Connectomics: Arrested Development

Neurodegeneration: A Case of Arrested Development?

The neurodegenerative disease Spinocerebellar ataxia type 1 (SCA1) is a polyglutamine expansion disorder characterized by the death of Purkinje neurons in the brain. In this issue, Serra et al. (2006) implicate the impaired function of the orphan nuclear receptor RORalpha in SCA1 pathogenesis. Their intriguing results suggest that derailing a transcription program during embryonic development m...

Arrested pneumatization: witness of paranasal sinuses development?

OBJECTIVES Recent radiological studies have demonstrated that formation of the sphenoid sinus is preceded by a phase of fatty transformation of the bone marrow, and then by a phase of fat involution prior to the appearance of an aerated cavity and that this process can sometimes be interrupted, resulting in the persistence of images of arrested pneumatisation. The objective of the study was to ...

Health care in "arrested development": Naylor.

Retinal Connectomics

The use of electron microscopy (EM) to describe the detailed synaptic connectivity in the retina has a rich history. Recent technological advances in serial electron microscopy (EM) have placed a complete description of the synaptic connectivity of the mammalian retina within reach. These new tools have recently been used to densely reconstruct the largest piece of a mammalian retina to date. C...

Human connectomics.

Recent advances in non-invasive neuroimaging have enabled the measurement of connections between distant regions in the living human brain, thus opening up a new field of research: Human connectomics. Different imaging modalities allow the mapping of structural connections (axonal fibre tracts) as well as functional connections (correlations in time series), and individual variations in these c...