Each year, Science publishes a review of the year’s scientific achievements across the globe. In its December issue, the American journal published a list of the top 10 scientific breakthroughs of 2013. Listed among them was our very own student alumna, Xie Lulu, whose research discovered that ‘Sleep Drives Metabolite Clearance from the Adult Brain”.
The key breakthrough of this research project was to reveal why people need to sleep. The first author of the paper, Dr. Xie, is a previous student of our university and is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Rochester. During an interview on this research, Dr. Xie explained, “Sleep is something that everybody is thinking about a lot in this modern era. Can we live without sleep and use the time for our work and our lives? The answer is probably not.” Through experiments on mice, the research project identified that the brain has a unique “garbage disposal system” and that during sleep, this system works to efficiently dispose of metabolic waste. What this indicates is that one of the major purposes of sleep is to “clear out” the brain.
Dr. Xie enrolled at NMU as a clinical medicine major in 2000. In 2005, she went on to become a Master’s student in pharmacology. With an excellent academic record, she was accepted into the school’s doctorate program in pharmacology in 2007. After graduating from NMU in 2010, she took up an offer to work as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Rochester in America. She was then able to get her research published in the American journal Science, which has an impact factor of 34.
News Link: http://news.xinhuanet.com/tech/2013-12/20/c_118635860.htm
Edited by: Anthony Williams
Reported by: The Office of Development
Translated by: Zhang DonghuiEdited by: Anthony Williams
