Archive for the ‘Organism’ Category
Circuit Neuroscience Recently, research into psychiatric disease has made great strides, but continued progress may require unpopular and ethically murky research. Joshua Gordon, the new director of the National Institutes of Mental Health writes in this month’s Nature Neuroscience: “At this unique and exciting time for psychiatry, novel therapies for individuals with mental illnesses seem just around […]
Filed under: Animal Rights, Anxiety, Behavior, Circuit Neuroscience, Disease, Ethics, Human, Motor, Mouse, Optogenetics, Primate, Schizophrenia, Uncategorized | Leave a Comment
Tags: Animal Rights, Anxiety, Ethics, neuro, Neuroscience, Primates, Psychiatry
5-hydroxy-methyl CpGs (5-hmCs) were first discovered in 2009 and shown to be enriched in the brain, but remain a mysterious epigenetic mark, despite intriguing functional findings such as: environmental enrichment’s reduction of it, MeCP2’s preference for 5mc over 5hmc, and it’s possible role as an intermediate in demethylation. This new technique will aid their characterization […]
Filed under: Epigenetics, Genetics, Human, Molecular, Mouse | 1 Comment
You may have seen my tweet about the upcoming documentary Mars Project, which tackles complex issues such as mental illness, drug use, psychiatry, race, and stigma. When director Jonathan Balazs contacted me about his film, I got really excited about it. If you liked the teaser but want to learn more about the project, check out Balazs’s Indie-Go-Go page […]
Filed under: Antipsychotics, Antipsychotics, Drugs, Film, Genetics, Human, Psychiatric, Schizophrenia | Leave a Comment
COMT, Catechol-O-methyl transferase, is an enzyme that degrades catecholamines–such as dopamine, epinephrine, and norepinephrine (or adrenaline and noradrenaline as they are called in the UK). It was first discovered in the ’50s by Nobel laureate and pirate Julius Axelrod. More recently, scientists discovered an evolutionarily recent nonsynonomous single-nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) in the protein-coding portion of […]
Filed under: Behavior, Cannabis, Dorsolateral PFC, Drugs, Genetics, Human, Schizophrenia, SNPs | 9 Comments
Tags: Biology, cogsci, Genetics, neuro, Neuroscience, psychology, Science
Smartest Mouse in the World? – Amazing mouse agility tests show how intelligent rodents are.
Despite having cared for laboratory mice for years, I’m wowed by the complexity of this task! The trainer’s site: http://mouse-agility.com/ describes the animals living conditions and training method. The trainer keeps the mice housed in groups of 3-4 females, in 3-dimensional cages such as a remodeled cupboard, or: a pyramid of different-sized tables, the several floors […]
Filed under: Behavior, Mouse | 4 Comments
Tags: mice, mouse, Mouse Behavior, obedience, training, tricks
The connectome is a map of all neural connections in a brain, which I believe only currently exists for the flatworm C. Elegans. Seung’s group and collaborators are working using serial electron microscopy, and partially automated EM analysis and the crowdsourcing site eyewire to reconstruct parts of the mouse retina, with the hope of steadily improving technologies […]
Filed under: Anatomy, Books, Connectomics, Connectopathy, Crowd Sourcing, Development, Electron Microscopy, Mouse | Leave a Comment
Tags: Connectomics, Connectopathy, Development, Electron Microscopy, Neuroscience, Wiring
This article is my translation of this Brazilian article by RICARDO ZORZETTO (with lots of help from google translate) Revising the Numbers Get to know the anatomy of the human brain, especially how researchers got to a figure of 86 billion neurons,instead of the 100 billions previously estimated. —- On Wednesday, January 11, researchers Casarsa Frederico Azevedo […]
Filed under: Cerebellum, Comparative, Cortex, FACS - Fluorescent Automated Cell Sorting, Glia, Human, Primate, Rat | Leave a Comment
First, experimental economists and psychologists like nobel laureates Vernon L. Smith and Daniel Kahneman taught us that we aren’t economically rational–we’re influenced by biases and we use flawed heuristics (though often in very testable, repeatable ways).(1) Then, Neuroeconomists showed that biology affects economic decisions–internasal oxytocin raises trust in risky exchanges, serum serotonin levels predict whether […]
Filed under: Anatomy, Behavior, Dorsolateral PFC, Field / Technique, fMRI, Genetics, Genoeconomics, Human, Insula, Neuroeconomics, oxytocin, Peptides, Uncategorized, Vasopressin | Leave a Comment
Using machine learning, Harvard researchers create a web-based tool to diagnose autism in minutes
Original full text of the study available from Translational Psychiatry here. Conventionally, children are diagnosed using Autism Diagnostic Interview, Revised (ADI-R) a 93-question survey, and/or the Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule (ADOS) which measures behavior. The two test can take up to 2.5 hours and must be administered by clinical professionals. Dennis Wall–the lead author of the paper and director […]
Filed under: Autism, Behavior, Disease, Human, Psychiatric, Uncategorized | 1 Comment
Scientists reported a new connection between autism and fragile x syndrome in the latest issue of neuron. They sequenced the exomes–the parts of DNA that code proteins–of 343 families that had a single child with autism and at least one unaffected sibling. Looking at de novo mutations (ones that occurred in the sperm or egg […]
Filed under: Autism, Disease, Fragile X, Genetics, Human, Plasticity, Psychiatric | Leave a Comment
Tags: ASD, de novo mutations, exome sequencing, FMRP, genetics of psychiatric disease, rare mutations, simons simplex, synaptic plasticity
Ben Kuebrich
Neuroamer 