Within the mammalian inner ear there are six separate sensory regions that subserve the functions of hearing and balance, although how these sensory regions become specified remains unknown. Each sensory region is populated by two cell types, the mechanosensory hair cell and the supporting cell, which are arranged in a mosaic in which each hair cell is surrounded by supporting cells. The propos...

Primary cilium is a protruding cellular organelle that has various physiological functions, especially in sensory reception. While an avalanche of reports on primary cilia have been published, the function dental cells remains to be investigated. In this study, we focused dentin-producing odontoblasts. Odontoblasts, like most other cell types, possess cilia, which disappear upon knockdown intra...

The small GTPase RhoA and its down-stream effector Rho-kinase (ROCK) are important effector molecules of the neuronal cytoskeleton. Modulation of the RhoA/ROCK pathway has been shown to promote axonal regeneration, however in vitro and animal studies are inconsistent regarding the extent of axonal outgrowth induced by pharmacological inhibition of ROCK. We hypothesized that injury to sensory an...

Descending feedback is a common feature of sensory systems. Characterizing synaptic plasticity in feedback inputs is essential for delineating the role of feedback in sensory processing. In this study, we demonstrate that multiple interacting processes underlie the dynamics of synaptic potentiation in one such sensory feedback pathway. We use field recording and modeling to investigate the inte...

In mammals, sensory projection pathways are provided by just three classes of spinal interneuron that develop from the roof-plate. We asked whether similar sensory projection interneurons are present primitively in a developing lower vertebrate where function can be more readily studied. Using an immobilized Xenopus tadpole spinal cord preparation, we define the properties and connections of sp...

A major challenge of sensory systems neuroscience is to quantify brain activity underlying perceptual experiences and to explain this activity as the outcome of elemental neuronal response properties. Rats make extremely fine discriminations of texture by "whisking" their vibrissae across an object's surface, yet the neuronal coding underlying texture sensations remains unknown. Measuring whisk...

backgroud: protein-protein interaction, plays a key role in signal transduction in signaling pathways. different approaches are used for prediction of these interactions including experimental and computational approaches. in conventional node-edge protein-protein interaction networks, we can only see which proteins interact but ‘structural networks’ show us how these proteins interact which ca...

Learning in sensory systems takes place after a repeated exposure to the incoming signals and many ideas based on information theoretical principles have been proposed to explain the synaptic adaptation which improves the coding capabilities of sensory areas. In this paper we want to emphasize that a simple, natural learning rule can be derived from a careful treatment of image redundancies. Th...

The tactile somatosensory pathway from whisker to cortex in rodents provides a well-defined system for exploring the link between molecular mechanisms, synaptic circuits, and behavior. The primary somatosensory cortex has an exquisite somatotopic map where each individual whisker is represented in a discrete anatomical unit, the "barrel," allowing precise delineation of functional organization,...