PubMed Journal Database | Journal of neuroscience methods - Page: 3 
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Showing PubMed Articles 51–75 of 363 from Journal of neuroscience methods
Although deep brain stimulation (DBS) has been proven to be an effective treatment for several neuropsychiatric disorders, such as Parkinson's disease, the underlying working mechanisms are still largely unknown. Behavioral animal models are essential in examining the working mechanisms of DBS and especially mouse models are necessary to investigate the genetic component underlying specific behaviors related to psychiatric diseases. Unfortunately, currently available stimulation devices are unsuitable to te...
Focalizing electrical neural stimulation with penetrating microelectrode arrays: A modeling study.
Penetrating neural probes are considered for neuroprosthetic devices to restore sensory or motor functions of the CNS using electrical neural microstimulation. These multielectrode systems require optimal electrode configurations to allow precise and focused tissue activation. Combining a finite element model of the spinal cord and compartmentalized models of both simple and complex neuron morphologies, we evaluated the use of the "ground surface" configuration, which consists in the integration of a conduc...
Vamping: Stereology-based automated quantification of fluorescent puncta size and density.
The size of dendritic spines and postsynaptic densities (PSDs) is well known to be correlated with molecular and functional characteristics of the synapse. Thus, the development of microscopy methods that allow high throughput quantification and measurement of PSDs is a contemporary need in the field of neurobiology. While the gold standard for measurement of sub-micrometer structures remains electron microscopy (EM), this method is exceedingly laborious and therefore not always feasible. Immunohistochemist...
A mobile olfactometer for fMRI-studies.
To perform functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies with olfactory stimulation, the stimulation device requires special properties including those of being non-conductive and non-magnetic. It should also be easily portable and should be small enough to be stored easily when not in use. However, presently only a limited number of devices fulfill these criteria; additionally, they are typically associated with high costs. The aim of the study was to investigate whether a newly developed and relati...
Convection-enhanced delivery (CED) shows promise in treating neurological diseases due to its ability to circumvent the blood-brain barrier (BBB) and deliver therapeutics directly to the parenchyma of the central nervous system (CNS). Such a drug delivery method may be useful in treating CNS disorders involving the hippocampus such as temporal lobe epilepsy and gliomas; however, the influence of anatomical structures on infusate distribution is not fully understood. As a surrogate for therapeutic agents, we...
Uncovering neural independent components from highly artifactual TMS-evoked EEG data.
Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) combined with electroencephalography (EEG) is a powerful tool for studying cortical excitability and connectivity. To enhance the EEG interpretation, independent component analysis (ICA) has been used to separate the data into independent components (ICs). However, TMS can evoke large artifacts in EEG, which may greatly distort the ICA separation. The removal of such artifactual EEG from the data is a difficult task. In this paper we study how badly the large artifact...
Insights into the anatomical organization of complex neural circuits provide important information about function, and thus tools that facilitate neuroanatomical studies have proved invaluable in neuroscience. Advances in molecular cloning have allowed the production of novel recombinant neuroinvasive viruses for use in transynaptic neural tracing studies. However, the vast majority of these viruses have motility in the retrograde direction only, therefore limiting their use to studies of synaptic input cir...
Oligodendrocyte progenitor cell (OPC) culture has provided a powerful approach to mechanistically investigate the proliferation and differentiation of oligodendroglia. However, existing culture methods (including the traditional shake-off method) have limitations, particularly their low productivities. Therefore, we developed a simplified and highly efficient method to produce a large yield of OPCs with low expense by using specialised modified media, in which B104-conditioned medium (B104-CM) instead of gr...
MicroRNAs (miRNAs) finely tune messenger RNA (mRNA) expression. As the brain is a highly heterogeneous tissue, physiologically relevant miRNA expression profiling greatly benefits from sampling brain regions or nuclei. MiRNA expression profiling from individual samples is also important for investigating potential differences between animals according to their physiological and pathophysiological status. We have punched the arcuate (ARC) and paraventricular (PVN) nuclei from the hypothalamus of seven male W...
Cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) provides an invaluable analytical window to the central nervous system (CNS) because it reflects the dynamically changing complement of CNS constituents. We describe an improved method for sampling CSF in rats that is easy to perform. It has a 96% success rate of CSF collection and consistently yields large volumes (150-200μl) of CSF. The blood contamination rate is also low (6%) as determined by both visual inspection and the lack of molecular detection of apolipoprotein B, a pla...
Pre-clinical investigation of human CNS disorders relies heavily on mouse models. However these show low predictive validity for translational success to humans, partly due to the extensive use of rapid, high-throughput behavioral assays. Improved assays to monitor rodent behavior over longer time scales in a variety of contexts while still maintaining the efficiency of data collection associated with high-throughput assays are needed. We developed an apparatus that uses radio frequency identification devic...
Penetrating brain injury (PBI) is a complex central nervous system injury in which mechanical damage to brain parenchyma results in hemorrhage, ischemia, broad areas of necrosis, and eventually cavitation. The permanent loss of brain tissue affords the possibility of treatment using a biomaterial scaffold to fill the lesion site and potentially deliver pharmacological or cellular therapeutic agents. The administration of cellular therapy may be of benefit in both mitigating the secondary injury process and...
One of the hallmark pathologies associated with Alzheimer's disease (AD) is the conspicuous deposition of extracellular amyloid plaques within the forebrain. These plaques are primarily composed of fibrular aggregates of the A-beta peptide. Traditional methods for the histological localization of these plaques typically rely on the use of the tracers Congo Red or Thioflavin S. This study describes the characterization of a novel fluorescent histochemical probe, Amylo-Glo, for the high resolution and contras...
Oxytocin (OXT) and arg-vasopressin (AVP) are nonapeptides with many important functions both peripherally and centrally. Intracerebral microdialysis has helped characterize their importance in regulating complex social and emotional processes. Radioiummunoassay is the most commonly used analytical method used for OXT and AVP measurements in microdialysates. These measurements have several well-known issues including single peptide per assay limit, possible cross-reactivity between structurally related pepti...
Embedding matrix for simultaneous processing of multiple histological samples.
A method is described for simultaneous histological processing of multiple fixed tissue samples. The tissue samples are embedded in a gelatin-albumin protein matrix that is rapidly solidified and bound to the tissue surface using a cross-linking reagent. After freezing and sectioning, the individual sections containing multiple samples can be processed for immunocytochemical and histochemical staining. The method is demonstrated for simultaneous processing of multiple rodent brains, and for reconstruction o...
It is estimated that lacunar infarcts account for 25% of all ischemic strokes, but its exact etiology is still on debating. The existing controversies include whether the embolisms can indeed cause lacunar stroke in humans or animal models. We hypothesized that lacunar infarction can be induced by the proximal middle cerebral artery (MCA) segmental occlusion involving the orifices of lenticulostriate arteries in animal models, which have abundant distal cerebral collateral anastomosis. Our work here establi...
The FD Rapid GolgiStain Kit (FD NeuroTechnologies, Inc., Ellicott City, MD) was developed using an improved Golgi-Cox impregnation method to provide stable, sensitive, and convenient staining of mature neurons. However, embryonic neurons cannot be clearly visualized using this method. We have further improved the Golgi-Cox method by introducing an additional aldehyde fixation step before impregnation; thus, we can stably and sufficiently impregnate fetal brain neurons so that even the fine branches of the d...
Cellular excitability originates from a concerted action of different ion channels. The genomic diversity of ion channels (over 100 different genes) underlies the functional diversity of neurons in the central nervous system (CNS) and even within a specific type of neurons large differences in channel expression have been observed. Patch-clamp is a powerful technique to study the electrophysiology of excitability at the single cell level, allowing exploration of cell-to-cell variability. Only a few attempts...
Sensitive CSF ELISAs for the detection of MBL, MASP-2 and functional MBL/MASP-2.
Mannose binding lectin (MBL) mediated complement pathway is an important constituent of innate immune response in several infections including neuroinflammatory and neurodegenerative diseases. Although there are Enzyme-Linked Immunosorbent Assays (ELISAs) for estimating MBL, MBL-associated serine protease-2 (MASP-2) and functional MBL-MASP-2 (fMBL) proteins for the plasma, serum and cell supernatants there are no established methods for their estimation in the cerebrospinal fluid (CSF). We developed sensiti...
Evaluation of plasmid permanence in transfected cells after transplantation into the rat brain.
Plasmid retention after long-term transplantation has been one of the major technical limitations for transplantation studies. This study describes the use of a modified protocol of Hirt and a SYBR Green-based quantitative real-time PCR (qPCR) to recover and quantify a vector containing a specific transgene in transfected cells after brain transplantation. We compared various methods for sample processing and recovery of extrachromosomal DNA suitable for qPCR. The modified protocol of Hirt was the most reli...
Systematic biases in early ERP and ERF components as a result of high-pass filtering.
The event-related potential (ERP) and event-related field (ERF) techniques provide valuable insights into the time course of processes in the brain. Because neural signals are typically weak, researchers commonly filter the data to increase the signal-to-noise ratio. However, filtering may distort the data, leading to false results. Using our own EEG data, we show that acausal high-pass filtering can generate a systematic bias easily leading to misinterpretations of neural activity. In particular, we show t...
Isolation of cortical mouse oligodendrocyte precursor cells.
The reliable isolation of primary oligodendrocyte progenitors cells (OPCs) holds promise as both a research tool and putative therapy for the study and treatment of central nervous system (CNS) disease and trauma. Stringently characterized primary mouse OPCs is of additional importance due to the power of transgenics to address mechanism(s) involving single genes. In this study, we developed and characterized a reproducible method for the primary culture of OPCs from postnatal day 5-7 mouse cerebral cortex....
Post-hoc selection of dynamic causal models.
Dynamic causal modelling (DCM) was originally proposed as a hypothesis driven procedure in which a small number of neurobiologically motivated models are compared. Model comparison in this context usually proceeds by individually fitting each model to data and then approximating the corresponding model evidence with a free energy bound. However, a recent trend has emerged for comparing very large numbers of models in a more exploratory manner. This led Friston and Penny (2011) to propose a post-hoc approxim...
Continuous EEG-based dynamic markers for sleep depth and phasic events.
Sleep architecture is characterized by classifying polysomnographic epochs into mutually exclusive stages. Notwithstanding the clinical importance of staging, it has the drawback of representing sleep as a discrete process. Metrics based on the electroencephalogram (EEG) are needed to supplement conventional sleep staging by allowing a description of sleep in terms of unitary, continuous markers. Traditional linear and nonlinear techniques for achieving this goal have not proved sufficient. Employing recurr...
Measuring adaptation with a sinusoidal perturbation function.
We examine the possibility that sensory and motor adaptation may be induced via a sinusoidally incremented perturbation. This sinewave adaptation method provides superior data for fitting a parametric model than when using the standard step-function method of perturbation, due to the relative difficulty of fitting a decaying exponential vs. a sinusoid. Using both experimental data and simulations, we demonstrate the difficulty of detecting the presence of motor adaptation using a step-function perturbation,...
