Editor's Note: These short reviews of a recent paper in the Journal, written exclusively by graduate students or postdoctoral fellows, are intended to mimic the journal clubs that exist in your own departments or institutions. For more information on the format and purpose of the Journal Club, please see Review of Shetty et al. Although the adult mammalian brain maintains high levels of structu...

Commentary Temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE) is one of the most common intractable epilepsy syndromes encountered in the clinic. Hip-pocampal pathology in TLE patients includes loss of hilar cells and pyramidal neurons in CA1 and CA3, astro-and microglio-sis, and architectural abnormalities of the dentate granule cells (DGCs). The latter comprises three main structural alterations. First is an abnor...

Submit Manuscript | http://medcraveonline.com potential proand anti-epileptogenic effects [1,2]. Given that epilepsy can be associated with neurodegeneration, mossy fiber sprouting and changes in receptor and neurotransmitter function, examining the specific role of reactive astrogliosis in epilepsy has been fraught with difficulties. Previously, a transgenic mouse line was generated [3] where ...

Human hippocampal choline decreases in major depression episodes. This decrease was recently measured by our group and it has been found that its level normalizes during electroconvulsive therapy. We hypothesized a hippocampal choline increase in the rat brain under electroconvulsive shock (ECS) treatment in an animal model of depression (Learned Helplessness). Method: Rat hippocampi were inves...

Proper axonal targeting is fundamental to the establishment of functional neural circuits. The hippocampal mossy fibres normally project towards the CA3 region. In the hippocampi of patients with temporal lobe epilepsy and related animal models, however, mossy fibres project towards the molecular layer and produce the hyperexcitable recurrent networks. The cellular and molecular mechanisms unde...

Commentary Development of acquired temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE) is accompanied by selective cell loss and reorganization of excitatory synaptic circuits in key brain regions. Of particular research focus, the axons of granule cells in the dentate gyrus (i.e., mossy fibers) have long been known to sprout collaterals and form new excitatory synapses with other granule cells after an epileptogenic...

The contribution of high-frequency synaptic activity to the induction of long-term potentiation (LTP) in the opioid peptide-containing mossy fiber projection was investigated in vivo in anesthetized rats. Because high-frequency mossy fiber activity is essential for both the release of opioid peptides and the induction of mossy fiber LTP, we investigated whether the activation of opioid receptor...