Some children raised in orphanages grow up to develop social disorders, and there's not all that much modern medicine can do about it. But scientists at Harvard Medical School are working on gaining a better understanding of how early isolation affects a developing brain. Their research gives new insight into the mechanisms at play, and indicates that timing and healthy myelination are crucial. “Social isolation from...
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Commonly used as a human anaesthetic and animal tranquilizer, the experimental drug ketamine became famous in the last two decades as a hallucinatory club drug known as “Special K.” Now, researchers at Yale University say the drug is beneficial in treating depression by increasing synaptic connections in parts of the brain that regulate mood and cognition. Dr. Ronald Duman, who uses Stereo Investigator and Neurolucida at...
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A baby cries and her mother's maternal instincts kick in. She picks her baby up, rocks her, feeds her. Changes in a new mother's brain compel her to act in ways that ensure her baby's survival. Researchers at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem are working on learning more about those changes. Their recent focus is on the olfactory bulb – a region of the brain...
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When it comes to preferred neuron reconstruction and neuron tracing systems, Neurolucida “dominated the last decade” according to a paper published earlier this year in Frontiers in Neuroscience. The paper, “Digital reconstructions of neuronal morphology: three decades of research trends" (Halavi et al, 2012), offers an overview of the history of digital neuron reconstruction and presents research trends on specific animal species, brain regions, neuron types,...
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Blue Brain Project researchers have hit an important milestone in their quest to create a virtual model of the human brain. They figured out how to accurately predict the location of synapses in the neocortex; and Neurolucida played an important part. In a paper published last week in PNAS, the research team led by Dr. Henry Markram at the Brain Mind Institute at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale...
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Dr. Daniel Peruzzi, staff scientist, shares his thoughts below: Customers often ask Staff Scientists at MBF Bioscience why it is sometimes difficult to reproduce certain published stereological results. For example, we get the question, “The estimates that I make of cell number in the region I’m researching do not match numbers reported in the literature. Can you help me understand why?” To solve this dilemma, we encourage...
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During a chicken embryo's twenty-one days of incubation, its eyes develop in astonishing ways. Muscles form, neurons branch, innervation occurs. Researchers at Dr. Rae Nishi's lab at the University of Vermont, including two MBF Bioscience staff scientists Julie Simpson, Ph.D. and Julie Keefe, M.S. are studying the development of a chicken embryo's nervous system. Their specific focus is on the behavior of neurons in the...
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Stereology has come a long way since Dr. Mark West started using the method of quantitative analysis in his research. The assumption-based or model-based stereological methods of the 1970s have been replaced by the more sophisticated design-based or unbiased stereological methods used today. Dr. West, a Professor of Medical Neurobiology at Aarhus University in Denmark and author of the most cited scientific papers on the...
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When an adult rat learns new things about its physical environment, the newborn neurons in its brain change – dendrites branch, spines increase, soma grows. But what about mature neurons? Might they also undergo structural changes in response to learning? “Yes,” say scientists at the National Institute of Health and Medical Research and the University of Bordeaux, in Bordeaux, France. Led by Drs. Valérie Lemaire, Sophie...
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There's a groundbreaking new tool in town. It's called WormLab, and it's going to revolutionize the way scientists analyze the behavior of C. elegans – tiny worms used as model organisms in research studies. WormLab helps scientists analyze the locomotion and behavior of C. elegans by providing precise information and analyses about their speed, direction, position, and wavelength. The software can track multiple worms as they...
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