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Posts Tagged ‘Neuron’

Image by MAMJODH via Flickr Oxygen is the key to life.  This is because it loves electrons.  In the mitochondria of every cell in your body, oxygen (in is atmospheric O2 state) serves as the ultimate electron acceptor and provides the chemical energy that drives the formation of ATP (a form of chemical energy storage [...]

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Image by BiggerPictureImages.com via Flickr Sometimes, when flipping channels late at night, its hard NOT to stop and gawk at the various spectacles on reality-trash-TV.  No self-respecting scientist would admit to being smitten by all the vanity and preening – right?  Well, back in 2002, there was a mouse whose homeobox-B8 gene was disrupted – [...]

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Image via Wikipedia For a great many reasons, research on mental illness is focused on the frontal cortex.  Its just a small part of the brain, and certainly, many things can go wrong in other places during brain/cognitive development, but, it remains a robust finding, that when the frontal cortex is not working well, individuals [...]

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One of the complexities in beginning to understand how genetic variation relates to cognitive function and behavior is that – unfortunately – there is no gene for “personality”, “anxiety”, “memory” or any other type of “this” or “that” trait.  Most genes are expressed rather broadly across the entire brain’s cortical layers and subcortical systems.  So, [...]

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Image by Biking Nikon PDX via Flickr One of the difficult aspects of understanding mental illness, is separating the real causes of the illness from what might be secondary or tertiary consequences of having the illness.  If you think about a car whose engine is not running normally, there may be many observable things going [...]

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If you compare the left panel to the right panel, you’ll see a dendrite (grey) with dendritic spines (green) on the left-side and then, on the right-side, these spines enveloped by the membrane of an astrocyte (white).  These images were obtained from synapse-web.org who use a method known as 3D reconstruction of serial section electron [...]

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Phrenological thinking, a popular pseudoscientific practice in the 1800′s suggested that the structure of the head and underlying brain held the clues to understanding human behavior.  Today, amidst the ongoing convergence of developmental science, molecular & biochemical science and systems-dynamical science (to name just a few), there is – of course – no single or [...]

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According to Joseph LeDoux, “One of the most important contributions of modern neuroscience has been to show that the nature/nurture debate operates around a false dichotomy: the assumption that biology, on one hand, and lived experience, on the other, affect us in fundamentally different ways” (ref).  Indeed.  While I know not where the current debate [...]

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Image via Wikipedia In previous posts, we have explored some of the basic molecular (de-repression of chromatin structure) and cellular (excess synaptogenesis) consequences of mutations in the MeCP2 gene – a.k.a the gene whose loss of function gives rise to Rett syndrome.  One of the more difficult aspects of understanding how a mutation in a [...]

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Celebrities and politicians are known for their love of the spotlight.  “Me, me, me!”  are the words to get ahead by in our modern media circus.   As well, it can even be – in the unglamorous world of science – where, in characteristically geeky form, the conventional wisdom is to shout, “my hypothesis, my [...]

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**PODCAST accompanies this post** In the brain, as in other aspects of life, timing is everything.  On an intuitive level, its pretty clear, that, since neurons have to work together in widely distributed networks, they have a lot of incentive to talk to each other in a rhythmic, organized way. Think of a choir that [...]

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Just stumbled onto this great educational resource …. From an article that describes NERVE: We’ve Got NERVE: A Call to Arms for Neuroscience Education Kyle J. Frantz, Colleen D. McNerney and Nicholas C. Spitzer “Are we neuroscientists doing our part to help revive science education, to stimulate teachers’ ingenuity, and diversify the intellectual capital among [...]

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Image via Wikipedia If you like gardening, the doldrums of winter can be dreary indeed. Although I’d never admit to it, my neighbors might swear to having seen me outside strangely (pathetically) counting the number of branches on my icicle-laden roses and rhododendrons.  In any case, I do admit to spending way too much time [...]

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Image by pchow98 via Flickr One of the cool things about the brain & one of the ways in which it differs markedly from our current computer systems is that cells and synapses are living dynamic entities that grow and sprout new connections in response to experience. Since the 1980′s studies using protein synthesis inhibitors [...]

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Image by Thomas Hawk via Flickr Mouse models of complex neurological illness are a powerful means to dissect molecular pathways and treatment paradigms. Current mouse models for the tremors and movement difficulties seen in Parkinson disease include genes such as parkin, alpha-synuclein, LRRK2, PINK1 and DJ-1. These models however, do not show the motor control [...]

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Image by koolkao via Flickr Damage to the human brain, ie. loss of cells due to programmed or non-programmed cell death is presently considered to be an irreversible fate. Many a skilled neurosurgeon can place new neurons or stem cells into damaged areas, but that does little good unless those cells are able to sprout [...]

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Image via Wikipedia Many of the unpleasant feelings and physiological changes associated with fear and anxiety can be traced back to a tiny brain region known as the amygdala. Neuroimaging studies often find this region abnormally active in people having difficulty down-regulating negative emotions. It is no surprise then, that when genes that regulate innate [...]

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Image via Wikipedia There is rightly much ado over the recent stem cell breakthrough. Indeed, who wouldn’t want to have an eternal supply of sprightly new cells to swap in to replace run-down geezer cells. Swapping in a neuron, however, is not quite so simple, as these cells are highly differentiated with far reaching projections [...]

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Image via Wikipedia I’m not sure what Skinner would have thought, but its clear that, nowadays, mechanisms of behavior can be understood in terms of dynamic changes in neural systems and, furthermore, that individual differences in these neural dynamics are heavily regulated by genetic variation. Consider the recent paper by Lobo et al., “Genetic control [...]

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