实验仪器使用技术

An adequate animal model of a disease should reproduce the cardinal features of its human counterpart. Parkinson’s disease is characterized by akinesia, rigidity, and tremor. Attempts to reproduce Parkinsonian symptoms can be divided in three broad categories according to the method ...

The cardinal symptoms of Parkinson’s disease are rigidity, akinesia, and tremors. Secondary symptoms include postural abnormalities and neuropsychiatric disturbances such as depression, cognitive disorders, and apparent apathy (Barbeau, 1979; Schultz, 1984; Marsden et al., ...

Huntington’s disease (HD) is an inherited, progressive neurodegenerative disorder transmitted by a single autosomal dominant gene. The symptomology of the disease was first described by George Huntington in 1872 as consisting of a progressive dementia coupled with bizarre uncon ...

The cerebellum is composed of the cerebellar cortex, internal white matter, and deep cerebellar nuclei. These nuclei are the fastigial, interpositus, and dentate nuclei; they mediate most of the output of the cerebellum. This output is directed primarily to motor regions of the brain stem and c ...

Disorders of learning and/or memory are commonly associated with Alzheimer’s disease and are often regarded as among the earliest changes that can be detected in individuals developing this disease. However, several other disease states, such as Huntington’s, Parkinson’s, and Korsa ...

When an organism is exposed to a stressor, a series of behavioral changes occur that are thought to be of adaptive value. Among other things, the response style of an organism will narrow to those innate responses highest in the animal’s defensive repertoire (see belles, 1970) or to responses previou ...

It is now widely accepted that depressive disorders in humans are heterogeneous. Therefore, it is very likely that several distinctly different animal models of depression can be useful. Because of the heterogeneity of the manifestations of depressive disorders, it is important for dev ...

The creation or discovery of animal models of psychiatric conditions, such as major depressive disorder, is fraught with many problems that are not encountered in the development of models in other areas of medicine. Some of these problems are the result of the apparent nature and complexity of t ...

The existence of circadian rhythms, near 24-hour patterns of variation in biological functions, has been well established in many species. There is currently a great deal of interest in whether or not disturbed circadian rhythms are involved in the pathogenesis or etiology of some types of psy ...

The present chapter reviews the effects of antipanic and panicogenic treatments in several animal models of anxiety, all of which have exhibited some degree of predictive validity based on positive effects following acute administration of benzodiazepine and barbiturate anxio ...

Anxiety is a term used to describe both a normal emotional state associated with stressful or psychologically difficult events and a pathological condition. When anxiety is chronic and is not clearly linked to well-defined events, it is generally considered abnormal and appropriate for ...

Tract tracing is a fundamental technique in neuroanatomy for examining fiber connections in the nervous system. After the introduction of horseradish peroxidase 40 years ago, many tracing substances have been used for neuroanatomical studies on various nervous systems. Here, we des ...

Biotinylated dextran amine (BDA) is a highly efficient and powerful marker for bidirectional tracing of nerve pathways in a wide variety of species at the light and electron microscopic level. The BDA tract-tracing method can readily be combined with other anterograde or retrograde trac ...

One of the best neurohistologic methods to reveal the cytoarchitecture of the brain and detailed morphology of neurons with unsurpassed clarity has been the Golgi staining. It is based on the principle of metallic impregnation of neurons, allowing visualization in their entirety inclu ...

The preparation of tissue for histological study is a multi-step process in which potential loss of quality and the introduction of artifacts can occur during each step. Knowledge of the process and the potential pitfalls at each step will serve the investigator well. Here I describe the most bas ...

Immunofluorescence or IF is a technique allowing the visualization of a specific protein or antigen in cells or tissues by binding a specific antibody chemically conjugated with a fluorescence dye. Immunofluorescent staining is widely used in life science research, particularly for ...

Time-lapse imaging techniques are widely used to monitor dendritic spine dynamics, a measurement of synaptic plasticity. However, it is challenging to follow the dynamics of spines over an extended period in vivo during development or in deep brain structures that are beyond the reach of tra ...

Quantifying dendrite morphology is a method for determining the effect of biochemical pathways and extracellular agents on neuronal development and differentiation. Quantification can be performed using Sholl analysis, dendrite counting, and length quantification. The ...

Patterned distributions of signalling molecules play fundamental roles during embryonic development. Several attempts have been made to reproduce these patterns in vitro. In order to study substrate-bound or membrane proteins, microcontact printing (μCP) is a suitable method ...

Stripe assays are frequently used for studying binary growth decisions of cells and axons towards surface-bound molecules in vitro. In particular in the fields of neurodevelopment and axon guidance, stripe assays have become a routine tool. Several variants of the stripe assay have been de ...