introduction: the aim of this study was evaluate the ability of notochord to induce neural induction and/or differentiation of mouse embryonic stem cell to neuron and motor neuron, respectively. methods: in order to produce embryoid bodies, es cells line royan b1 were grown in suspension in the absence of lif for 4 days. ebs were divided into 4 groups. ebs in group 1 & 2 were further cultured i...

Circuit-level implementation of a novel neuron has been discussed in this article. A low-power Activation Function (AF) circuit is introduced in this paper, which is then combined with a highly linear synapse circuit to form the neuron architecture. Designed in Carbon Nanotube Field-Effect Transistor (CNTFET) technology, the proposed structure consumes low power, which makes it suitable for the...

objective(s): the main characteristic of mesenchymal stem cells (mscs) is their ability to produce other cell types. electromagnetic field (emf) stimulates differentiation of mscs into other cells. in this study, we investigated whether emf can effect on the differentiation of mscs into dopaminergic (da) neurons. materials and methods: an emf with a frequency of 50 hz and two intensities of 40 ...

background: alzheimer’s disease (ad) is characterized by progressive neuronal loss in hippocamp. epidermal neural crest stem cells (epi-ncsc) can differentiate into neurons, astrocytes and oligodendrocytes. the purpose of this study was to evaluate the effects of transplanting epi-ncsc into ad rat model. methods: two weeks after induction of ad by injection of amyloid-β 1-40 into ca1 area of ra...

there is strong evidence demonstrating that nifedipine dissolved in ethanol selectively inhibits only l-type ca2+ current. in addition, acute ethanol exposure reduces voltage-dependent calcium currents. in the present study, we investigated the antagonistic effect of fixed concentration of nifedipine dissolved in different concentration of ethanol on l-type ca2+ current. in a na+-k+ free soluti...

background and objective: although diabetes mellitus is known to be one of the risk factors for dementia but neuropathic changes in the brain of diabetic patients have not been completely revealed. therefore, this research study was done to evaluate structural changes in pyramidal neurons of hippocampal ca1 area of male diabetic rats using golgi-impregnation method. materials and methods: male ...

Stress, which involves a heightened arousal and excitability, triggers important adaptive responses to maintain homeostasis and prepare a response. In the current studies, we administered a psychological stressor of 2 h acute restraint on rats, and found that 24 h after the cessation of the restraint session, there was a significant decrease in ventral tegmental area dopaminergic (DA) neuron po...

In this work we study the detection of weak stimuli by spiking (integrate-and-fire) neurons in the presence of certain level of noisy background neural activity. Our study has focused in the realistic assumption that the synapses in the network present activity-dependent processes, such as short-term synaptic depression and facilitation. Employing mean-field techniques as well as numerical simu...

The non-stationary nature and variability of neuronal signals is a fundamental problem in brain-machine interfacing. We developed a brain-machine interface to assess the robustness of different control-laws applied to a closed-loop image stabilization task. Taking advantage of the well-characterized fly visuomotor pathway we record the electrical activity from an identified, motion-sensitive ne...

It is generally assumed that nerve cells optimize their performance to reflect the statistics of their input. Electronic circuit analogs of neurons require similar methods of self-optimization for stable and autonomous operation. We here describe and demonstrate a biologically plausible adaptive algorithm that enables a neuron to adapt the current threshold and the slope (or gain) of its curren...