MIT Research News' Journal
[Most Recent Entries]
[Calendar View]
Monday, June 25th, 2018
| Time |
Event |
| 2:59p |
How music lessons can improve language skills Many studies have shown that musical training can enhance language skills. However, it was unknown whether music lessons improve general cognitive ability, leading to better language proficiency, or if the effect of music is more specific to language processing.
A new study from MIT has found that piano lessons have a very specific effect on kindergartners’ ability to distinguish different pitches, which translates into an improvement in discriminating between spoken words. However, the piano lessons did not appear to confer any benefit for overall cognitive ability, as measured by IQ, attention span, and working memory.
“The children didn’t differ in the more broad cognitive measures, but they did show some improvements in word discrimination, particularly for consonants. The piano group showed the best improvement there,” says Robert Desimone, director of MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research and the senior author of the paper.
The study, performed in Beijing, suggests that musical training is at least as beneficial in improving language skills, and possibly more beneficial, than offering children extra reading lessons. The school where the study was performed has continued to offer piano lessons to students, and the researchers hope their findings could encourage other schools to keep or enhance their music offerings.
Yun Nan, an associate professor at Beijing Normal University, is the lead author of the study, which appears in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences the week of June 25.
Other authors include Li Liu, Hua Shu, and Qi Dong, all of Beijing Normal University; Eveline Geiser, a former MIT research scientist; Chen-Chen Gong, an MIT research associate; and John Gabrieli, the Grover M. Hermann Professor in Health Sciences and Technology, a professor of brain and cognitive sciences, and a member of MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research.
Benefits of music
Previous studies have shown that on average, musicians perform better than nonmusicians on tasks such as reading comprehension, distinguishing speech from background noise, and rapid auditory processing. However, most of these studies have been done by asking people about their past musical training. The MIT researchers wanted to perform a more controlled study in which they could randomly assign children to receive music lessons or not, and then measure the effects.
They decided to perform the study at a school in Beijing, along with researchers from the IDG/McGovern Institute at Beijing Normal University, in part because education officials there were interested in studying the value of music education versus additional reading instruction.
“If children who received music training did as well or better than children who received additional academic instruction, that could a justification for why schools might want to continue to fund music,” Desimone says.
The 74 children participating in the study were divided into three groups: one that received 45-minute piano lessons three times a week; one that received extra reading instruction for the same period of time; and one that received neither intervention. All children were 4 or 5 years old and spoke Mandarin as their native language.
After six months, the researchers tested the children on their ability to discriminate words based on differences in vowels, consonants, or tone (many Mandarin words differ only in tone). Better word discrimination usually corresponds with better phonological awareness — the awareness of the sound structure of words, which is a key component of learning to read.
Children who had piano lessons showed a significant advantage over children in the extra reading group in discriminating between words that differ by one consonant. Children in both the piano group and extra reading group performed better than children who received neither intervention when it came to discriminating words based on vowel differences.
The researchers also used electroencephalography (EEG) to measure brain activity and found that children in the piano group had stronger responses than the other children when they listened to a series of tones of different pitch. This suggest that a greater sensitivity to pitch differences is what helped the children who took piano lessons to better distinguish different words, Desimone says.
“That’s a big thing for kids in learning language: being able to hear the differences between words,” he says. “They really did benefit from that.”
In tests of IQ, attention, and working memory, the researchers did not find any significant differences among the three groups of children, suggesting that the piano lessons did not confer any improvement on overall cognitive function.
Aniruddh Patel, a professor of psychology at Tufts University, says the findings also address the important question of whether purely instrumental musical training can enhance speech processing.
“This study answers the question in the affirmative, with an elegant design that directly compares the effect of music and language instruction on young children. The work specifically relates behavioral improvements in speech perception to the neural impact of musical training, which has both theoretical and real-world significance,” says Patel, who was not involved in the research.
Educational payoff
Desimone says he hopes the findings will help to convince education officials who are considering abandoning music classes in schools not to do so.
“There are positive benefits to piano education in young kids, and it looks like for recognizing differences between sounds including speech sounds, it’s better than extra reading. That means schools could invest in music and there will be generalization to speech sounds,” Desimone says. “It’s not worse than giving extra reading to the kids, which is probably what many schools are tempted to do — get rid of the arts education and just have more reading.”
Desimone now hopes to delve further into the neurological changes caused by music training. One way to do that is to perform EEG tests before and after a single intense music lesson to see how the brain’s activity has been altered.
The research was funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China, the Beijing Municipal Science and Technology Commission, the Interdiscipline Research Funds of Beijing Normal University, and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities. | | 3:00p |
Researchers decode molecule that gives living tissues their flexibility The stretchiness that allows living tissues to expand, contract, stretch, and bend throughout a lifetime is the result of a protein molecule called tropoelastin. Remarkably, this molecule can be stretched to eight times its length and always returns back to its original size.
Now, for the first time, researchers have decoded the molecular structure of this complex molecule, as well as the details of what can go wrong with its structure in various genetically driven diseases.
Tropoelastin is the precursor molecule of elastin, which along with structures called microfibrils is the key to flexibility of tissues including skin, lungs, and blood vessels. But the molecule is complex, made up of 698 amino acids in sequence and filled with disordered regions, so unravelling its structure has been a major challenge for science.
That challenge has been solved by a team of researchers who used a combination of molecular modeling and experimental observation to build an atom-by-atom picture of the molecule’s structure. The results appear this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in a paper by Markus Buehler, the Jerry McAfee Professor in Engineering and head of the MIT Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering; Anna Tarakanova PhD ’17, an MIT postdoc; and three others at the University of Sydney and the University of Manchester.
“The structure of tropoelastin has been elusive,” Tarakanova says. Traditional characterization methods are insufficient for decoding this molecule “because it’s very large, disordered, and dynamic.” But the combination of computer modeling and experimental observations this team used “allowed us to predict a fully atomistic structure of the molecule,” she says.
The study showed how certain different disease-causing mutations in the single gene that controls the formation of tropoelastin change the molecule’s stiffness and dynamic responses, which could ultimately help in the design of treatments or countermeasures for these conditions. Other “artificial” mutations induced by the researchers, that do not correspond to any known naturally occurring mutations, can be used to better understand the function of the specific part of the gene affected by that mutation.
“We’re interested in probing a particular region of the molecule to understand the function of that region,” Tarakanova says. “In addition to imparting elasticity, the molecule plays a key role in cell signaling and cell adhesion, affecting cellular processes which are driven by interactions with specific sequences within the molecule.”
The study also looked at the specific changes in the tropoelastin molecule caused by mutations that are associated with known diseases, such as cutis laxa, in which the skin lacks elasticity and hangs loosely. “We show that a point mutation associated with the disease causes changes in the molecule that have implications — the mechanism of the disease actually stems from the [changes on the] molecular scale,” she says.
“Understanding the structure of this molecule is not only important in the context of disease,” says Buehler, “but can also enable us to translate the knowledge from this biomaterial to synthetic polymers, which can be designed to meet certain engineering needs. Engineering the balance of order and disorder in the context of desired properties could open doors to new designer materials.”
The method they used to unravel the structure of the tropoelastin molecule included a technique based on molecular dynamics modeling and simulation. While that approach has been used to study simpler molecular structures, she says, “this is the first work where we’ve shown that it can be used for a highly disordered molecule the size of tropoelastin, and then validated it against experimental data.”
The approach combines looking at “the global structure of the molecule, to consider the general outline” into which the molecular structure must fit. Then, they look in detail at local, secondary structures within the molecule, which were culled from large amounts of data in the scientific literature from experimental work. “The relationship of the local structure and the global structure gives us a point of comparison with experiments” that validates their findings, she says.
The techniques they used could be applied to understanding other large, complex molecules, she adds. “More generally, I think this approach is applicable to large molecules with a high degree of disorder — and by some estimates half of the proteins in your body contain regions with a high degree of disorder. This can be a very powerful framework for looking at many kinds of [biological] systems.”
“Intrinsically disordered proteins play important roles in many biological processes, from biomineralization to tissue elasticity,” says Peter Fratzl, a professor and director of the Max Planck Institute of Colloids and Interfaces in Garching, Germany, who was not involved in this research. “Disordered proteins have short-lived structures often in response to the interaction with their environment. Such structures are very hard to investigate experimentally as well as numerically, because computation times can be prohibitive for such large entities.” Fratzl adds that this paper “shows that accelerated-sampling molecular dynamics algorithms represents a real way forward to describe the behavior of such molecules. Elastin and several mutations of this important component of extracellular matrices are studied as a proof of concept with truly convincing results.”
Zsolt Urban, an associate professor of human genetics at the University of Pittsburgh, who also was not connected to this work, says “elastin is necessary for the proper working of stretchy organs such as blood vessels, heart valves, and lungs. However, the full structure of tropoelastin was unknown until now. Tarakanova and coworkers have now solved the structure of tropoelastin at the resolution of atoms. This is a remarkable feat given that tropoelastin consists of more than 8,000 atoms.”
Urban says “Elastin can survive the lifespan of a human, about 75 years, and withstand billions of cycles of stretch and recoil. A key question for elastin is how its remarkable material properties such as stretchiness, extreme longevity, and endurance come about. This study provides a starting point to answering this intriguing question.”
The research team also included postdoc Giselle Yeo and professor of biochemistry Anthony Weiss at the University of Sydney, Australia, and professor of biochemistry Clair Baldock at the University of Manchester, in the U.K. The work was supported by the National Institutes of Health, the Office of Naval Research, the National Science Foundation, the Australian Research Council, and the Wellcome Trust. | | 4:59p |
3Q: Nancy Hopkins on the impact and potential of cancer prevention Great progress has already been made in reducing the cancer death toll through prevention, according to a new article in the June 25 issue of Genes and Development by MIT Professor Emerita Nancy Hopkins and colleagues from the Broad Institute, Fox Chase Cancer Center, University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, and Oxford University. The potential for further reduction is great for two reasons, these researchers say: If these approaches can be more widely applied, in principle about half of current U.S. cancer deaths could be prevented over the next two to three decades; and new discoveries about how cancer develops could help scientists develop even better prevention and screening methods. MIT News spoke with Hopkins, the Amgen Inc. Professor of Biology Emerita, about why this is an exciting time for cancer research.
Q: What does your new article reveal about the impact of cancer prevention and early detection?
A: We’ve described how researchers are integrating the dramatic advances in understanding the molecular biology of cancer to explain long-known facts about how lifestyle choices and factors in the environment affect how cancers arise, and how they progress to become detectable tumors.
Prevention and early detection have already had a tremendous impact on reducing U.S. cancer death rates. In the cancer prevention community, it is well-known that about half of current U.S. cancer deaths could, in theory, be prevented over the next two to three decades simply by the full uptake of proven methods of cancer prevention. This important fact is not as well appreciated by the larger cancer research community. This is not a fault of the cancer researchers; it simply reflects the reality that after years of investment and growth, the field of cancer is very broad, with most people working in areas of specialty.
Given the difficulties in treating established cancers, preventing many cancers entirely would obviously produce a quantal leap in reducing U.S. cancer death rates. But in addition, we believe that recent progress in understanding the molecular mechanisms that underlie cancer, and new technologies associated with these advances, could also lead to novel approaches to preventing cancer, detecting it at earlier stages when treatment is often far more successful, or even intercepting the progression of incipient cancers before they develop into tumors.
Q: What interventions have had success preventing cancer, and what promising new approaches are on the horizon?
A: Spectacular examples of preventing cancers from arising in the first place (formally called “primary cancer prevention”) include (1) successful efforts that reduced smoking rates in the United States (from over 40 percent in the 1960s to about 15 percent today) and that have led to a decline in the incidence of lung cancer and a dozen or more other types of cancer caused by smoking; (2) vaccines for cancer-causing viruses, including hepatitis B virus (a cause of liver cancer) and papilloma viruses (the cause of cervical, head and neck, and several other cancers); (3) clean air and water acts and safer workplace laws in the United States that have prevented workers as well as the general population from exposure to high concentrations of certain industrial chemicals known to cause cancer; (4) the development of drugs to cure hepatitis C infection, which are expected to prevent the development of liver cancer in the future; (5) campaigns such as the one in Australia to prevent skin cancers (particularly melanoma) by behavioral changes related to sun exposure.
As for promising new approaches to primary cancer prevention, the fuller uptake of proven methods of prevention is obviously one way to ensure a dramatic decrease in U.S. cancer death rates in the next two to three decades. This would require a greater investment in public health measures. As our article outlines, we are only now coming to understand the mechanisms by which factors such as obesity, inflammation, and some lifestyle choices synergize with long-appreciated risk factors to promote cancer. Based on this improved understanding, prevention could also be aided by research into new drugs, for example to prevent nicotine addiction or to intercept cancer progression by targeting inflammation. Exciting, too, is the possibility that DNA sequencing of cancer genomes may help to identify additional external causes of cancers based on the “mutational signatures” they leave in our DNA after exposures. If so, these agents may prove to be removable or avoidable in future.
We also discuss a second type of intervention to prevent cancer. This is screening, sometimes referred to as “secondary cancer prevention,” which can detect precancers and cancers at an early enough stage to remove them completely or treat them much more successfully. Spectacular successes to date include the Pap test that has greatly reduced deaths from cervical cancer in the United States and elsewhere; newer molecular tests focused on HPV-virus detection have proven similarly effective and are now replacing traditional Pap tests which require expert pathologic interpretations, making screening more widely available. A second success is colonoscopy, which has been enormously successful at detecting precancerous polyps and early-stage colon cancers that can be removed through the endoscope, or detected earlier when they’re more likely to be responsive to treatment. Additionally, other less-invasive methods of colon cancer screening are readily available and highly effective. Also successful has been mammography in combination with follow-up treatment. Along with greatly improved treatment, it is credited with contributing to the declining death rate from breast cancer.
Q: What types of new screening methods do you believe could help to further improve early detection of cancer?
A: Many of the most successful screening methods are for cancers that develop on body surfaces and hence can be detected by visual inspection. Imaging can be hugely successful for cancers that lie deeper in the body — breast for example — but imaging that becomes more and more sensitive can identify many abnormalities that may not be cancer at all. This can lead to costly and invasive testing of what are sometimes referred to as “incidentalomas.” Much needed are novel methods of screening that may combine imagining with other markers to make it possible to distinguish true cancers from noncancerous aberrations occurring in internal organs.
The holy grail of cancer screening would be blood tests to detect early-stage cancers, and many efforts are now directed to this goal. This is an extremely exciting time for the emergence of powerful molecular diagnostics that can help pinpoint very early-stage tumors. Some of these rely on relatively noninvasive methods, such as measurement of DNA signatures found in the blood. Widespread availability and demonstrated effectiveness of such methods would greatly enhance the field of secondary prevention, but there remain substantial challenges and it is not yet known if this approach will succeed. Also very exciting are methods being developed by bioengineers here at MIT and in other places to try to amplify other signals arising from tumors that may be difficult to detect otherwise and include, for example, completely noninvasive urine-based tests.
After decades of effort, cancer is gradually coming under control thanks to prevention and early detection, improvements in “conventional” cancer treatment (imaging, surgery, radiation, chemotherapy, and some adjuvant therapies), and novel approaches to treatment based on immunotherapy and more personalized drugs. But it is likely that for now, the full implementation of proven methods of prevention offers the most reliable approach to large-scale reduction of U.S. cancer deaths. Meanwhile, research into novel mechanism-based approaches to preventing the initiation and progression of cancer may one day prevent the majority of cancers from occurring in the first place. |
|