神经生物学

This chapter describes the immunocytochemical (ICC) localization of receptors in tissue sections and cells growing in culture. The protocol is illustrated using examples of how site-directed polyclonal antisera can be used to distinguish between subtypes of G protein-coupled re ...

Radioligand binding is widely used to characterize receptors and to determine their anatomical distribution, particularly the superfamily of rhodopsinlike, seven-transmembrane-spanning G protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs). More than 200 receptors that transduce ma ...

In recent years, the endocytosis and the intracellular trafficking of many G protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs) have been evaluated. A milestone in the analysis of the transport of GPCRs was the molecular cloning of the green fluorescent protein (GFP) from the jellyfish Aequorea victoria ...

Attentional dysfunction has been implicated in a variety of psychopathological conditions (Cutting, 1985). Two major syndromes in which such dysfunction is considered to play a central role are attention-defidt hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and schizophrenia. It is not clear to wh ...

Activity anorexia is a biobehavioral process that occurs in animals. Laboratory rats are fed once per day, they lose weight, but quickly adjust to the feeding regime. Other animals receive a similar meal schedule and are allowed to run voluntarily on an activity wheel—these animals die of starva ...

The introduction of neuroleptics in 1952 to clinical practice was followed by numerous reports in the literature describing a syndrome of abnormal involuntary movements that appeared with increasing frequency during treatment or during withdraw al from neuroleptics. This synd ...

When amphetamine or cocaine is administered to humans every hour or so for several days, either during the “speed runs” of addicts or in controlled laboratory settings, there reliably results a psychosis that is similar to paranoid schizophrenia in a number of important aspects. This unique re ...

Although there is a dramatic need for animal models related to schizophrenic symptomatology, the literature has been disappointing in this regard. This is also true for models of the side effects of antipsychotic drugs, particularly with regard to rodent models. Considerable controve ...

The phosphoinositides, namely phosphatidylinositol (PI), phosphatidylinositol 4-phosphate (PIP), and phosphatidylinositol 4,5-bisphosphate (PIP2), are acidic lipids that are present in all animal tissues. The markedly polar character of these lipids makes conventio ...

Phospholipid metabolism in the central nervous system is regulated by a variety of enzymes whose substrate specificities, cellular localizations, and regulatory mechanisms are only beginning to be understood. In brain, different phospholipids turn over at different rates with r ...

The principal nonsaponifiable lipids of mammalian cells are derived from multiple units of the five-carbon hydrocarbon isoprene (2-methyl-1,3-butadiene) (Fig. 1A), and may consequently be termed isoprenoids. These compounds are further subcategorized as terpenes and steroz ...

Mitochondria are the powerhouses of eukaryotic cells. These organelles generate energy in the form of adenosine triphosphate (ATP) from carbohydrates, fats, and proteins, via oxidative phosphorylation. By virtue of possessing their own genetic material—mitochondrial DNA (m ...

Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD) is an X-linked recessive neuromuscular disorder caused by mutations in the dystrophin gene at Xp21. Approximately two-thirds of the mutations are intragenic deletions of one or more of the 79 exons that constitute the 2.4 Mb dystrophin gene, 5 % are duplicati ...

Psychiatric genetics is a relatively new term for an old research question: “Are behavioral and psychological conditions and deviations inherited?” The systematic empirical inquiries in this field started in the late nineteenth century with the work of F. Galton and his monograph Talent ...

The development of gene-mapping methodology has not been a linear process. Instead, this development has been multidimensional, culminating in the creation of a powerful and heterogeneous collection of tools. A description of the history of the development of this would include words s ...

Are the strategies for the identification of susceptibility genes in psychiatric diseases the same as those that have been used to successfully identify genes in monogenic diseases? How many cases, families, and markers are needed? These methodological questions are still a matter of deb ...

Ten years ago, Tsuang et al. (1) stated that “psychiatric genetics had reached a point where the sophistication of available experimental tools such as molecular genetics technologies and statistical procedures has surpassed the ability to describe relevant phenotypes.” Indeed, the ...

Candidate gene association studies in psychiatric disorders have suffered from difficulties in replication. One strategy for overcoming this difficulty is a focus on endophenotypes. If most psychiatric disorders are polygenic and are caused by numerous genes—each contribut ...

The rationale for the use of an endophenotype in genetic studies of psychiatric disorders is that these disorders are likely to be multi-determined, with multiple environmental and genetic origins, so that a discrete biological phenotype is more likely to reflect a single major gene effect. ...

When a completed draft emerged from The Human Genome Project in 2001 (1), the most ambitious biological enterprise ever undertaken yielded a prize of almost inestimable value: A map of the basepair (bp) sequence of the nearly 6-foot strand of DNA found in almost all of the body’s 100 trillion cells (2–4). As ...