The studies in this thesis research were conducted to investigate if sensitivity to induced cortical spread depression (CSD) or the consequence of a CSD event is affected by sumatriptan induced latent sensitization. Previous studies in our lab showed persistent exposure of sumatripan to rats produced a latent state of sensitization. Using persistent sumatripan exposed rats as a model for medica...

Communities are basic components in networks. As a promising social application, community recommendation selects a few items (e.g., movies and books) to recommend to a group of users. It usually achieves higher recommendation precision if the users share more interests; whereas, in plenty of communities (e.g., families, work groups), the users often share few. With billions of communities in o...

Microglia play a pivotal role in innate immunity in the brain. During development, they mature from myeloerythroid progenitor cells in the yolk sac and colonize the brain to establish a resident population of tissue macrophages. In the postnatal brain, they exert phagocytosis and induce inflammatory response against invading pathogens. Microglia also act as guardians of brain homeostasis by sur...

BACKGROUND All honey bee species (Apis spp) share the same sex determination mechanism using the complementary sex determination (csd) gene. Only individuals heterogeneous at the csd allele develop into females, and the homozygous develop into diploid males, which do not survive. The honeybees are therefore under selection pressure to generate new csd alleles. Previous studies have shown that t...

Cortical spreading depression (CSD) is thought to play an important role in different pathological conditions of the human brain. Here we investigated the interaction between CSD and Ca2+ waves within the astrocyte population in slices from mouse neocortex (postnatal days 10-14). After local KCl ejection as a trigger for CSD, we recorded the propagation of Ca2+ increases within a large populati...

BACKGROUND Sugar-sweetened beverage consumption is associated with morbidity and mortality. The retail food environment influences food and beverage purchasing and consumption. This study assesses the impact of a community pharmacy's removal of sweet beverages on overall community sales of carbonated soft drinks (CSD) in a rural setting. We also examined whether the pharmacy intervention affect...

In this paper, we construct a simplified neuronal model which is capable of simulating the instigation of cortical spreading depression (CSD) and propagation of a CSD wave. Our model is a simplification and extension of a single neuron model proposed in the literature for studying the instigation of CSD. Using the simplified neuronal model, we construct a network of these simplified neurons. Th...

The effect of cortical spreading depression (CSD) on oxygen demand (extracellular K(+)), oxygen supply (cerebral blood flow - CBF) and oxygen balance (mitochondrial NADH) was studied by a special multiprobe assembly (MPA), during hypoxia and partial ischemia. The MPA was constructed and applied to monitor the CSD wave from its front line until complete recovery, continuously and simultaneously....

Haplodiploid organisms comprise about 20% of animals. Males develop from unfertilized eggs while females are derived from fertilized eggs. The underlying mechanisms of sex determination, however, appear to be diverse and are poorly understood. We have dissected the complementary sex determiner (csd) locus in the honeybee to understand its molecular basis. In this species, csd acts as the primar...

Caveolin-1 (Cav1), a major Src kinase substrate phosphorylated on tyrosine-14 (Y14), contains the highly conserved membrane-proximal caveolin scaffolding domain (CSD; amino acids 82-101). Here we show, using CSD mutants (F92A/V94A) and membrane-permeable CSD-competing peptides, that Src kinase-dependent pY14Cav1 regulation of focal adhesion protein stabilization, focal adhesion tension, and can...