit new living material, which becomes functional, normal bone, according to the paper. They therefore hold promise in the treatment of bone defects in humans associated with the removal of tumors, trauma, and abnormal bone development and in dental implants, Zanello added.

More research is needed to determine how the body will interact with carbon nanotubes, specifically in its immune response, the paper states.

"We hope to look at the atomic interactions between living matter and synthetic scaffolds so we can come up with material that can interact at the nanolevel with living cells," Zanello said.

The University of California, Riverside is a major research institution. Key areas of research include nanotechnology, genomics, environmental studies, digital arts and sustainable growth and development. With a current undergraduate and graduate enrollment of more than 16,600, the campus is projected to grow to 21,000 students by 2010. Located in the heart of Inland Southern California, the nearly 1,200-acre, park-like campus is at the center of the region's economic development.

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MIT Researchers Restore Vision in Rodents Blinded by Brain Damage

Rodents blinded by a severed tract in their brains' visual system had their sight partially restored within weeks, thanks to a tiny biodegradable scaffold invented by MIT bioengineers and neuroscientists.

This technique, which involves giving brain cells an internal matrix on which to regrow, just as ivy grows on a trellis, may one day help patients with traumatic brain injuries, spinal cord injuries and stroke.

The study, which will appear in the online early edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) the week of March 13-17, is the first that uses nanotechnology to repair and heal the brain and restore function of a damaged brain region.

"If we can reconnect parts of the brain that were disconnected by a stroke, then we may be able to restore speech to an individual who is able to understand what is said but has lost the ability to speak," said co-author Rutledge G. Ellis-Behnke, research scientist in the MIT Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences. "This is not about restoring 100 percent of damaged brain cells, but 20 percent or even less may be enough to restore function, and that is our goal."

Spinal cord injuries, serious stroke and severe traumatic brain injuries affect more than 5 million Americans at a total cost of $65 billion a year in treatment.

"If you can return a certain quality of life, if you can get some critical functions back, you have accomplished a lot for a victim of brain injury," said study co-author Gerald E. Schneider, professor of brain and cognitive sciences at MIT. Ellis-Behnke and Schneider worked with colleagues from the MIT Center for Biomedical Engineering (CBE) and medical schools in Hong Kong and China.

In the experiment on young and adult hamsters with severed neural pathways, the researchers injected the animals' brains with a clear solution containing a self-assembling material made of fragments of proteins, the building blocks of the human body. These protein fragments are called peptides.

Shuguang Zhang, associate director of the CBE and one of the study's co-authors, has been working on self-assembling peptides for a variety of applications since he discovered them by accident in 1991. Zhang found that placing certain peptides in a salt solution causes them to assemble into thin sheets of 99 percent water and 1 percent peptides. These sheets form a mesh or scaffold of tiny interwoven fibers. Neurons are able to grow through the nanofiber mesh, which is similar to that which normally exists in the extracellular space that holds tissues together.

The process does not involve growing new neurons, but creates an environment conducive for existing cells to regrow their long branchlike projections called axons, through which neurons form synaptic connections to communicate with other neurons. These projections were able to bridge the gap created when the neural pathway was cut and restore enough communication among cells to give the animals back useful vision within around six weeks. The researchers were surprised to find that adult brains responded as robustly as the younger animals' brains, which typically are more adaptable.

"Our designed self-assembling peptide nanofiber scaffold created a good environment not only for axons to regenerate through the site of an acute injury but also to knit the brain tissue together," said Zhang. The technique may be useful for helping close cuts in the brain made during surgery to remove tumors.

Doctors treating traumatic brain injury are confronted with a number of obstacles. When brain tissue is injured, the tissue closes itself like a skin wound. When this happens, scar tissue forms around the injury and large gaps appear where there was once continuous gray matter.

When the clear fluid containing the self-assembling peptides is injected into the area of the cut, it flows into gaps and starts to work as soon as it comes into contact with the fluid that bathes the brain. After serving as a matrix for new cell growth, the peptides' nanofibers break down into harmless products that are eventually excreted in urine or used for tissue repair.

The MIT researchers' synthetic biological material is better than currently available biomaterials because it forms a network of nanofibers similar in scale to the brain's own matrix for cell growth; it can be broken down into natural amino acids that may even be beneficial to surrounding tissue; it is free of chemical and biological contaminants that may show up in animal-derived products such as collagen; and it appears to be immunologically inert, avoiding the problem of rejection by surrounding tissue, the authors wrote.

The researchers are testing the self-assembling peptides on spinal cord injuries and hope to launch trials in primates and eventually humans.

In addition to Ellis-Behnke, Zhang and Schneider, authors include Yu-Xiang Liang, Kwok-Fai So and David K.C. Tay of the University of Hong Kong Li Ka Shing Faculty of Medicine and State Key Lab of Brain and Cognitive Sciences; and Si-Wei You of the Institute of Neurosciences, Fourth Military Medical University in Xian, China.

This work is funded by the Whitaker Foundation, the Deshpande Center at MIT, the Research Grant Council of Hong Kong and private donations by Peter Kook and the late Mr. and Mrs. Ma Yip Seng.

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Scientists Provide New Evidence for Cellular Cause of SIDS

University of Chicago researchers and colleagues have found strong support that a disturbance of a specific neurochemical can lead to sudden infant death syndrome, the primary cause of death before age 1 in the United States. Approximately 3,000 infants die each year from SIDS, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

In the March 8, 2006, issue of the Journal of Neuroscience, researchers describe what happens during hypoxia when levels of the hormone serotonin are disturbed in pacemaker cells — the specific group of neurons they previously showed to be responsible for gasping, which resets the normal breathing pattern for babies. Scientists found that normal serotonin levels are needed in these respiratory pacemakers to induce gasping and ignite auto-resuscitation.

In a paper published last year in the journal Neuron, Ramirez's work found that sodium-driven pacemaker cells controlled gasping. This work in tissue slices was confirmed in a study published last month by University of Bristol researchers who found the same results in rats.

Scientists knew that SIDS victims had disturbed levels of serotonin in areas critical for respiration. Since serotonin regulates the sodium channels in pacemaker cells, Ramirez's research team examined more closely serotonin levels in sodium-driven pacemaker neurons in the breathing center.

When researchers removed serotonin from these pacemaker cells, the gasping drastically decreased, from typically about 20 gasps to just two or three gasps — not enough for the baby to awaken.

According to the researcher, when the body senses a lack of oxygen, it shuts down most of the cellular respiratory network and focuses its energy on gasping, which is modulated solely by sodium-driven pacemaker neurons. If that specific neuron is blocked, for whatever reason, the body cannot gasp.

This means there may be nothing wrong with a baby's breathing under normal conditions, but if the baby goes into hypoxia from a blocked airway or because the baby sleeps on its tummy and does not receive sufficient oxygen, the child needs the sodium-driven pacemakers in order to gasp, which wakes the baby and initiates movement or crying.

"Gasping is an important arousal or auto-resuscitation mechanism," Ramirez said. It resets a baby's normal breathing rhythm and also alerts the baby as well as the mother that something is wrong.

"During normal breathing, it's a complicated network. However, the network becomes more vulnerable to situations like hypoxia, because under these conditions, respiration relies on only one group of pacemakers that become the critical drivers of [breathing] rhythm," Ramirez said.

Disturbed serotonin levels are also implicated in many psychiatric conditions, such as depression, bipolar disorder and attention deficit disorder. According to Ramirez, adults suffering with these types of conditions may be survivors of SIDS.

Ramirez and his colleagues now are looking more closely at the effects of different levels of serotonin, as well as the hormone norepinephrine, and exactly how much of each is necessary to keep auto-resuscitation in tact.

This study was funded by a grant from the National Institutes of Health. Other authors of the paper are: Andrew Tryba of the Medical College of Wisconsin, first author, and Fernando Pena of Departamento de Farmacobiologia, Cinvestav-Coapa, Mexico, co-author.

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