Introduction: Over the last decade, exposure to non-ionizing electromagnetic waves due to base station antenna has increased. This in vivo study was planned for evaluating the effects of whole-body exposure to 950 MHz field of GSM mobile phone system on rat dentate gyrus long-term potentiation. Materials and Methods: 24 naive male Wistar rats (3 month old, 225|¡|25 g) were randomly divided in t...

The effect of theta pulse stimulation (TPS) on pentylenetetrazol (PTZ)-induced long-term potentiation of population spikes (PS) was studied in the hippocampal CA1 in vitro. A transient PTZ application produced a long-lasting enhancement of PS amplitude. A 3-min episode of TPS delivered at a higher intensity produced complete reversal of the PTZ potentiation when delivered during the last minute...

Sensory experience plays an instructive role in the development of the nervous system. Here we showed that visual experience can induce persistent modification of developing retinotectal circuits via spike timing-dependent plasticity (STDP). Pairing light stimuli with spiking of the tectal cell induced persistent enhancement or reduction of light-evoked responses, with a dependence on the relat...

High-frequency stimulation (HFS) of the fimbria induces long-term potentiation (LTP) in the lateral septum. This study was aimed at investigating the effect of contextual fear conditioning on septal LTP with the use of behaving C57 BL/6 mice as subjects. For the acquisition of contextual fear conditioning, animals were placed in a conditioning chamber, where they were subjected to footshocks (F...

In reward-based learning, synaptic modifications depend on a brief stimulus and a temporally delayed reward, which poses the question of how synaptic activity patterns associate with a delayed reward. A theoretical solution to this so-called distal reward problem has been the notion of activity-generated "synaptic eligibility traces," silent and transient synaptic tags that can be converted int...

Regulation of brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) secretion plays a critical role in long-term potentiation (LTP). It is generally thought that the supply for this secretion is newly synthesized BDNF targeted to the synapse. Here we provide evidence that hippocampal neurons additionally recycle BDNF for activity-dependent secretion. Exogenously applied BDNF is internalized by cultured neur...

Long-term potentiation (LTP) is a long-lasting strengthening of synaptic transmission that is triggered by brief periods of high-frequency synaptic stimulation. Other patterns of stimulation can produce a long-term weakening of synapses, a process termed long-term depression (LTD) or depotentiation. Synapses thus have a stable strength that can be bi-directionally modified in an activity-depend...

The ability to maximize reward and avoid punishment is essential for animal survival. Reinforcement learning (RL) refers to the algorithms used by biological or artificial systems to learn how to maximize reward or avoid negative outcomes based on past experiences. While RL is also important in machine learning, the types of mechanistic constraints encountered by biological machinery might be d...