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...

Mounting evidence has demonstrated that the autonomic system plays a role in the morbidity and mortality of certain cardiovascular disease states. Ventricular arrhythmias have been associated with the level of sympathetic activation. We attempted to determine if the presence of fibrosis, a marker for previous ischemic events, correlates with an increase in the number of left stellate ganglion n...

The stellate cells 1 of the liver, which were first described by von Kupffer (1876) with the gold impregnation method, are quite different from the so-called phagocytic Kupffer cells in the sinusoids, and vitamin A is stored in these stellate cells (see Wake, 1971). The stellate cells are star-shaped perisinusoidal cells located in the space of Disse. Their cytoplasm contains well-developed, ro...

Previous experimental and computational work (for review, see White et al., 2000) has suggested that channel noise, generated by the stochastic flicker of voltage-gated ion channels, can be a major contributor to electrical membrane noise in neurons. In spiny stellate neurons of the entorhinal cortex, we remove the primary source of channel noise by pharmacologically blocking the native persist...

A direct commissural connection between cochlear nuclei provides a pathway by which binaural input can influence the processing of acoustic information through the ventral cochlear nucleus. Despite anatomical evidence to suggest the existence of such a pathway, its nature and behavior have not been investigated previously. This in vivo intracellular electrophysiological study provides direct ev...

BACKGROUND The injection of double-stranded RNA (dsRNA) has been shown to induce a potent sequence-specific inhibition of gene function in diverse invertebrate and vertebrate species. The homology-dependent posttranscriptional gene silencing (PTGS) caused by the introduction of transgenes in plants may be mediated by dsRNA. The analysis of Caenorhabditis elegans mutants impaired with dsRNA-medi...

Background Liver fibrosis and cirrhosis are late complications common to liver diseases of different etiology such as viral hepatitis and alcoholic liver disease. Irrespective of the initial cause of liver disease, activation of hepatic stellate cells is a crucial step in the fibrotic pathomechanism. Activated hepatic stellate cells produce excess collagen as well as profibrotic cytokines and c...

The contents of type I, type III and type V collagen and the collagen type specific distributions in liver under normal and cirrhotic conditions were examined. In CCl4 injected rat, the increasing amount of type V collagen was a specific event during the progression of cirrhosis. In normal liver, immunohistochemical observation showed that type V collagen was localized on the fine fibrils, whil...

Abstract We present a detailed network model of neurons of the cochlear nucleus to explore leveldependent processing by T stellate cells. These cells selectively process input from two types of auditory nerve fibres to enhance their dynamic range. We use a biologically plausible network between T stellate, D stellate and tuberculoventral cells, to show how level-dependent selective processing c...

Stellate ganglion blocks have been shown to provide effective pain relief in a number of different conditions involving the upper body. This was demonstrated in a 65-year-old woman who had experienced severe debilitating pain in her left temporomandibular joint (TMJ) and the surrounding area of her face for over 10 years. The pain was unresponsive to indomethacin, carbamazepine, sodium valproat...