This article focuses on one of the basic properties of the cortical network that is widely considered as noise and mostly averaged out during the experimentation. The neural response is incompletely characterized without focusing on the ongoing activity that apparently gives rise to variable responses to the same stimulus situation. The across-trial membrane potential (Vm) […]
Archiv der Kategorie 'General'
OctßR1 and OctßR2 act antagonistically on starvation induced locomotor speed and synaptic growth in Drosophila larvae
The authors’ previous paper Koon et al. (2011) presented in JC in March last year, demonstrated structural changes in octopaminergic synaptic terminals in response to starvation. These changes induce an increase in locomotion. Underlying the structural change is the activation of a positive-feedback mechanism, in which octopamine release, presumably by type II octopaminergic synaptic boutons, […]
NPY and olfactory response in Axolotls salamander.
I read this quite old paper, because of a blog post (on reasearch blogging), made me think that this paper showed that the response of olfactory receptor neurons were changing with starvation state of the animal. This is not the case and indeed the blog was not arguing directly that, I misinterpreted the post… Mousley […]
Functional neurogenesis induced by operant but not by classical conditioning
Some studies on olfactory conditioning in rodents have shown that long term memory of the conditioned odor depends on neurogenesis, while other studies did not detect such a dependence on neurogenesis. In their paper entitled „Involvement of Newborn Neurons in Olfactory Associative Learning? The Operant or Non-operant Component of the Task Makes All the Difference“, […]
Methylphenidate enhances extinction of contextual fear
Posted on behalf of Neloy Kumar Chakroborty Summary: Prefrontal cortex (PFC) is known to be an important area regulating the extinction of fear. Psychostimulants that can increase the extracellular levels of dopamine (DA) in the PFC were reported to be involved in the fear extinction, although the reports were dilemmatic. Methylphenidate hydrochloride (MPH) or Ritalin […]
Variation in the human cannabinoid receptor CNR1 gene modulates gaze duration for happy faces
The authors of the current study (2) investigated the relationship of common genetic variations and gaze patterns. In particular, they tested whether variations in the cannabinoid receptor 1 (CNR1) gene would modulate gaze duration on (happy) faces. To this end, four single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in the CNR1 gene were genotyped in 30 healthy subjects (13 […]
Getting started
The good news first: this blog is now linked to both Twitter and Researchblogging.org (link to come), I will send access information via our mailing list. The bad news: we don’t have a calendar function here on the blog such as that of our Yahoo Group, nor a file folder for the papers, nor a […]
Hello World!
This is, to my knowledge, the first blog of a journal club. I maybe wrong, but we might be making history. Check this space for new developments.
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