实验仪器使用技术

Neural transplantation is a potential therapeutic strategy for treating neurological disorders such as Parkinson’s and Huntington’s diseases. Approx 200 patients with Parkinson’s disease have been transplanted with neural tissue into the brain. Of these, only a minority, approx ...

Because neurodegenerative diseases have their functional impact as the result of the death of neurons and glia, an obvious strategy is to replace them. This is a particularly attractive proposition in diseases such as Parkinson’s disease (PD) and Huntington’s disease (HD), in which there is l ...

The survival of neural grafts is dependent on a multitude of both donor-and host-related conditions. The importance of several of these factors, such as anatomical specificity and age of the donor tissue, surgical technique, immunology, presence of growth factors, and so on, are described in o ...

As described in several different chapters of this book, neural transplantation has been used extensively during the past two decades as a model for neural development and maturation, as well as a screening tool for different factors that might affect these processes. In addition, neural tra ...

The formation of new blood vessels from existing vessels (angiogenesis) is mandatory for organ and tissue development, and differs in degree from vasculogenesis, which is the de novo formation of the rudimentary vasculature in the early embryo. Angiogenesis is a continuous event in diges ...

Intraocular grafting has become a useful tool for studying viable tissue isolated from its natural surroundings, by implanting a piece of tissue into the anterior chamber of the eye, and placing the tissue onto the anterior surface of the iris. The graft survives and becomes attached to the host ir ...

The two fundamental criteria for successful cell transplantation in the adult mammalian brain are, first, the selection of an appropriate donor tissue at a stage of development when it can survive and grow after transplantation, and, second, the selection of an implantation method and site w ...

The use of markers to label donor tissue prior to transplantation into the central nervous system (CNS) can be of critical importance, if the fate of grafted cells and the influence of these cells on the host are to be accurately assessed. Identification of transplanted material is often difficult ...

The technique of transplanting the nonneuronal or glial cells of the nervous system is almost as old as the century. Cajal and Tello (Cajal, 1928) transplanted Schwann cells (in the form of a length of peripheral nerve) into the central nervous system (CNS), with a view to providing a cellular environm ...

As evidence becomes available from long-term studies of the effects of neural transplants in patients with Parkinson’s disease (PD), it is clear that grafts of embryonic mesencephalon into the striatum can relieve parkinsonian symptoms, and be of therapeutic benefit to patients (Defer ...

A major goal of neuroscience research is to develop effective treatments for clinical disorders, including those with underlying central nervous system (CNS) dysfunction. Progressive CNS diseases are characterized by the continuous deterioration of both cognitive and motor f ...

Among the different behavioral criteria used to discriminate substance dependence (or drug addiction) from other non-disordered forms of drug use, drug intake escalation presents a number of unique features that makes it particularly suitable for modeling in nonhuman animals. This ...

Eating disorders and drug addiction share many common traits. This includes biological and environmental factors that predispose individuals to develop either disorder, an increased risk for anxiety and depression when the disorders are present, and heightened trait levels of im ...

Exposure to psychostimulant drugs leads to sensitized locomotor responding, nucleus accumbens (NAcc) dopamine (DA) overflow, and drug self-administration upon reexposure to the drug weeks to months later. Calcium-dependent signaling pathways contribute importantly to b ...

Place conditioning is a form of stimulus–outcome learning that is commonly used to draw inferences about the rewarding and aversive effects of psychoactive drugs. This chapter focuses primarily on methodological issues that arise in the implementation and interpretation of place ...

This chapter provides an exhaustive overview of the current repertoire of animal models for alcoholism research. The chapter covers behavioral procedures modeling different stages of the alcohol addiction cycle, including strategies for investigating ethanol reinforcem ...

Intravenous self-administration (IVSA) studies have shown that nicotine can serve as a reinforcer in �animals and humans. Brain mechanisms underlying nicotine IVSA, as well as the effects of pharmacological interventions, have also been widely investigated and are summarized. Ho ...

Stimulants such as cocaine and the amphetamines are widely abused due to their rewarding effects. Much of what we know about drug abuse and drug reward comes from research involving stimulants, and much of this research involves using drug self-administration as an animal model of drug abuse. In t ...

Intracranial self-stimulation (ICSS) is an operant behavioral paradigm in which experimental animals learn to deliver brief electrical pulses into specific regions of their own brains that are considered to be part of the brain’s reward pathways mediating both natural and ICSS reward. ...

A variety of animal models have been developed to mimic the interactions between drugs and environment that are thought to play a crucial role in human addiction. A history of exposure to stress, for example, facilitates the development of drug addiction and drug relapse. Furthermore, there is s ...