神经生物学

The cholinesterases (acetylcholinesterase and butyrylcholinesterase) In this chapter, cholinesterase will be used to refer to both enzymes together (i.e., total cholinesterase), whereas acetylcholinesterase or butyrylcholinesterase will be used when referring to the ...

Silver degeneration stains are typically considered the domain of studies of neural circuitry, but have also proven useful in studies of neurotoxicity. They are particularly well suited to localizing sites of injury, and determining the extent and time-course of degeneration.

The brain depends on other organ systems of the body for oxygen, nutrients, and the elimination of metabolic byproducts. The primary route for such transfer of these essentials is the cerebrovasculature. The cerebrovasculature also participates in metabolizing or excluding xenobi ...

Although structure and function of the major cells comprising nervous tissue have been studied extensively, very little detailed information exists concerning subcellular distributions of water and such elements as Na, K, Cl, and Ca. This information gap limits our understanding of c ...

In order to understand the functionality of genes and the importance of their expression, it is important to be able to understand proteins and, therefore, amino acids. Many techniques allow one to look at proteins at the amino acid level; however, very few allow researchers to understand them at the n ...

Differential gene expression is essential for normal development, and a variety of pathophysiological conditions (including neurodegeneration, neurotrauma, and ischemic injury) of the central nervous system. Various numbers of mRNAs are expressed in a given cell at any time poi ...

The technique of subtractive hybridization is used to enrich abundant cDNAs that differ between two cell populations. This approach is well suited for systems in which a homogenous cell population is activated in culture with an agent or factor that induces the transcription of genes that are ...

RNase protection assay (RPA) is becoming an increasingly popular method for the detection and quantitation of RNA levels in cells and tissues (1–3). Hybridization is conducted in solution using an excess of a labeled antisense single-stranded RNA as probe. Thus, hybridization of the probe w ...

The functional unit of the peripheral nervous system (PNS) is the neuron, with its long axon enveloped either by Schwann cells (unmyelinated axons) or by the multilamellar myelin sheath formed and maintained by these cells (myelinated axons) (Fig. 1 A). Neuronal cell bodies may be located within ...

Transfection of specific elements of DNA into cultured mammalian cells allows for the analysis of a range of functional and toxicologic mechanisms. At the heart of this technique is the ability to promote the uptake of DNA into actively growing cells, and to detect and analyze the expression of the g ...

Transcription factors are induced in neurons to alter gene expression to adapt to brain injury caused by exposure to neurotoxins, neurodegeneration disease, or mechanical damage. These DNA-binding proteins bind to specific recognition sequences in the promoter region of genes to re ...

Over the course of an organism’s life, cells divide, grow, differentiate, and die. For many years cell death has been recognized as significant in normal neuronal development. More recently, interest has grown in the mechanisms that regulate both cell death and cell survival in neurons during ho ...

The patch-clamp technique has revolutionized the understanding of ion channel physiology (Hamill et al., 1981; Neher and Sakmann, 1976). This technique facilitates the measurement of currents and voltage in cells under voltage-clamp and current-clamp conditions. Cells can be patch ...

One of the basic tenets of experimental science has been the search for techniques that give relevant information from intact systems while causing minimal effects. This concept is particularly important in the physiological branch of the biological sciences. In general, reduction ...

This chapter describes methods for the study of ion channels and transporters by recording from membrane macropatches. While investigators have made use of many different cell types for such experiments, we focus here on studies of these proteins expressed exogenously in Xenopus oocyt ...

One of the main challenges for a better understanding of signaling mechanisms in the normal and diseased central nervous system (CNS) is to unravel the molecular basics of function on the cellular and systemic levels. Several important cellular processes, such as proliferation, differe ...

The technique of patch clamping can be seen in retrospect as a combination of two separate lines of development that both originated in the 1960s and 1970s. The classical biophysics of the nerve impulse had by then been established in the squid giant axon using a combination of (1) voltage clamping with ...

Patch clamping facilitates directly controlling the voltage of a cell and thus has been acknowledged to be the gold standard for assessing ion-channel physiology in academic and industrial laboratories. The method was developed 30 years ago by (1976), and its various different configur ...

The extracellular patch voltage clamp technique has facilitated studying the currents through single ionic channels from a wide variety of cells. In its early form (Neher and Sakmann, 1976), the resolution of this technique was limited by the relatively low resistances, which isolated the ...

The patch-clamp recording technique measures ionic currents under a voltage clamp and was designed to study small patches of membrane in which near-perfect control of the transmembrane voltage can be readily achieved. Today, this technique is most frequently used to examine currents ac ...