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Microglial activation is a key aspect of the neuroinflammatory process in neurodegenerative disorders including idiopathic and atypical parkinsonian disorders. With positron emission tomography (PET) it has become possible to image this phenomenon in vivo and over the last years patterns of microglia activation corresponding with the known distribution of neuropathological changes in these diso...

Since it’s serendipitous discovery by researchers over thirty years ago, the translocator protein (18 kDa) (TSPO) has been demonstrated to play an important role in a multitude of critical biological processes. Although implemented as a novel therapeutic and diagnostic tool for a variety of disease states, its most promising role is as a molecular target for anti-cancer treatments such as photo...

In Alzheimer`s disease (AD), regional heterogeneity of ?-amyloid burden and microglial activation individual patients is a well-known phenomenon. Recently, we described high incidence inter-individual in terms asymmetry plaque mouse models AD as assessed by positron-emission-tomography (PET). We now investigate the associations between amyloid burden, activation, impaired spatial learning perfo...

The current studies indicate that Leydig cells from old (24-27-Mo) rats secreted significantly less cholesterol in response to stimulators, hCG, forskolin, or Bt2cAMP as compared to cells from young mature (5-Mo) animals. This deficiency was reversed by incubation of cells with free diffusible hydroxycholesterols, indicating that age-related decline in testosterone secretion primarily results f...

The traditional scale invariant feature transform (SIFT) method can extract distinctive features for image matching. However, it is extremely time-consuming in SIFT matching because of the use of the Euclidean distance measure. Recently, many binary SIFT (BSIFT) methods have been developed to improve matching efficiency; however, none of them is invariant to mirror reflection. To address these ...

The outer mitochondrial membrane (OMM) protein, the translocator protein 18 kDa (TSPO), formerly named the peripheral benzodiazepine receptor (PBR), has been proposed to participate in the pathogenesis of neurodegenerative diseases. To clarify the TSPO function, we identified the Drosophila homolog, CG2789/dTSPO, and studied the effects of its inactivation by P-element insertion, RNAi knockdown...