AIMS While prion infection ultimately involves the entire brain, it has long been thought that the abrupt clinical onset and rapid neurological decline in laboratory rodents relates to involvement of specific critical neuroanatomical target areas. The severity and type of clinical signs, together with the rapid progression, suggest the brainstem as a candidate location for such critical areas. ...

Glial cell line-derived neurotrophic factor (GDNF) is a member of the TGF-beta superfamily of growth factors with neurotrophic activity on midbrain dopaminergic neurons and on developing and mature motoneurons of the brainstem and spinal cord. To investigate the extent of GDNF dependency of central and peripheral nervous structures during development, we have performed an immunohistochemical an...

introduction: the aim of this study was to assess the effect of ca2+/calmodulin-dependent kinase iiα (camkiiα) inhibitor (kn-93) injection into the locus coeruleus (lc) on the modulation of withdrawal signs. we also sought to study the effect of chronic morphine administration on camkiiα activity in the rat lc. methods: the research was based on behavioral and molecular studies. in the behavior...

Fear generalization to stimuli resembling a conditioned danger-cue (CS+) is fundamental dynamic of classical fear-conditioning. Despite the ubiquity fear in human experience and its known pathogenic contribution clinical anxiety, neural investigations have only recently begun. The present work provides first meta-analysis this growing literature delineate brain substrates fear-generalization fo...

N-acetylaspartylglutamate (NAAG) is the third most prevalent and widely distributed neurotransmitter in the mammalian nervous system. NAAG activates a group II metabotropic glutamate receptor (mGluR3) and is inactivated by an extracellular enzyme, glutamate carboxypeptidase II (GCPII) in vivo. Inhibitors of this enzyme are analgesic in animal models of inflammatory, neuropathic and bone cancer ...

Priming phenomenon, in which an earlier exposure to a stimulus or condition alters synaptic plasticity in response to a subsequent stimulus or condition, known as a challenge, is an example of metaplasticity. In this review, we make the case that the locus coeruleus noradrenergic system-medial perforant path-dentate gyrus pathway is a neural ensemble amenable to studying priming-challenge effec...

Many areas of the brain have been implicated in the sleep cycle, but a holistic picture of their involvement is hard, if not impossible, to find. This paper is meant to summarize in relevant detail the major players in sleep initiation in the mammalian brain. The major players in sleep were broken into two categories: sleep-agonists and sleep-antagonists. The sleep-agonist areas are the median ...

Mice carrying mutant amyloid-β precursor protein and presenilin-1 genes (APP/PS1 double transgenic mice) have frequently been used in studies of Alzheimer's disease; however, such studies have focused mainly on hippocampal and cortical changes. The severity of Alzheimer's disease is known to correlate with the amount of amyloid-β protein deposition and the number of dead neurons in the locus co...

BACKGROUND Depression, one of the most frequent psychiatric disturbances in Alzheimer disease (AD), is proposed to have its neurobiological basis in neuron loss in the noradrenergic locus coeruleus, although this is not the case in idiopathic depression. METHODS We performed image analyzer-assisted morphometry of the locus coeruleus in 6 depressed, 6 transiently depressed, and 6 nondepressed ...