Search results for " Neurosurgery"
showing 10 items of 7727 documents
Bumetanide prevents brain trauma-induced depressive-like behavior
2019
AbstractBrain trauma triggers a cascade of deleterious events leading to enhanced incidence of drug resistant epilepsies, depression and cognitive dysfunctions. The underlying mechanisms leading to these alterations are poorly understood and treatment that attenuates those sequels not available. Using controlled-cortical impact (CCI) as experimental model of brain trauma in adult mouse we found a strong suppressive effect of the sodium-potassium-chloride importer (NKCC1) specific antagonist bumetanide on appearance of depression-like behavior. We demonstrate that this alteration in behavior is associated with a block of CCI-induced decrease in parvalbumin-positive interneurons and impairmen…
Tetrabromobisphenol A (TBBPA)-stimulated reactive oxygen species (ROS) production in cell-free model using the 2′,7′-dichlorodihydrofluorescein diace…
2016
t Tetrabromobisphenol A (TBBPA) is a widely used brominated flame retardant, applied in a variety of commercial and household products, mainly electronic ones. Since the production of reactive oxygen species (ROS) is considered one of the principal cytotoxicity mechanisms, numerous studies undertake that aspect of TBBPA’s mechanism of action. The present study verifies if the fluorogenic substrate 2′,7′- dichlorodihydrofluorescein diacetate (H2DCFDA) should be used to detect ROS production induced by TBBPA. To determine the ability of TBBPA alone to stimulate the conversion of H2DCFDA to its fluorescent product 2’, 7’- dichlorofluorescein (DCF), we used a cell-free model. In the experiments…
Retract p < 0.005 and propose using JASP, instead
2018
Seeking to address the lack of research reproducibility in science, including psychology and the life sciences, a pragmatic solution has been raised recently: to use a stricter p < 0.005 standard for statistical significance when claiming evidence of new discoveries. Notwithstanding its potential impact, the proposal has motivated a large mass of authors to dispute it from different philosophical and methodological angles. This article reflects on the original argument and the consequent counterarguments, and concludes with a simpler and better-suited alternative that the authors of the proposal knew about and, perhaps, should have made from their Jeffresian perspective: to use a Bayes …
Reactome graph database: Efficient access to complex pathway data
2018
Reactome is a free, open-source, open-data, curated and peer-reviewed knowledgebase of biomolecular pathways. One of its main priorities is to provide easy and efficient access to its high quality curated data. At present, biological pathway databases typically store their contents in relational databases. This limits access efficiency because there are performance issues associated with queries traversing highly interconnected data. The same data in a graph database can be queried more efficiently. Here we present the rationale behind the adoption of a graph database (Neo4j) as well as the new ContentService (REST API) that provides access to these data. The Neo4j graph database and its qu…
Cofilin and Neurodegeneration: New Functions for an Old but Gold Protein
2021
Cofilin is an actin-binding protein that plays a major role in the regulation of actin dynamics, an essential cellular process. This protein has emerged as a crucial molecule for functions of the nervous system including motility and guidance of the neuronal growth cone, dendritic spine organization, axonal branching, and synaptic signalling. Recently, other important functions in cell biology such as apoptosis or the control of mitochondrial function have been attributed to cofilin. Moreover, novel mechanisms of cofilin function regulation have also been described. The activity of cofilin is controlled by complex regulatory mechanisms, with phosphorylation being the most important, since t…
The activation of NMDA receptors alters the structural dynamics of the spines of hippocampal interneurons
2017
N-Methyl-d-Aspartate receptors (NMDARs) are present in both pyramidal neurons and interneurons of the hippocampus. These receptors play a key role in the structural plasticity of excitatory neurons, but to date little is known about their influence on the remodeling of interneurons. Among hippocampal interneurons, the somatostatin expressing cells in the CA1 stratum oriens are of special interest because of their functional importance and structural characteristics: they display dendritic spines, which change their density in response to different stimuli. In order to understand the role of NMDAR activation on the structural dynamics of the spines of somatostatin expressing interneurons in …
Alterations in Tau Protein Level and Phosphorylation State in the Brain of the Autistic-Like Rats Induced by Prenatal Exposure to Valproic Acid
2021
Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a neurodevelopmental condition characterized by deficient social interaction and communication besides repetitive, stereotyped behaviours. A characteristic feature of ASD is altered dendritic spine density and morphology associated with synaptic plasticity disturbances. Since microtubules (MTs) regulate dendritic spine morphology and play an important role in spine development and plasticity the aim of the present study was to investigate the alterations in the content of neuronal α/β-tubulin and Tau protein level as well as phosphorylation state in the valproic acid (VPA)-induced rat model of autism. Our results indicated that maternal exposure to VPA indu…
Intra-neuronal Competition for Synaptic Partners Conserves the Amount of Dendritic Building Material
2017
Brain development requires correct targeting of multiple thousand synaptic terminals onto staggeringly complex dendritic arbors. The mechanisms by which input synapse numbers are matched to dendrite size, and by which synaptic inputs from different transmitter systems are correctly partitioned onto a postsynaptic arbor, are incompletely understood. By combining quantitative neuroanatomy with targeted genetic manipulation of synaptic input to an identified Drosophila neuron, we show that synaptic inputs of two different transmitter classes locally direct dendrite growth in a competitive manner. During development, the relative amounts of GABAergic and cholinergic synaptic drive shift dendrit…
Neuronal LRP4 regulates synapse formation in the developing CNS
2017
The low-density lipoprotein receptor-related protein 4 (LRP4) is essential in muscle fibers for the establishment of the neuromuscular junction. Here, we show that LRP4 is also expressed by embryonic cortical and hippocampal neurons, and that downregulation of LRP4 in these neurons causes a reduction in density of synapses and number of primary dendrites. Accordingly, overexpression of LRP4 in cultured neurons had the opposite effect inducing more but shorter primary dendrites with an increased number of spines. Transsynaptic tracing mediated by rabies virus revealed a reduced number of neurons presynaptic to the cortical neurons in which LRP4 was knocked down. Moreover, neuron-specific kno…
Regulation of Dendritic Spine Morphology in Hippocampal Neurons by Copine-6.
2015
Dendritic spines compartmentalize information in the brain, and their morphological characteristics are thought to underly synaptic plasticity. Here we identify copine-6 as a novel modulator of dendritic spine morphology. We found that brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) - a molecule essential for long-term potentiation of synaptic strength - upregulated and recruited copine-6 to dendritic spines in hippocampal neurons. Overexpression of copine-6 increased mushroom spine number and decreased filopodia number, while copine-6 knockdown had the opposite effect and dramatically increased the number of filopodia, which lacked PSD95. Functionally, manipulation of post-synaptic copine-6 level…