In Parkinson's disease (PD), dopamine neurons in the substantia nigra are degenerated and lost. Cell therapy for PD replaces the lost dopamine neurons by transplanting donor dopamine neural progenitor cells. Cell therapy for PD has been performed in the clinic since the 1980s and uses donor cells from the mesencephalon of aborted embryos. Regenerative medicine for PD using induced pluripotent s...

The radiologic evolution of Leigh disease is documented with sequential brain MR in the acute phase of the illness, at 3 weeks, and at 3 months. High-signal-intensity lesions seen on T2-weighted images in the first week resolved by 3 months, whereas new lesions appear during the chronic stage. Putamenal involvement is not a pathognomonic radiologic finding. Brain stem tegmentum, particularly th...

The possibility was explored that certain central brain-stem areas might be critical for the performance of conditioned reflexes. In 6 cats, large bilateral electrolytic lesions were placed in the medial diencephalon or mesencephalon and subsequently defined by histology. A tone served as conditional stimulus and footshock as unconditional stimulus. The EEG, respiration, and the EMG of the cond...

Otx2 expression in the forebrain and midbrain was found to be regulated by two distinct enhancers (FM and FM2) located at 75 kb 5' upstream and 115 kb 3' downstream. The activities of these two enhancers were absent in anterior neuroectoderm earlier than E8.0; however, at E9.5 their regions of activity spanned the entire mesencephalon and diencephalon with their caudal limits at the boundary wi...

Female mate choice is of importance for individual fitness as well as a determining factor in genetic diversity and speciation. Nevertheless relatively little is known about how females process information acquired from males during mate selection. In the Emei music frog, Babina daunchina, males normally call from hidden burrows and females in the reproductive stage prefer male calls produced f...

To determine whether glia from different CNS regions differ in their ability to support axons or dendrites, embryonic (E18) mouse cortical neurons were cocultured with early postnatal (P4) rat astroglial derived from cortex, retina, olfactory bulb, mesencephalon, striatum, and spinal cord. After 5 d in vitro, axon and dendrite outgrowth from isolated neurons was quantified with double-labeling ...

Cerebral ischemia is known to be accompanied by brain edema. This increase in brain tissue water content probably influences the final outcome of an ischemic insult negatively. Despite extensive investigations on different aspects of brain edema, information on edema development during the early recirculation period following ischemia is sparse. We assessed changes in brain water content, as re...

A dopaminergic neuroblastoma was derived using somatic cell fusion of rat embryonic mesencephalon cells and the murine neuroblastoma-glioma cell line N18TG2. The resulting interspecies hybrid, named MES23.5, has retained a stable phenotype and karyotype for a continuous culture period of 1 year. The hybrid exhibits several properties that suggest that the parent primary neurons originated in th...

Understanding the ontogeny of A9 dopamine (DA) neurons is critical not only to determining basic developmental events that facilitate the emergence of the substantia nigra pars compacta (SNc) but also to the extraction and de novo generation of DA neurons as a potential cell therapy for Parkinson’s disease. Recent research has identified a precise window for DA cell birth (differentiation) in t...

Mesodiencephalic dopaminergic (mdDA) neurons are located in the ventral mesencephalon and caudal diencephalon of all tetrapod species studied so far. They are the most prominent DA neuronal population and are implicated in control and modulation of motor, cognitive and rewarding/affective behaviors. Their degeneration or dysfunction is intimately linked to several neurological and neuropsychiat...