Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) is a neurodegenerative disorder characterized by the progressive loss of motor neurons leading to paralysis and death. Mutations of the human Cu/Zn superoxide dismutase (SOD1) are found in some cases of familial ALS (fALS). Recent evidences suggest the accumulation of intracellular calcium is one of the primary mechanisms of motor neuronal degeneration. In th...

Cell death is an inherent process that is required for the proper wiring of the nervous system. Studies over the last four decades have shown that, in a parallel developmental pathway, axons and dendrites are eliminated without the death of the neuron. This developmentally regulated 'axonal death' results in neuronal remodeling, which is an essential mechanism to sculpt neuronal networks in bot...

Dominant mutations and mislocalization or aggregation of Fused in Sarcoma (FUS), an RNA-binding protein (RBP), cause neuronal degeneration in Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) and Frontotemporal Lobar Degeneration (FTLD), two incurable neurological diseases. However, the function of FUS in neurons is not well understood. To uncover the impact of FUS in the neuronal transcriptome, we used high...

with heterotrimeric G proteins (Nishimoto et al., 1993), Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is the most common cause of and APPs can activate high conductance potassium progressive cognitive decline in the aged population. channels (Furukawa et al., 1996) and increase the activThe triad of amyloid plaques, neurofibrillary tangles, and ity of MAP kinase (Greenberg et al., 1994). However, the dementia that...

Degeneration of the sympathetic neuron can be achieved by a variety of procedures. Until 1960 the most common method for producing degeneration of postganglionic sympathetic nerve fibers was either to surgically remove the neuronal cell body, or to cut the extrinsic nerve fibers between the cell body and the effector organ. In recent years a number of chemical agents and immunological methods h...

We used proton magnetic resonance spectroscopic imaging (1H-MRSI) to assess the in vivo cortical and subcortical neuronal involvement in progressive supranuclear palsy, Parkinson's disease and corticobasal degeneration. This technique permitted the simultaneous measurement of compounds containing N-acetylaspartate (NA), choline (Cho), creatine-phosphocreatine (Cre) and lactate, from four 15-mm ...

Adult neurogenesis is a process of producing nerve cells from their progenitor that occurs in some areas in the brain such as the hypothalamus. Low activity in this area plays a role in neural degeneration and diseases such as multiple sclerosis, epilepsy and depression. MS is a neurodegenerative disease with a permanent disability that the main reason for it is axonal degeneration and neuronal...

Introduction: Astrocyte dysfunction is the common pathology resulting in failure of astrocyte-neuron interaction in neurological diseases, including Parkinson’s Disease (PD). To date, only few experimental models of selective ablation of astrocytes are known. The aim of present study was to evaluate the effect of striatal injections of selective glial toxin L-aminoadipic acid (L-AA) on the loco...

It has been claimed over the years—most recently in this journal and several others—that neuronal degeneration in adult brain arising during chronic alcohol exposure is, or is likely to be, via " excitotoxicity " A purpose of this opinion piece is to reinforce a view, noted earlier (Collins and Neafsey, 2012), that an excitotoxic mechanism underlying alcoholic neurodamage in the mature brain ha...