神经生物学

A critical goal of neuroscience is to fully understand neural processes and their relations to mental processes, and cognitive, affective, and behavioral disorders. Computational modeling, although still in its infancy, continues to play a central role in this endeavor. Presented he ...

The search for DNA alterations that cause human disease has been an area of active research for more than 50 years, since the time that the genetic code was first solved. In the absence of data implicating chromosomal aberrations, researchers historically have performed whole genome linkage a ...

The analysis of gene expression in the central nervous system is complicated by the diversity of its anatomical structures, the heterogeneity of its cell types, and the large number of genes that these cells express. The technique of in situ hybridization histochemistry has both the sensiti ...

The vast majority of somatic cells possess the same complement of genes. What makes one cell different from another is the subset of genes that each expresses. Further, the regulated expression of different sets of genes within a cell largely controls phenomena such as cell development, differ ...

Neuronal programmed cell death (PCD) is a well-recognized developmental phenomenon that culminates in apoptosis (reviewed in Oppenheim, 1991). Shortly after the period of neuroblast proliferation, many neurons, commonly about 50%, die during a circumscribed period at about the ti ...

In the past 20 years that in vitro preparations of central nervous system (CNS) cells have been used to access excitable membrane properties with electrophysiological techniques, there have been remarkable changes both in technology and in knowledge regarding membrane excitabili ...

Antibodies have been widely used in biochemistry as selective probes to study the structure and function of important biological macromolecules. The usefulness of antibody molecules as research tools lies in their unique structure. Antibody molecules consist of two distinct doma ...

A diverse array of proteins involved in every aspect of cellular activity including signaling, division, homeostasis, and differentiation is modified by phosphorylation. Altering the phosphorylation state of protein through the activation of specific kinases and phosphata ...

The phosphoinositide second-messenger system is one of the major mechanisms utilized by cells to transduce signals originating from extracellular stimuli, such as neurotransmitters, to intracellular responses (Fisher, 1995). A variety of cellular components can contribute ...

Neuroscience has quickly evolved to include classical neurochemical as well as molecular approaches to the study of proteins, This marriage of disciplines has been brought about not only by our need to further explore systems of specific interest, but also by the increased availability of c ...

A number of new and useful mutation detection methods have evolved in recent years enabled by the advent of polymerase chain reaction (PCR) (Grompe, 1993). These methods can be divided into two groups: (1) the PCR-based techniques aimed at scanning DNA sequences for unknown mutations and (2) the tec ...

The polymerase chain reaction (PCR) is a powerful technique for the amplification of small amounts of DNA or RNA, and its application has revolutionized fields that span molecular biology, forensic pathology, genetics and the diagnosis of disease. The employment of a heat-stable DNA polym ...

The ability to measure steady-state mRNA levels is central to the analysis of neuronal gene expression and, therefore, finds application across a broad range of neuroscientific research endeavors including the investigation of spatial-, temporal-, drug-induced-, or activity-de ...

Radio&and binding is one of the most widely used techniques by which the pharmacological and biochemical properties of receptors are determined. This technique was used in many of the pioneering studies of the receptors for hormones, neurotransmitters, and drugs and is now routinely used by ...

Gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS) has been used for the identification of drugs since 1968 when Hammar and coworkers (1968) employed this technique for the analysis of chlorpromazine and some of its metabolites isolated from human blood. Since that time this analytical pro ...

This review attempts to cover a broad range of literature on the analysis of psychotropic drugs in tiβues and body fluids, A considerable emphasis on the quantification of plasma drug levels will be found because this is an area that has generated most of the published analytical procedures. Conc ...

There can be little doubt that the benzodiazepines represent one of the major succeβes of the pharmaceutical industry. Since their introduction into clinical practice in 1960, they have become the most frequently prescribed of all psychotropic drugs; at present there are over 35 such comp ...

Although antidepreβant drug treatment is a well-established therapeutic approach in manic-depreβive disorders, the mechanism by which such drugs ameliorate the depreβive syndromes remains an area of active research. The mechanism of action of antidepreβants most likely has two ...

The preclinical behavioral analysis of effects of psychiatric drugs may be seen from two viewpoints. On the one hand it is neceβary to identify drugs that may be useful for treating psychiatric disorders. With this approach the basic question is: “Does a drug fit into the particular claβ of drugs that ...

Measurement of psychotropic drugs has become an integral part of the evaluation of new agents and, for older drugs, is often a routine part of clinical practise. Much of the interest in the measurement of psychotropic drugs can be traced to the notion that plasma concentrations may in some way reflect ...