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For stress awareness month we want to talk about the relationship between health and stress, we also touch on a recent research paper from the University of Washington to highlight the importance of this connection as shown in rhesus macaques.

Stress is bad for our health; we’ve all heard it right? When we’re stressed it can wear us down and leaves us vulnerable to illnesses. Despite this being a well-known fact, we are yet to fully understand the exact science behind how stress impacts us on the cellular level. New Research from the University of Washington on monkeys may have an answer to this gap in our knowledge.

In certain animal groups a low social status has been linked to negative impact on quality of life and health. Those who are lower in the social ranks receive less social support and therefore more harassment from peers, which in turn impacts their health.

To investigate this on a cellular level, the researchers of this study looked into the effect that social status in female rhesus macaques had on the gene expression and accessibility to chromatin in response to hormones involved in stress regulation (glucocorticoids). The results of the study found that social status did indeed impact multiple levels of immune cell gene regulation and therefore supports the idea that stress relates to health on a cellular level.

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As it’s Stress Awareness month we would like to highlight papers recommended on F1000Prime which focus on the topic of stress and health.

If you like our recommendations, why not consider checking out F1000Prime? F1000Prime is our literature recommendation service, which has a peer-nominated global Faculty of more than 8,000 of the world’s leading biomedical scientists and clinicians. The Faculty select those articles which they think are particularly interesting and important and write recommendations explaining their selection. From the numerical ratings awarded, we have created a unique system for quantifying the importance of individual articles.

“The study by Razzoli et al. explores the link previously found between social stress and shortened lifespan in humans. The authors developed the first model of lifelong chronic psychosocial stress (LCPS) in male mice.” –Siegfried Hekimi and Alycia Noë, McGill University, Canada

“This elegant study identifies a novel pathway by which protein aggregates in neurons are cleared. This pathway involves the extrusion of protein aggregates through neighboring cells (hypodermis), which are eventually degraded by coelomcytes in C. elegans” – Pankaj Kapahi, Buck Institute for Research on Aging, USA

“This highly interesting paper investigates the influence of the tumor microenvironment on regulatory T cells (Treg), which are recruited into solid tumors where they suppress T-cell responses to tumor cells. The authors show that Treg cells in the tumor microenvironment underwent apoptosis due to oxidative stress. Surprisingly, these apoptotic Treg cells mediated superior immunosuppression compared to live Treg cells. The immunosuppressive agent was identified to be a soluble factor, namely adenosine that is produced via the increased release and conversion of ATP by apoptotic Treg cells. Adenosine acted on effector T cells via the A2A pathway.” – Margot Thome, University of Lausanne, Switzerland

Current Top 3 recommendations

Rankings are generated using the article recommended in F1000Prime during the preceding 30 days.

“This exciting paper shows that the Arabidopsis ABA PYL receptors are inactivated by phosphorylation to dampen stress responses and that the conserved TOR kinase is involved in this regulatory process. This provides a new and important link between the activation of growth by the TOR kinase and the repression of stress responses.” – Christian Meyer, INRA, Versailles, France

“In this very well written article, authors study circulating tumor cell interaction with neutrophils…These results provide an example of tumor-immune cell interaction that happens outside of the primary tumor and impacts the metastatic cascade – a poorly-explored aspect of cancer therapies.” – Seiamak Bahram, INSERM UMR_S 1109 and LabEx TRANSPLANTEX, Strasbourg Cedex, France and Gautier Follain, Hôpital Civil de Strasbourg, France

“Here, the authors show that a small percentage of cases with neurodevelopmental disorders have a disease causing de novo mutation in the non-coding, i.e. regulatory, sequence. Building on their previously established statistical framework for protein-coding de novo mutations, the authors now show that patients with neurodevelopmental disorders have a small but significant enrichment for de novo mutations (SNVs) in highly evolutionarily conserved fetal brain-active elements. In total, these types of de novo mutations may explain 1-3% of cases in which no pathogenic coding mutation was previously identified.” – Alex Hoischen, Radboud University Medical Centre, Nijmegen, The Netherlands

Hidden Jewels

Hidden Jewels rankings only include articles published in specialist journals, recommended in F1000Prime during the preceding 30 days.

“This most interesting paper shows the direct reciprocal regulation of abscisic acid (ABA) and Target of Rapamycin (TOR) signaling in balancing plant growth under stressful and normal conditions.” – Sjef Smeekens, Faculty of Science, Utrecht University, The Netherlands

“This is a fascinating paper which explains how two different chemokines (CXCL1 and CXCL2) that each bind to the same neutrophil receptor (CXCR2) can sequentially act during different steps of the leukocyte extravasation process.” – Dietmar Vestweber, Max-Planck-Institute for Molecular Biomedicine, Münster, Germany

“Taken together, this study provides important new insight into the alternative mechanism that invading cells can utilize in the absence of MMPs. Targeting these adaptive mechanisms will be essential for the therapeutic inhibition of basement membrane invasion in cancer and other diseases.” – Rik Korswagen, Hubrecht Institute, Utrecht, The Netherlands