Traditionally, great red wines are aged in oak barrels from the end of fermentation until bottling. The first motivation in choosing barrels was probably that they were easy for one man to handle and could also be used for shipping. It was not until some time later that their positive effect on wine development, in terms of color, clarity and flavor, came to be appreciated. However, the use of ...

The facial whiskers of mice project through several synapses to anatomically distinct structures called barrels in the contralateral cerebral cortex. With appropriate illumination, individual barrels can be recognized and dissected from unfixed, freeze-dried tissue sections taken parallel to the plane of layer IV. The tissue then can be analyzed using quantitative microhistochemical techniques ...

Very few methods address the problem of predicting beta-barrel membrane proteins directly from sequence. One reason is that only very few high-resolution structures for transmembrane beta-barrel (TMB) proteins have been determined thus far. Here we introduced the design, statistics and results of a novel profile-based hidden Markov model for the prediction and discrimination of TMBs. The method...

Direct infusion electrospray ionisation mass spectrometry in the negative ion mode [ESI(-)-MS] was employed to evaluate the authenticity of aged cachaças, a traditional and valuable Brazilian alcoholic beverage prepared from the distillation of brewed sugarcane juice and aged in barrels made of common woods. Counterfeit samples were prepared by adding dyes, sawdust or essences to a freshly-dist...

This study focuses on the synaptic output patterns of thalamocortical axons in mouse barrel cortex at postnatal day (P) 11. Axons were labeled by biotinylated dextran amine transported anterogradely following injection in vivo into the ventrobasal thalamus. Labeled axons in the posteromedial barrel subfield were examined by light and electron microscopy and then reconstructed in three dimension...

The barrel cortex (BC) is essential for the acquisition of whisker-signaled trace eyeblink conditioning and shows learning-related expansion of the trained barrels after the acquisition of a whisker-signaled task. Most previous research examining the role of the BC in learning has focused on anatomic changes in the layer IV representation of the cortical barrels. We studied single-unit extracel...

For the past three years, GROUP (Group for Research On Usage and Pragmatics) has been developing the VesselWorld system. In VesselWorld, three participants collaborate on remote workstations to remove barrels of toxic waste from a harbor. Each participant is the captain of a ship, and their joint goal is to remove all of the barrels from the harbor without spilling any toxic waste. Each ship ha...

Sensory signal processing in cortical layer IV involves two major morphological classes of excitatory neurons: spiny stellate and pyramidal cells. It is essentially unknown how these two cell types are integrated into intracortical networks and whether they play different roles in cortical signal processing. We mapped their cell-specific intracortical afferents in rat somatosensory cortex throu...