35 The basolateral amygdala (BLA) is a complex brain region associated with processing 36 emotional states, such as fear, anxiety and stress. Some aspects of these emotional states are 37 driven by the network activity of synaptic connections, derived from both local circuitry and 38 projections to the BLA from other regions. Although the synaptic physiology and general 39 morphological charact...

PURPOSE Vision is encoded at photoreceptor synapses by the number of released vesicles and size of the post-synaptic response. We hypothesized that elevating cytosolic glutamate could enhance quantal size by increasing glutamate in vesicles. METHODS We introduced glutamate (10-40 mM) into cone terminals through a patch pipette and recorded excitatory post-synaptic currents (EPSCs) from horizo...

The electrical properties of rat Purkinje cells and synapses from granule cells were studied in dissociated cell cultures. To identify the cells we used an immunohistochemical method and recorded voltage-gated and synaptic currents with the patch-clamp technique (the whole-cell mode). Cultured Purkinje cells generated action potentials similar to those recorded from in vitro slices or in vivo p...

Synaptic homeostasis is a mechanism present in biological neural systems used to stabilize the network’s activity. It acts by scaling the synaptic weights in order to keep the neurons firing rate within a functional range, in face of chronic changes of their activity level, while preserving the relative differences between individual synapses. In analog VLSI spike based neural networks, homeost...

PURPOSE Retinal prosthetic devices are being developed to bypass degenerated retinal photoreceptors by directly activating retinal neurons with electrical stimulation. However, little is known about retinal activity during such stimulation. METHODS Whole cell patch-clamp recordings were obtained from ganglion and bipolar cells in the salamander retinal slice preparation. A stimulating electro...

The properties of neuromuscular junctions (NMJs) were studied in motor-point biopsy samples from eight patients with congenital myasthenic syndromes affecting primarily proximal limb muscles ['limb-girdle myasthenia' (LGM)]. All had moderate to severe weakness of the proximal muscles, without short-term clinical fatigability but with marked variation in strength over periods of weeks or months,...

The role of the endogenous opioid peptide dynorphin (1-17) in regulating NMDA receptor-mediated synaptic currents was examined in guinea pig hippocampus. Schaffer collateral/commissural fiber-evoked NMDA synaptic currents were recorded using whole-cell patch-clamp techniques in CA3 pyramidal cells. Dynorphin was found to have dual effects on NMDA synaptic currents, increasing currents at low co...