Now on ScienceBlogs: Oxytocin: Starting with the basics
Category: Developmental Biology
Alzheimer's Disease is the most common form of dementia, affecting more than 400,000 people in the U.K. and some 5.5 million in the U.S. The disease has a characteristic pathology, which often appears first in the hippocampus, and then spreads...
Posted by Mo at 10:34 PM • 7 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Neuroscience
The brains of vertebrates are asymmetrical, both structurally and functionally. This asymmetry is believed to increase the efficiency of information processing - one hemisphere is specialized to perform certain functions, so the opposite is left free to perform others. In...
Posted by Mo at 12:08 PM • 2 Comments
Category: Developmental Biology
This beautiful image of the brain of a 5-day-old zebrafish larva, which was created by Albert Pan of Harvard University, has just won 4th place in the 2008 Olympus BioScapes Digital Imaging competition. (See a larger version here.) It...
Posted by Mo at 9:27 AM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Developmental Biology
A team of Japanese researchers has demonstrated that embryonic stem cells obtained from mice and humans can spontaneously organize themselves into cortical tissues when grown in a culture dish under special conditions. Reporting in the journal Cell Stem Cell, the...
Posted by Mo at 1:35 PM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Developmental Biology
This reconstruction, produced by researchers from the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg, Germany using a technique called digital scanned laser light sheet fluorescence microscopy, shows the movements of all 16,000 cells in an 18-hour-old zebrafish embryo.To make the...
Posted by Mo at 2:48 PM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Developmental Biology
The classic Nobel Prize-winning studies of David Hubel and Torsten Weisel showed how the proper maturation of the developing visual cortex is critically dependent upon visual information received from the eyes. In what would today be considered highly unethical experiments,...
Posted by Mo at 10:54 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Neuroscience
The winners of the first Kavli Prize were announced a couple of weeks ago. One of the three recipients of the prize for neuroscience was Pasko Rakic, a professor of neurobiology and neurology at the Yale School of Medicine.Rakic has...
Posted by Mo at 7:42 AM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Developmental Biology
The word "wOOt" - spelt with zeros instead of the letter 'o' - has just been voted as Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary's Word of the Year. Coined by internet users, and defined as an interjection "expressing joy", it's quite apt today,...
Posted by Mo at 3:07 PM • 6 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Developmental Biology
[Introduction|Part 2|Part 3] The three studies discussed here make important contributions to our understanding of axon guidance. Lopez-Bendito et al describe a novel guidance mechanism involving tangentially migrating GABAergic interneurons. These cells migrate ventrally from the LGE to form a...
Posted by Mo at 12:00 PM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Developmental Biology
[Introduction|Part 2|Discussion] Tojima et al (2007) find that the growth cone's response to attractive guidance cues requires asymmetrical vesicle transport and exocytosis. They cultured dorsal root ganglion (DRG) cells from embryonic chicks, and produced localized elevations in calcium ion concentration...
Posted by Mo at 12:00 PM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
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Starts With a Bang 11.04.2009
