Neurons, by virtue of their complex and continuously changing signaling roles in brain, must be able to regulate access to energy in order to maintain their ability to communicate meaningful frequency-encoded information. This is accomplished by release of neurotransmitters to astrocytes that in turn signal the vascular system to increase cerebral blood flow (CBF). This process has been termed ...

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...

two omega-3 fatty acids including docosahexaenoic acid (dha) and eicosapentaenoic acid (epa) are essential for the physiologic function of neuronal cell membrane. normal function of neuronal cell membrane requires appropriate composition of fatty in its structure. present study was designed to compare the effect of short-term and long-term pretreatment with omega-3 fatty acids on scopolamine-in...

Functional MRI (fMRI) is widely used to study brain function in the neurosciences. Unfortunately, conventional fMRI only indirectly assesses neuronal activity via hemodynamic coupling. Diffusion fMRI was proposed as a more direct and accurate fMRI method to detect neuronal activity, yet confirmative findings have proven difficult to obtain. Given that the underlying relation between tissue wate...

Adult neurogenesis is thought to provide neural plasticity used in forming and storing new memories. Here we show a novel relationship between numbers of new neurons and the stability of a previously learned motor pattern. In the adult zebra finch, new projection neurons are added to the nucleus HVC and become part of the motor pathway for producing learned song. However, new song learning occu...