神经生物学

Although a plethora of information exists on the role of the endothelial cell (EC) in vascular hemostasis and tissue homeostasis, little is known of the role played by the microvascular pericyte (PC) (Fig. 1). This lack of substantial information is most evident in the understanding of the role pla ...

The blood-brain barrier (BBB) is formed by the micro vasculature of the brain (1). The permeability properties, per se, of the BBB are regulated by the capillary endothelial cell (2). However, there are at least four different cells that comprise the brain microvasculature (Fig. 1), and all contribu ...

The application of the suppressive subtraction hybridization (SSH) technique to blood-brain barrier (BBB) genomics has accelerated the discovery and identification of BBB-specific genes in humans and in experimental animals (1–3). This procedure allows for the development of g ...

Cell culture techniques provide a useful tool to study the physiological functions that any given cell type provides to the host organ. Isolation and culturing techniques have developed dramatically in the past decades and an increasing number of cellular factors have been discovered, w ...

The development of efficient ways to deliver large molecules such as peptides, proteins, and nucleic acids across the blood-brain barrier (BBB) is crucial to future therapeutic strategies for treatment of central nervous system (CNS) disorders. The principal approach to deliver macr ...

In situ hybridization (ISH) has become a critical tool for studying gene expression in the central nervous system (CNS) (1–6). ISH has advantages over immunohisto-chemistry, because ISH identifies the cells that make the antigen of interest, rather than just contain it. ISH has been used to asse ...

There continue to be many new technical developments that propel advances in our understanding of biological events taking place at the cellular and molecular level. One method that developed early in the expansion of cell and molecular biology and still remains a valuable tool and major core ...

The first complete deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) sequence of an organism was published in 1977 (1), marking a starting point for what is today called genomics. In the meantime, there was a rapid development in scientific equipment and data processing capabilities, which led to a strong accelera ...

Immunohistochemistry is a widely used research technique in blood-brain barrier (BBB) research being used for the cellular localization of proteins of interest in normal vessels and documentation of altered expression following disease states, for the identification of cultu ...

Manipulation of genes in the mouse genome to produce transgenic or gene-targeted animals represents a powerful experimental tool to study the role of specific gene products in complex physiological systems. Because of the power of studying genetically altered mice, many laboratori ...

Over the past decades, transgenic mice have become a valuable tool in investigating gene expression, regulation, and function. Mouse models have been established for various human diseases to determine gene expression patterns and to elucidate gene function in tissues and organ syste ...

The ability to alter the mouse genome through homologous recombination in their embryonic stem (ES) cells, and propagate the modification through their germ-line, has revolutionized biomedical research. Such gene-targeted mice have afforded researchers unprecedented oppo ...

Immunocytochemical procedures offer a unique means to visualize receptors at cellular and subcellular resolution. This approach has been enhanced by the availability of immunochemical probes to simultaneously visualize cellular ultrastructure, such as intracellular o ...

The advent of powerful molecular techniques to study protein structure and function allows the modification of the codmg region of genes to produce proteins with altered structures that can be studied for changes in biochemical properties. The most common way to do structure/function st ...

Heterotrimeric guanine nucleotide-binding regulatory (G) proteins, composed of α-, β-, and γ-subunits, play pivotal roles in many receptor-mediated transmembrane signaling processes. Although detailed regulatory modes of G protein-mediated signal transduction have not y ...

The demonstration that many intracellular signaling processes are mediated by a family of closely related guanine nucleotide binding proteins (G proteins) has led to the development of specific techniques that can be used to identify which of these polypeptide(s) is involved upon rece ...

The basic mechanism of G protein-mediated transmembrane signaling was elucidated in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Subsequently, molecular clomng has identified a large array of closely related receptors (R), G protein subunits (G), and effecters (E). Currently, an important research g ...

Heterologous expression of receptor proteins provides a means of studying a molecularly defined receptor subtype in isolation from species closely related either by function and/or homology. For example, metabotropic glutamate receptors (mGluRs) comprise a large family (pre ...

G proteins link heptahelical membrane receptors to their effector systems. The G proteins consist of three subunits, α, β, and γ, of which until now 23 (including splice variants), 6, and 11 different forms are known, respectively (for reviews, see refs. 1 and 2). By sequence homology of G protein α-subuni ...

Investigation of the function of intracellularly located protein components of receptor-effector transduction pathways has been hampered not only by their inaccessibility, but also by the lack of specific tools. The problem is particularly acute when the effect of interest must be m ...