In the vertebrate olfactory system, sensory neurons with common odorant specificities project to specific glomeruli in the olfactory bulb. How do olfactory sensory neurons find their glomerular targets? To address this question, we have visualized the genesis of the peripheral olfactory system in living zebrafish embryos. Dye labelings reveal that a primordial yet stereotyped map of glomeruli i...

Natural odorants are complex mixtures of diverse chemical compounds. Monomolecular odorants are represented in the main olfactory bulb by distinct spatial patterns of activated glomeruli. However, it remains unclear how individual compounds contribute to population representations of natural stimuli, which appear to be unexpectedly sparse. We combined gas chromatography and intrinsic signal ima...

Center-surround receptive fields are a fundamental unit of brain organization. It has been proposed that olfactory bulb mitral cells exhibit this functional circuitry, with excitation from one glomerulus and inhibition from a broad field of glomeruli within reach of the lateral dendrites. We investigated this hypothesis using a combination of in vivo intrinsic imaging, single-unit recording, an...

An immunofluorescent study of renal biopsies from patients with toxemia of pregnancy has been performed. It was found that the glomeruli consistently showed bright staining for fibrin within endothelial cells, as well as occasional deposits along the basement membrane. Gamma globulin was only occasionally demonstrable, generally in the form of irregular deposits along the basement membrane. bet...

Musk odorants are used widely in cosmetic industries because of their fascinating animalic scent. However, how this aroma is perceived in the mammalian olfactory system remains a great mystery. Here, we show that muscone, one musk odor secreted by various animals from stink glands, activates a few glomeruli clustered in a neuroanatomically unique anteromedial olfactory bulb. The muscone-respons...

1 BAMBI acts as a pseudoreceptor for the TGFβ type I receptor family and negative modulator of TGFβ kinase 2 signaling and BAMBI-/-mice show mild endothelial dysfunction. As diabetic glomerular disease is associated 3 with TGFβ overexpression and microvascular alterations, we examined the effect of diabetes on glomerular 4 BAMBI mRNA levels. In isolated glomeruli from biopsies of patients with ...

Nephropathic cystinosis results from lysosomal cystine storage and, if untreated with cysteamine, results in end-stage renal disease by 10 years of age. The renal Fanconi syndrome occurs in the first year of life and is accompanied by a characteristic "swan neck" deformity of the proximal renal tubule. The linkage between cystine storage, Fanconi syndrome, and renal failure has not been underst...

To visualize odorant representations by receptor neuron input to the mouse olfactory bulb, we loaded receptor neurons with calcium-sensitive dye and imaged odorant-evoked responses from their axon terminals. Fluorescence increases reflected activation of receptor neuron populations converging onto individual glomeruli. We report several findings. First, five glomeruli were identifiable across a...

The biosynthesis of glycosaminoglycans (GAG) and glycopeptides was studied in rat kidney cortex, glomeruli, and isolated glomerular basement membranes (GBM). Rats were given four intraperitoneal injections of [(35)S]sulfate and [(3)H]glucosamine (over 10 hr) and sacrificed 14 hr after the last injection. Fractions of kidney glomeruli and purified GBM were prepared. The percent of the label inco...

An odorant stimulus given to a bee elicits a characteristic combinatorial pattern of activity in neuronal units called glomeruli. These patterns can be measured by optical imaging, however detecting and identifying the glomeruli is a laborious task and prone to errors. Here, we present an image analysis pipeline for the automatic detection and identification of glomeruli. It involves Independen...