Israeli researchers want to build a tear bank to better understand why we cry
Compared to other bodily secretions, researchers have so far devoted infinitely less attention to tears. Collecting the salty drops is a tedious task: there are not many donors capable of shedding tears, men hardly ever volunteer for this purpose, and the tears must be "fresh" so that their contents can be properly analyzed. As a result, there is no consensus among researchers about the very role played by this basic human behavior. Is crying a primitive form of communication shared by many species of animals, as some chemists hypothesize? Or is the hypothesis of psychologists correct, that this is a unique human phenomenon that plays a central role in creating social relationships? to the Israeli neurobiologist Noam Sobel The Weizmann Institute of Science has a plan to advance tear research: it has developed a method for rapid freezing of tears, and is now working to establish a "tear bank" that will serve researchers from all over the world.
Sobel discovered in 2011 that women's tears contain pheromones which reduce the level ofTestosterone in the men around them. But follow-up studies have progressed slowly because these molecules break down quickly.
To prevent damage to the chemical composition of the tears, Sobel and the members of his research group developed a systematic way to freeze the drops using liquid nitrogen, which quickly lowers the temperature of the samples to a temperature lower than minus 80 degrees Celsius. According to the researchers, who plan to publish the results of the study later in 2016, this process preserves most of the chemical components of the tears. The next planned step is the construction of a cryogenic tear reservoir (at a very low temperature) that will contain samples that will be classified according to their source and will allow samples to be ordered online. "Just as there are other biological reservoirs, of amniotic fluid, blood and urine, so we will have a reservoir of tears," says Sobel. "It will allow us to complete studies in two weeks instead of six months."
Tear banks will make it possible to conduct studies that "hold enormous possibilities," he says Saed in the word, a biological engineer at Stanford University who often had to use his studies of animal tears to find out how tears cover the surface of the eye. As an example of possible applications, he tells about the interest shown by companies in Silicon Valley in contact lenses that will act, among other things, as a personal information screen, and about the increasing prevalence of the dry eye phenomenon as a result of prolonged viewing of computer screens.
Sobel hopes that researchers interested in the tear bank will eventually be able to select tears from the pool according to donor characteristics, such as age and gender, and order, for example, 200 samples from white men aged 18 to 25. These access options could simplify experiments dealing with the chemistry of crying and the countless unsolved questions about The crying phenomenon: do tears affect mood or appetite? Are there differences between men's and women's tears? What is the difference between emotional tears and non-emotional tears (e.g. as a result of cutting an onion)? From Sobel's point of view, the more people shed tears the better.
