神经生物学

Obesity has become a major health and economic burden, and the development of new treatments is urgently needed. Initially, such treatments involve use of animal models, and the purpose of this chapter is to describe some of the most useful models, why one might be chosen over another to address a parti ...

Binge eating is a behavior that occurs in some eating disorders, as well as in obesity and in nonclinical populations. Both sugars and fats are readily consumed by human beings and are common components of binges. This chapter describes animal models of sugar and fat bingeing, which allow for a detail ...

The classification of psychiatric disorders has always been a problem in clinical settings. The present debate about the major systems in clinical practice, DSM-IV and ICD-10, has resulted in attempts to improve and replace those schemes by some that include more endophenotypic and molec ...

Mathematical sciences and computational methods have found new applications in fields like medicine over the last few decades. Modern data acquisition and data analysis protocols have been of great assistance to medical researchers and clinical scientists. Especially in psychi ...

The compartmented culture model utilizing rat sympathetic neurons and sensory neurons is gaining wide use in investigations of neurotrophic factor signaling and axonal transport. Previous chapters have focused on the preparation of compartmented cultures. Here we focus on anal ...

Glyceraldehyde-3-phosphate dehydrogenase (GAPDH; EC 1.2. 1.12) has classically been regarded as an ubiquitous enzyme of little importance beyond its role in glycolysis. Indeed, the most frequent reference to GAPDH in recent scientific literature is as the “housekeeping” gene used to s ...

The use of DNA arrays offers the promise of semiquantitative analysis of large numbers of genes simultaneously. Here, we report our efforts at applying this technology to an issue of potentially high relevance to current research in Alzheimer’s Disease (AD). The AD field is in strong need of bioma ...

Microarray technology, while it is no longer in its infancy, is still immature and unpredictable. If it works well, microarray expression analysis is a powerful method for estimating the behavior of 10,000 genes simultaneously. But how often does it work well? Because of the rapid adoption of this ...

To manage the instrument successfully, delicacy of touch and a great deal of patience are required; but it is only with the latter, combined with perseverance, energy, and close observations that scientific facts have, or ever will be established.

Specific cellular and temporal regulation of gene expression is a goal of many molecular studies. The study of programmed cell death requires cellular specificity, temporal regulation, as well as the interaction of a myriad of gene products. One way to regulate these interactions in an apopt ...

Apoptosis is a physiological process that contributes to the establishment and homeostasis of the nervous system. For example, neurons that fail to make the proper connections with their postsynaptic targets die naturally during development due to the lack of sufficient trophic supp ...

In recent years substantial evidence has accumulated demonstrating a central regulatory role for mitochondria in cell death (1). More recently, mechanisms of cell death, through apoptosis, have been elucidated and increasingly point toward mitochondria as the gatekeepers of apo ...

Bax is a proapoptotic member of the Bcl-2 family. Members of this family can promote either cell survival, as in the case of Bcl-2 and Bcl-XL, or cell death, as in the case of Bax and Bak. Bax was first identified as a Bcl-2 binding partner by immunoprecipitation (1). Subsequently it was shown that overexpression ...

Dogma suggests that cell death mechanisms can present with either a necrotic or an apoptotic phenotype. Recent evidence, however, seems to point to a far more complex picture, in which apoptotic and necrotic phenotypes might present simultaneously (1). For example, TUNEL positivity in car ...

Neuronal apoptosis plays a significant role in nervous system development and in neuropathological conditions (1). Although apoptosis is not the only type of non-necrotic, regulated cell death observed in the nervous system, it is by far the most extensively investigated (2,3). Studies in a ...

Essentially three modes of synaptic elimination have been described (1): (1) loss of synapses in synaptically connected neurons following physiological neuron death during development or hormonally driven reorganization; (2) process (generally axonal) retraction and prot ...

Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is nowadays the most widespread form of senile dementia in Western countries. AD is considered a multifactorial disease: in fact, it is probable that many concomitant factors (genetic and environmental) are relevant in the pathogenesis of this disease. In partic ...

Alcoholic dementia is a disorder characterized by multiple cognitive deficits that include memory impairment associated with one or more cognitive disturbances listed in the present text. First, we characterize the disorder and describe aspects of using nonhuman models for study ...

Dementia in humans following traumatic brain injury (TBI) has been well documented in clinical populations, either after a single TBI or repeated mild TBI (rMTBI). In most cases, trauma-induced dementia follows a slow, chronic time-course, and in many cases mild injuries accumulate over ti ...

Normal Pressure Hydrocephalus (NPH) is a syndrome of dementia, gait disturbances, and urinary incontinence affecting the elderly population. Neuroimaging shows ventriculomegaly, and from the 70s to the early 90s invasive testing of intracranial pressure (ICP) and cerebrospin ...