Birds and mammals hear binaurally, hearing sounds through two ears. Binaural hearing allows them to determine which direction a sound came from—a pivotal element of survival. Doctors Armin H. Seidl, Edwin W. Rubel, and David M. Harris of Seattle’s Virginia Merrill Bloedel Hearing Research Center at the University of Washington recently published a study in the Journal of Neuroscience that may encourage scientists to think in...
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We're pleased to announce that MBF Bioscience has been selected as one of the "Best Places to Work in Vermont" for the third time in a row. The list of fifteen companies is compiled by Best Companies Group in an effort to recognize excellence among state employers. Companies are evaluated based on the benefits they provide and their levels of employee engagement and satisfaction. We'll...
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If you start smoking as a teen, it’s much harder to quit. University of Vermont Neurobiologist Rae Nishi wants to find out why. And thanks to a $1 million Challenge Grant, Nishi and her team will be able to further study the way adolescent brains react to nicotine. The grant is one of 200 National Institute of Health grants allocated by the American Recovery and Reinvestment...
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It is possible to image the brain of a single fruit fly, but how about 100? This is what, MBF Bioscience Customer and Assistant Professor of Biology at Stanford University, Mark Schnitzer, would like to do. In an interview published in the October 16 issue of Science, Schnitzer explained that "massive brain imaging" would revolutionize brain research by allowing neuroscientists to simultaneously study multiple flies of...
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Optogenetics is a fairly new scientific field that combines optical stimulation with genetic engineering. According to a recent article in Wired magazine, neuroscientist, psychologist, and MBF Bioscience customer Dr. Karl Deisseroth and his team of researchers at Stanford University are making major optogenetic advancements - the kind that might lead to a cure for Parkinson's Disease. It all began in 1979, when one of the discoverers...
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MBF Bioscience President Jack Glaser appears on the cover of this month's Business People-Vermont magazine. Read the informative feature article "Microscopic Vision" to find out how MBF Bioscience got its start, and how researchers like neuroscientist Henry Markram, are using our products today to make important advances in a range of scientific fields. {Photo by Brad Pettengill, courtesy of Business People-Vermont}...
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At MBF Bioscience, we are committed to delivering innovative products and unrivaled support to our customers and collaborators. Our development team and staff scientists actively engage with leading scientific researchers to develop new technology as they work to further advance the field. Recently, several of our customers worked closely with us to advance virtual slide technology to create high resolution brain atlases and morphometric analyses using...
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Thousands of people in the United States have spinal cord injuries (SCIs), with associated loss of movement and sensation below the site of the injury. Neural and glial cell transplants into research animals after SCI have correlated with recovery of function. The improvement may be caused by the transplanted cells; it’s thought that remyelination by the transplanted glial cells is the main reason for the...
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One factor that makes a neuron uniquely suited for a particular function is its morphology, including where and how the dendrites extend. The nature of the dendritic arbor affects the connectivity and electrical properties of the neuron, and arbor abnormalities are associated with neurological diseases. Many classification schemes have been based on neuronal morphology but in an article from the December 2007 issue of Neuron,...
Read MoreDensita, our latest software application, is now available to researchers in labs around the world. Designed as an intuitive application for semi-quantitative and autoradiographic analyses, Densita can work with images from a scanner or a traditional light table and camera system, as well as with image files from other systems, including MCID. Densita allows researchers to quickly and accurately perform receptor binding and mapping studies. "Densita...
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