CFTR Modulates Hypothalamic Neuron Excitability to Maintain Female Cycle

Cdk5 modulates cocaine reward, motivation, and striatal neuron excitability.

Cyclin-dependent kinase 5 (Cdk5) regulates dopamine neurotransmission and has been suggested to serve as a homeostatic target of chronic psychostimulant exposure. To study the role of Cdk5 in the modulation of the cellular and behavioral effects of psychoactive drugs of abuse, we developed Cre/loxP conditional knock-out systems that allow temporal and spatial control of Cdk5 expression in the a...

Hypothalamic contribution to sleep-wake cycle development.

Infant mammals cycle rapidly between sleep and wakefulness and only gradually does a more consolidated sleep pattern develop. The neural substrates responsible for this consolidation are unknown. To establish a reliable measure of sleep-wake cyclicity in infant rats, nuchal muscle tone was measured in 2-, 5-, and 8-day-old rats, as were motor behaviors associated with sleep (i.e. myoclonic twit...

DNA Replication Modulates R-loop Levels to Maintain Genome Stability

Self-organized criticality in single-neuron excitability.

We present experimental and theoretical arguments, at the single-neuron level, suggesting that neuronal response fluctuations reflect a process that positions the neuron near a transition point that separates excitable and unexcitable phases. This view is supported by the dynamical properties of the system as observed in experiments on isolated cultured cortical neurons, as well as by a theoret...

Perceptual Load Modulates Visual Cortex Excitability to Magnetic Stimulation

Much recent research has shown that the level of perceptual load in a task determines the perception of task-irrelevant stimuli and associated neural activity, but the mediating neural mechanisms remain unclear. Here we show that increasing the level of perceptual load in a static letter search task results in an increase in the intensity of transcranial magnetic stimulation over V5/MT required...