神经生物学

The inhibitory GABAA receptor plays important roles in the control of anxiety and sleep behavior. The α1 subunit-containing GABAA receptor is the major subtype, contributing to about 60% of all GABAA receptors in the brain. In this chapter, we present phenotypes observed in a GABAA receptor alp ...

The two circling rat mutants described in this review illustrate how genetic animal models may serve to study multifaceted brain functions and dysfunctions. The LEW/Ztm-ci2/ci2 and BH.7A/Ztm-ci3/ci3 rat mutants both exhibit lateralized circling and hyperactivity and thus provide ...

Rats have been extensively used to explore the brain mechanisms underlying psychiatric disorders. However, due to a lack of sufficient tools for the generation of knockout or mutant rats, there has been a general lag in the understanding of genetic factors in psychiatric and neurodevelopm ...

Zebrafish have traditionally been used as effective genetic and developmental models in biomedical research. Recently, the scope and utility of zebrafish in biomedical research has been further expanded with the implementation of new genetic techniques aimed at developing tran ...

Opiates, such as morphine and heroin, exert their pharmacological effects by binding to highly specific receptor proteins on the cell surface of neuronal and nonneuronal cells. In 1973, researchers in three different laboratories demonstrated the presence of receptors specific for ...

Addiction exacts enormous costs on society in terms of both its clinical and social ramifications. Addiction, defined as the compulsive use of a drug despite adverse consequences, is thought to develop as a result of adaptive changes in specific brain areas. The persistence of these progress ...

Since its identification as a family of protein kinases that is activated in the presence of calcium, phosphatidyl serine, and diacylglycerol (DAG), protein kinase C (PKC) has been regarded as one of the early steps in receptor signaling (Nishizuka, 1988, Nishizuka, 1995; Berridge, 1993; Rasm ...

G protein-linked receptor function and regulation have received considerable attention owing to the pivotal role of these receptors in mediating cellular responses to chemical transmitters. Typically, alterations in neurotransmitter status can either result in reduced re ...

Although the dopamine hypothesis of schizophrenia has gained wide acceptance, it has recently become clear that it requires revision (Seeman and Niznik, 1990; Ellison, 1994; Kahn and Davis, 1995). The original hypothesis asserts that schizophrenia is produced by a hyperdopaminergic s ...

Dopamine receptors are members of a large family of neurotransmitter/hormone receptors that exert their biological actions via signal transduction pathways that involve subtype-specific guanine nucleotide binding or G proteins (see Kaziro et al., 1991; Simon et al., 1991; Hille, 19 ...

Given their ubiquitous and crucial role in the integration and amplification of signal transduction pathways, it is not surprising that anomalies in the expression and/or function of various G proteins has been implicated in a multitude of pathophysiological states: pseudohypopa ...

Cells are capable of responding to extracellular stimuli because of their ability to detect external information and to transduce this signal to intracellular effectors that may result in the generation of second messengers and/or cause alteration in the cell’s metabolism. The cell su ...

Neurotransmitter receptors contain two main functional components: a ligand binding domain, which specifically recognizes the neurotransmitter, and a signaling component, which translates the binding of the neurotransmitter (or its agonists) into a physiological respo ...

Since Emil Kraepelin coined the term dementia praecox, schizophrenia has been recognized as a group of illnesses of unknown etiology sharing common symptomatology with diverse clinical courses. Family, twin, and adoption studies indicate that genetic factors contribute to the eti ...

Numerous controlled investigations by computed tomography and magnetic resonance imaging of living patients suffering from schizophrenia have found quantitative evidence of brain pathology in the form of enlarged third and lateral ventricles and increased cortical marki ...

The purine nucleoside adenosine has been shown to act as a neuromodulator in many areas of the mammalian brain. One of the main actions of adenosine in the central nervous system is the modulation of the release of a variety of neurotransmitters. Adenosine acts as a general depressant in the brain. In co ...

Mood and anxiety disorders are common, severe, chronic, and often life-threatening illnesses. Despite wellestablished genetic diatheses and extensive research, the biochemical abnormalities underlying the predisposition to, and the pathophysiology of, these disorders ...

To determine the cell autonomous and environmental factors that control the differentiation of neurons, astrocytes, and oligodendrocytes, we have used neurospheres made of primary neural progenitor cells. These organoids are amenable to the live cell imaging of several paramete ...

In this chapter we describe a technically simple and cost-effective method for quantifying apoptotic and non-apoptotic cell death in primary neuronal cultures. The method consists of three assays: cell viability assay, nuclear morphology assay, and caspase-3 activity assay (Creg ...

We describe the steps in detail to expand human neural stem cells, to bank and cryopreserve the stem cells. The methods described in this protocol represent the latest improvement in tissue culture and molecular biology reagents to help identify specific cell lineages. Specific tissue cul ...