NEWRON Volume VI, Issue V
NEWRON Admin
NeuroEngineering Weekly Review of News
Hey NEWRON Subscribers,
I hope everyone in Baltimore is enjoying the (slightly) warmer weather!
Enjoy,
Mike Batista
NEWRON Editor and Manager
Reviews
Brain-stimulation and graphene projects win billion-euro competition
The Human Brain Project, led by Henry Markram, a neuroscientist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, plans to use a supercomputer to recreate everything known about the human brain — a hugely ambitious goal that has been met with some skepticism. The Human Brain Project hopes to aid medical advancement in brain disorders.
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Responses to the announcement:
Brain imaging during memory task may predict response to antidepressant
Brain imaging of activity in the visual cortex while performing working-memory tasks may prove a biomarker for response to an experimental rapid-acting antidepressant. Scopolamine, better known as a treatment for motion sickness, has been under study since its fast-acting antidepressant properties were first reported in 2006. But not all patients respond. So Maura Furey, Ph.D., and colleagues developed a strategy for identifying patients likely to respond to the drug. The acetylcholine system, on which scopolamine works, plays a pivotal role in working memory by influencing the processing of information through the visual cortex. Furey and colleagues hypothesized that depressed patients would show aberrant visual cortex activity in response to a working-memory task; they also expected to find that patients with more dysfunctional acetylcholine systems would respond better to scopolamine treatment.
Read more:
http://alert.psychiatricnews.org/2013/02/brain-imaging-during-memory-task-may.html
Pyramidal neurons derived from human pluripotent stem cells integrate efficiently into mouse brain circuits in vivo
The study of human cortical development has major implications for brain evolution and diseases but has remained elusive due to paucity of experimental models. Here we found that human embryonic stem cells (ESCs) and induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs), cultured without added morphogens, recapitulate corticogenesis leading to the sequential generation of functional pyramidal neurons of all six layer identities. After transplantation into mouse neonatal brain, human ESC-derived cortical neurons integrated robustly and established specific axonal projections and dendritic patterns corresponding to native cortical neurons. The differentiation and connectivity of the transplanted human cortical neurons complexified progressively over several months in vivo, culminating in the establishment of functional synapses with the host circuitry. Our data demonstrate that human cortical neurons generated in vitro from ESC/iPSC can develop complex hodological properties characteristic of the cerebral cortex in vivo, thereby offering unprecedented opportunities for the modeling of human cortex diseases and brain repair.
Read more:
http://download.cell.com/neuron/pdf/PIIS089662731201121X.pdf?intermediate=true