实验仪器使用技术

The diversity of neuropeptide transmitters is fairly large, as compared to other, “classical” neurotransmitters, such as acetylcholine and glutamate. Currently, immunocytochemistry and in situ hybridization are the methods of choice to map neuropeptide expression patterns ...

Microdialysis is a frequently used technique to collect continuously in vivo various endogenous chemical substances from the extracellular space of discrete brain regions. In comparison to other sampling methods (such as the push-pull technique), microdialysis causes only min ...

The brain-slice technique has been utilized in electrophysiological, morphological, biochemical, and pharmacological studies of almost all brain structures. A search of the literature between 1991 and 1995 on the Ovid Medline revealed 4387 entries that used the brain-slice techn ...

Electrochemical techniques detect materials by oxidizing them in solution at a positively polarized “working” electrode. The oxidized material gives up electrons that are collected by the working electrode and generate a current flow through it. The detection of this current is the ba ...

Thin slices of brain are commonly used to study regulation of neurotransmission in the central nervous system (CNS). In most of these studies, experiments are performed using brain slices soon after their preparation. Thin brain slices have limited viability: Unless special culture con ...

The development of in vitro brain slice and isolated neuron techniques has greatly facilitated detailed studies of the electrophysiology of a wide range of neuronal types in the adult and neonatal vertebrate central nervous system (CNS). Particularly advantageous are the greater mec ...

Apoptosis plays a crucial role in tissue sculpturing during development and in the maintenance of a steady state in continuously renewing tissues. It is now becoming increasingly clear that apoptosis also contributes to cell death in many different pathological situations, includi ...

Synaptosomes were first isolated by Whittaker (1) in 1958 and identified by electron microscopy as detached synapses 2 yr later (2). Synaptosomes are sealed particles that contain small, clear vesicles and sometimes larger densecore vesicles, indicating their presynaptic origin. O ...

During development of the retina, a number of different cell types are produced in excess and then undergo programmed cell death (Young, 1984). Retinal ganglion cells, which are the tertiary neurons whose axons make up the optic nerve and provide connectivity between the eye and higher centers in ...

Despite recent scientific advances, the mechanisms inducing neuronal death in many human brain diseases remain unknown. Selective neuronal vulnerability, often with slowly developing loss of neurons, is a common feature of neurodegenerative disorders, infectious CNS disea ...

Apoptosis is a form of regulated cell death, characterized by a series of morphological alterations including cell shrinkage, chromatin condensation, pyknosis of the nucleus, and multistep chromatin degradation (see references in Bonfoco et al., 1995 and in Ankarcrona et al., 1995). The l ...

Normal development and homeostasis result from a tenuous balance between cell proliferation and cell death. Disruption of this balance, in favor of cell death in particular, could easily lead to pathological states in postmitotic organs such as the adult brain (see Thompson, 1995). For exam ...

Naturally occurring cell death (NOCD) has been recognized for many years as a critical phase in the development of the nervous system (Hamburger and Levi-Montalcini, 1949; Oppenheim, 1991). During this process, immature neurons undergo an active process of cell death, probably because th ...

During embryogenesis of vertebrates, programmed cell death (or apoptosis) is an important event involved in tissue formation and organogenesis (Ernst, 1926; Gl�cksmann, 1951; Kerr et al., 1972). In the nervous system, programmed cell death of sensory and motor neurons occurs in embryonic s ...

In recent years, we have studied cell death in the developing nervous system (Owens et al., 1995), in fetal tissue grafts (Mahalik et al., 1995), and in the rodent olfactory epithelium (Mahalik, 1995). In addition, we are interested in correlating cell death in the rodent CNS with the expression of a putati ...

Apoptosis is one type of programmed cell death responsible for the physiological elimination of various cell populations during development (Wyllie, 1988). It has been estimated that up to 50% or more of vertebrate neurons in the central nervous system (CNS) die during embryonic developm ...

Apoptosis is a mode of cell death that has been defined largely on the basis of morphology (Wyllie et al, 1980; Clarke, 1990). The primary criteria used to delineate cell death as “apoptotic” are the condensation of nuclear chromatin and the fragmentation of nuclear DNA into oligonucleosomal-si ...

Apoptosis is an active process of selective cell death that occurs during development and has been implicated in the pathogenesis of a variety of human diseases (Thompson, 1995). Apoptosis can be distinguished from the other major form of cell death, necrosis, on the basis of both morphological ...

DNA fragments of discrete sizes, multiples of monomeric units, have clearly been observed during the period of nuclear degeneration of the terminal lens cell differentiation (Appleby and Modak, 1977). The same puzzling phenomenon has been associated with thymocyte apoptoses (Wyll ...

Our understanding of apoptosis and programmed cell death has rapidly evolved over the last decade. As originally conceived, apoptosis was a purely morphological phenomena based on the appearance of membrane blebbing (apoptotic bodies) and nuclear changes, including chromatin co ...