Neuroscience

Nervous system (6739)
Neuroscience (423)
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Synopsis: Neuroscience:

It involves skills that the human brain is very good at, and can complete almost instantly.

Drugs that help people with brain and neuropsychiatric conditions improve concentration, planning and memory, or reduce impulsive

working for longer and driving for longer, says Barbara Sahakian, Professor of Neuropsychology at the University of Cambridge,

The authors said the drug likely improved working memory function by boosting levels of the neurotransmitter acetylcholine.

and suggestions that those with two copies of a gene variant associated with higher levels of dopamine actually performed worse when given the drug.

Brain scans he carried out found those with the lowest working memory capacity to begin with improved the most when taking Ritalin.

Another study, led by Martha Farah, Director of the Center for Neuroscience & Society at the University of Pennsylvania

either boost or curb levels of circulating neurotransmitters, the chemicals that relay signals between nerve cells in the brain.

Animal studies show that both very low and very high levels of dopamine in the prefrontal cortex can impair working memory,

the brain is responding to scent molecules that have wafted into your nose and locked on to these receptors.

In the case of scent receptors, specialised neurons send messages to the brain so we know what we have sniffed.

A smattering of papers over the following few years reported sweet taste receptors in the bladder and the gut, bitter taste receptors in the sinuses, airways, pancreas and brain,

#For the first time a Marker of Neuroinflammation Is seen in Brain Scans of Depressed Patients Research conducted by Elaine Setiawan, Ph d.,a 2013 NARSAD Young Investigator grantee,

and her colleagues provides the first evidence of a link between inflammation of brain cells? neuroinflammation?

There has been some evidence of the link between inflammation and depression in the analysis of postmortem brain tissue.

Dr. Setiawan and her colleagues used a new dye that is visible on brain scans of patients

whether the biological marker of neuroinflammation (called translocator protein) that is visible with the new dye would be elevated in regions of the brain that regulate mood.

The team said its findings rovide the most compelling evidence to date of brain inflammationin major depression.

Specifically, this study is the first to see activation of immune cells called microglia that live in the brain and central nervous system.

Finding active microglia in the brains of people with MDD s important for improving treatment, Dr. Setiawan says,

#Problems With attention Traced to Specific Brain Circuit People with schizophrenia, for example, often find it difficult to focus their attention on a task or conversation.

But now scientists can use new technologies to try to isolate the specific brain areas and circuits that help enable concentration.

In a paper published online December 15th in Nature Neuroscience, a team that included three NARSAD grant recipients described a specific circuit that filters out rrelevantinformation from elevantinformation entering the brain at the same time.

and 2013 NARSAD Young Investigator grantee Sarah Ahrens, Ph d.,all of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New york. The team confirmed a long-held theory that a part of the brain called the TRN

what is relevant to a structure called the thalamus. The thalamus is considered a atewayto higher processing areas in the brain cortex.

no one had been able to isolate the specific types of nerve cells in the TRN from others nearby,

The team most important discovery sheds light on what causes the TRN-thalamus-cortex circuit to perform abnormally.

when a cellular receptor called Erbb4 was repressed experimentally in certain neurons of the TRN. They learned that the ability of the mice to switch attention between conflicting sensory cues was impaired.

a researcher at the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior at UCLA."But not everyone who experiences trauma suffers from PTSD.

that play important roles in brain function. COMT is an enzyme that degrades dopamine, a neurotransmitter that controls the brain's reward and pleasure centers,

and helps regulate mood, thinking, attention and behavior. Too much or too little dopamine can influence various neurological and psychological disorders.

TPH-2 controls the production of serotonin a brain hormone that regulates mood, sleep and alertness--all of

which are disrupted in PTSD. Antidepressants called SSRIS, or selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitors, which were designed to treat depression, target serotonin.

More physicians are prescribing SSRIS to treat disorders beyond depression, including PTSD.""We found a significant association between variants of COMT

and TPH-2 with PTSD symptoms, suggesting that these genes contribute to the onset and persistence of the disorder,"said Goenjian."

"Our results indicate that people who carry these genetic variants may be at higher risk of developing PTSD."

#Tracking subtle brain mutations systematically DNA sequences were thought once to be identical from cell to cell,

but it's increasingly understood that mutations can arise during brain development that affect only certain groups of brain cells.

and provides a new way to study both the normal brain and brain disorders such as epilepsy and autism.

"highly sensitive whole-genome sequencing of single neurons and a new technology that identifies inserted bits of DNA caused by retrotransposons,

one of several kinds of so-called somatic mutations that can arise as the brain develops.

The technique picks up somatic mutations that affect just a fraction of the brain's cells, in a"mosaic"pattern.

"showing when during brain development the mutations arise and how they spread through brain tissue as the mutated cells grow,

replicate and migrate, carrying the mutation with them.""There is a lot of genetic diversity from one neuron to the other,

and this work gets at how somatic mutations are distributed in the brain, "says Christopher Walsh, MD, Phd, chief of Genetics and Genomics at Boston Children's and co-senior author on the paper."

"Some mutations may occur on one side of the brain and not the other. Some may be clumped,'affecting just one gyrus fold of the brain,

disrupting just a little part of the cortex at a time.""The study examined brain tissue from a deceased 17-year-old who had been neurologically normal,

sampling in more than 30 brain locations. It builds on work published by the Walsh lab in 2012,

which developed methods to sequence the genomes of single neurons, and represents the first time single neurons have been sequenced in their entirety.

The single-cell technique is better at detecting subtle mosaicism than usual DNA sequencing methods,

which sequence many thousands or millions of cells mixed together and read out an average for the sample.

Somatic brain mutations, affecting just pockets of cells can be harmful, and have been suggested as a possible cause of neurodevelopmental disorders such as autism,

epilepsy or intellectual disability (see this review article for further background). But they also can be completely benign

or have just a subtle effect.""Our findings are intriguing because they suggest that every normal brain may in fact be a mosaic patchwork of focal somatic mutations,

though in normal individuals most are likely silent or harmless,"says Gilad Evrony, Phd, in the Walsh Lab, co-first author on the Neuronpaper."

"These same technologies can now be used to study the brains of people who died from unexplained neuropsychiatric diseases to determine

the findings provide a proof-of-principle for a systematic way of studying how brain cells disperse

study published by Walsh's lab in 2014 used single-neuron sequencing to detect copy number variants--another type of mutation affecting the number of copies of chromosomes or chromosome fragments.

The study found that these mutations can occur in both normal and neurologically diseased brains s

#Brain imaging may help predict future behavior Noninvasive brain scans, such as functional magnetic resonance imaging, have led to basic science discoveries about the human brain,

but they've had limited only impacts on people's day-to-day lives. A review article published in the January 7 issue of the Cell Press journalneuron,

The study, available online in prepublication in ACS Chemical Neuroscience and partially funded by the National institutes of health, focuses specifically on alpha-synuclein (asyn), a protein

which represents the major structural component of Lewy bodies protein clumps found in the brains of individuals with Parkinson disease and other neurological disorders.

Parkinson disease is characterized by impairment or deterioration of neurons in an area of the brain known as the substantia nigra In the familial form of the disorder,

a research scientist with SDSC as well as the UC San diego Moores Cancer Center and the Department of Neurosciences. evertheless when these changes seem to be random on first glance,

Researchers found that asyn contacting the neuron membrane in that site immediately and deeply penetrated it,

These theoretical predications were confirmed by a set of experimental methods conducted in the laboratory of Eliezer Masliah, a professor in UC San diego Department of Neurosciences. revious to this study,

and Kori Kosberg, from the Department of Neurosciences at UC San diego e

#Promising drug candidate protects against radiation exposure from nuclear fallout The 2011 Fukushima disaster was a stark reminder of the continuing dangers posed by nuclear fallout,

Columbia University School of engineering and Applied science-Opening new doors for biomedical and neuroscience research, Elizabeth Hillman, associate professor of biomedical engineering at Columbia Engineering and of radiology at Columbia University Medical center

and neuroscience research,"says Hillman, who is also a member of Columbia's Mortimer B. Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute."

"With SCAPE, we can now image complex, living things, such as neurons firing in the rodent brain, crawling fruit fly larvae,

and single cells in the zebrafish heart while the heart is actually beating spontaneously--this has not been possible until now."

"Highly aligned with the goals of President Obama's BRAIN INITIATIVE, SCAPE is a variation on light-sheet imaging,

even delivering neurons that flash as they fire in the living brain. Yet imaging techniques that can capture these dizzying dynamic processes have lagged behind.

acquiring enough of these layers to form a 3d image at fast enough rates to capture events like neurons actually firing has become a frustrating road-block.

Hillman and her collaborators have used already the system to observe firing in 3d neuronal dendritic trees in superficial layers of the mouse brain.

"Beyond neuroscience, Hillman sees many future applications of SCAPE including imaging cellular replication, function, and motion in intact tissues, 3d cell cultures,

As a member of the new Zuckerman Institute and the Kavli Institute for Brain science at Columbia

including Randy Bruno (associate professor of neuroscience, Department of Neuroscience), Richard Mann (Higgins Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biophysics, Department of Biochemistry & Molecular Biophysics), Wesley Grueber (associate professor

of physiology and cellular biophysics and of neuroscience, Department of Physiology & Cell Biophysics), and Kimara Targoff (assistant professor of pediatrics, Department of Pediatrics), all of whom are starting to use the SCAPE system in their research."

"Deciphering the functions of brain and mind demands improved methods for visualizing, monitoring, and manipulating the activity of neural circuits in natural settings,

"says Thomas M. Jessell, co-director of the Zuckerman Institute and Claire Tow Professor of Motor neuron Disorders, the Department of Neuroscience and the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biophysics at Columbia."

"Hillman's sophistication in optical physics has led her to develop a new imaging technique that permits large-scale detection of neuronal firing in three-dimensional brain tissues.

This methodological advance offers the potential to unlock the secrets of brain activity in ways barely imaginable a few years ago."

Picture of robot and human arm Mopic-Fotolia The Smarthand project succeeded in developing a system that essentially tricks the brain into thinking that a real hand is attached to a person arm. hat for decades has been one of medicine greatest challenges

Sebelius led a team that combined neuroscience, biotechnology and information technologies to develop an artificial hand that patients were able to experience, to some degree,

the and areais still present in the brain. This means an amputee can still imagine that the missing hand is moving. he artificial hand we developed can actually be controlled by an amputee thoughts,

The brain connection to the missing hand is so strong that it can be tricked into believing that the prosthetic hand is real.

#A second chance for injured brains Jouni Salmenjaakko, once a busy executive manager, now spends all his time with his family at their home in Turku in southern Finland.

and because our brains control virtually all bodily functions it is often a challenge for neurologists to offer a clear diagnosis, treatment and rehabilitation.

#A machine which can read your mind e have developed so called brain-computer interfaces which allow the user to control different devices and programmes without hands, by means of the user thoughts.

which sit on the scalp translates user intentions into electronic commands. brain-computer interface captures various electrical impulses from the head of the user,

The frequency of the flashing is reproduced in the brain cortex and read by the electrodes. s soon as we have understood the electroencephalography patterns produced by the groups of neurons in the brain,

we can map the brain activity to any commands for any device, like a television or a motorised system for the home, said Arnau Espinosa Manzanal of the Research and development department,

g. tec Guger Technologies Developed within a European research project, this technology makes home electronics more accessible.

and stop epileptic attacks without drugs and without major brain surgery. To the 50 million people worldwide who suffer from epileptic seizures a chronic neurobiological disorder this simple plan could transform their lives.

which help the brain return to normal functioning. It works in much the same way as an implantable cardiac defibrillator applies shocks automatically to the heart after detecting minor cardiac rhythm disturbances."

"A small circuit is continuously monitoring brain activity and, if it detects a'failure, 'transmits a special electric pulse through the brain.

As the pulse travels from one temple to the other, it interferes (in a good way) with the areas causing the seizure,

"This can dramatically reduce complications (infections, intracerebral bleeding, etc. because the brain tissue is exposed not directly to any manipulation,

Dr Berényi suggests.""And shorter, less-complex surgeries usually lead to faster postoperative recovery in general,

#Expanding insight into Alzheimer's disease Chronic neurodegenerative diseases, such as Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and Huntington's, are all characterised by an inflammatory reaction within the brain.

based on research with mice, could open new avenues for the regulation of Alzheimer-like reactions in the brain related to the loss of memory and other mental abilities.

and also prevent the loss of neurons, says Gómez-Nicola. e selectively targeted the CSF1R with a small-molecule inhibitor delivered systemically,

Gómez-Nicola work also looked at neural stem cells, the intrinsic self-repair mechanism in adults. He found that some activity during the disease compensated for cell death at the hippocampus,

the brain structure involved in learning and memory. e showed that a self-repair mechanism is in place during widespread neurodegeneration,

leading to new avenues for treatment, affirms Gómez-Nicola. PRONEURODEG project coordinator, Hugh Perry, and also Professor of Experimental Neuropathology at the University of Southampton,

The researchers know that infections elsewhere in the body communicate with the brain, and that is why we feel ill.

and analysed the results to show how self-repair might work with humans. iego found that the increase in brain immune cells was a result of local proliferation.

"Cells that divide have different functions and shapes muscle cells, neuron cells and so on. When they divide they pass on their DNA,

It has been designed for the insertion of instruments like biopsy probes or electrodes for deep brain stimulation through small holes in the head of the patient.

and at the same time receive feedback of the sensations that he would have operating directly on the brain.

The robot feedback is amplified to help the surgeon feel his way around the brain. So what kind of operation could be perfomed with this type of robot?

chronic pain and all types of brain cancer, said Cardinale. The robot, developed within the EU Robocast project, is a year away from surgical trials.

there is something in my brain that says that this is forbidden for me, because it is healthy food.

The reason why Alzheimer's develops in the brain is being elucidated, and a few drugs aiming to delay

Four academic partners leaders in imaging neuroscience and based in Brescia (IT), Amsterdam (NL), Stockholm (SW),

The European-wide approach is clearly mandatory to an initiative that is aiming to change the way science is carried out in a strategic field such as clinical neurosciences.

and image dataset that is being collected Europe-wide can be exploited by a large neuroscience community through the application of sophisticated brain analysis algorithms.

The neugrid e-infrastructure is so far the first and only European effort aiming to offer a distributed working environment to computational neuroscientists. neugrid has been developed for the front runner community of neuroscientists working in the field of Alzheimer's disease and other neurodegenerative diseases (i e.

The electrodes will also be designed for optimal use with the human nervous system. With the financial backing of a collective Europe scientific community, things are being achieved,

they were not in a part of the brain that researchers predict would be affected by cell phone radiation.

and migraines as two very different brain events but new research has uncovered a surprising link between the two.

but migraine auras based on an underlying process called spreading depression are marked by a silencing of electrical activity in part of the brain.

which we were working on controlling says Steven J. Schiff an engineering professor at Penn State and director of the Center for Neural engineering.

and all of the ions the charged atoms going into and out of brain cells. Potassium and sodium contribute the ions that control electricity in the brain.

Researchers added fundamental physics principles of conservation of energy charge and mass to an older theory of this electricity.

They kept track of the energy required to run a nerve cell and kept count of the ions passing into and out of the cells.

The brain needs a constant supply of oxygen to keep everything running because it has to keep pumping the ions back across cell membranes after each electrical spike.

Certainly the same brain cells produce these different events and we now have increasing numbers of examples of where single gene mutations can produce the presence of both seizure and migraines in the same patients and families.

and now a professor of physics at University of South Florida explored extending older models of brain cell activity with basic conservation principles.

They were motivated by previous Penn State experiments that showed the very sensitive link between oxygen concentration with reliable and rapid changes in nerve cell behavior.

and spreading depression were all part of a spectrum of nerve cell behavior. It appeared that decades of observations of different phenomena in the brain could share a common underlying link.

We have found within a single model of the biophysics of neuronal membranes that we can account for a broad range of experimental observations from spikes to seizures

and spreading depression the researchers report in a recent issue of the Journal of Neuroscience.

While the initial intent was to better model the biophysics of the brain the connection

The ability to better understand the difference between normal and pathological activity within the brain may lead to the ability to predict

but we are keen to seek ways to stabilize the brain in normal operating regimes

#Team makes spiny neurons without stem cells Washington University in St louis rightoriginal Studyposted by Julia Evangelou Strait-WUSTL on October 30 2014scientists have figured outâ#howâ#to convert human skin cells

directly into a specific type of brain cell without passing through a stem cell phase which avoids the production of multiple cell types.

The researchers demonstrate that these converted cells survived at least six months after injection into the brains of mice

and behaved similarly to native cells in the brain.####Not only did transplanted these cells survive in the mouse brain they showed functional properties similar to those of native cells##says senior author Andrew S. Yoo assistant professor of developmental biology at the Washington University School of medicine in St louis.##These cells

are known to extend projections into certain brain regions. And we found the human transplanted cells also connected to these distant targets in the mouse brain.

That s a landmark point about this paper.####The investigators produced a specific type of brain cell called medium spiny neurons

which are important for controlling movement. They are affected the primary cells in Huntington s disease an inherited genetic disorder that causes involuntary muscle movements

and cognitive decline usually beginning in middle-adulthood. Patients with the condition live about 20 years following the onset of symptoms

and his colleagues put the skin cells in an environment that closely mimics the environment of brain cells.

They knew from past work that exposure to two small molecules of RNA a close chemical cousin of DNA could turn skin cells into a mix of different types of neurons.

In a skin cell the DNA instructions for how to be a brain cell or any other type of cell is packed neatly away unused.

Though the investigators still are unraveling the details of this complex process these micrornas appear to be opening up the tightly packaged sections of DNA important for brain cells allowing expression of genes governing development and function of neurons.

Knowing exposure to these micrornas alone could change skin cells into a mix of neurons the researchers then started to fine tune the chemical signals exposing the cells to additional molecules called transcription factors that they knew were present in the part of the brain where medium spiny

neurons are common.####We think that the micrornas are really doing the heavy lifting##says co-first author Matheus B. Victor a graduate student in neuroscience.##

##They are priming the skin cells to become neurons. The transcription factors we add then guide the skin cells to become a specific subtype in this case medium spiny neurons.

We think we could produce different types of neurons by switching out different transcription factors.####Yoo also explains that the micrornas

but not the transcription factors are important components for the general reprogramming of human skin cells directly to neurons.

His team including co-first author Michelle C. Richner senior research technician showed that when the skin cells were exposed to the transcription factors alone without the micrornas the conversion into neurons wasn t successful.

The researchers performed extensive tests to demonstrate that these newly converted brain cells did indeed look

and behave like native medium spiny neurons. The converted cells expressed genes specific to native human medium spiny neurons and did not express genes for other types of neurons.

When transplanted into the mouse brain the converted cells showed morphological and functional properties similar to native neurons.

To study the cellular properties associated with the disease the investigators now are taking skin cells from patients with Huntington s disease

and reprogramming them into medium spiny neurons using the approach described in the new paper.

They also plan to inject healthy reprogrammed human cells into mice with a model of Huntington s disease to see

if this has any effect on the symptoms. The work appears in the journal Neuron.

Funding came from a National Science Foundation Graduate Research fellowship a fellowship from Cognitive Computation and Systems neuroscience Pathway grants from the National institutes of health and awards from the Mallinckrodt Jr.

Foundation Ellison Medical Foundation and Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers. Source: Washington University in St. Louisyou are free to share this article under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noderivs 3. 0 Unported license t

and they send the wrong signals to the brain about when and how much to eat.

The protein called NT3 is critical for maintaining communication between the ears and brain. The work reported in the journal elife suggests the protein might be a target for treating people who have suffered hearing loss due to noise or aging.

In addition to the protein the study also looked at the role of cells that have traditionally been seen as the##supporting actors##of the ear-brain connection.

Called supporting cells they form a physical base for the hearing system s##stars##the hair cells in the ear that interact directly with the nerves that carry sound signals to the brain.

and nerve cells the researchers demonstrate. This special type of connection called a ribbon synapse allows extra-rapid communication of signals that travel back and forth across tiny gaps between the two types of cells.##

##It has become apparent that hearing loss due to damaged ribbon synapses is a very common and challenging problem

whether it s due to noise or normal aging##says Gabriel Corfas who led the team

Now Arbabian and his colleagues are collaborating with other researchers to develop sound-powered implants for a variety of medical applications including studying the nervous system

The goal is to produce smaller devices that could be used to create a network of electrodes to study the brains of experimental animals in ways not currently possible."

"US and European brain initiatives are pushing for a more complete understanding of the central nervous system"Solzbacher says."

"This requires being able to interface with cells using arrays of micro implants across the entire 3d structure of the brain."

#Brain surgery robot would go through the cheek Vanderbilt University Posted by David Salisbury-VU on October 16 2014for people with severe epilepsy treatment can mean drilling through the skull deep into the brain

Because the area of the brain involved is the hippocampus which is located at the bottom of the brain they could develop a robotic device that pokes through the cheek

and enters the brain from underneath. This strategy avoids having to drill through the skull

and is much closer to the target area. To do so however meant developing a shape-memory alloy needle that can be steered precisely along a curving path

of which are curved that allow the tip to follow a curved path into the brain. Unlike many common metals nickel-titanium is compatible with MRIS.

They learned that neuroscientists currently use the through-the-cheek approach to implant electrodes in the brain to track brain activity

and insert the needle used to destroy the misbehaving neurons through the top of the head.

Comber and Barth shadowed Neimat through brain surgeries to understand how their device would work in practice.##

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