Seizures may cause brain injury via a variety of mechanisms, potentially contributing to cognitive deficits in epilepsy patients. Although seizures induce neuronal death in some situations, they may also have "nonlethal" pathophysiological effects on neuronal structure and function, such as modifying dendritic morphology. Previous studies involving conventional fixed tissue analysis have demons...

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE Focal stroke is associated with cell death, abnormal synaptic activity, and neurologic impairments. Given that many of these neuropathologic processes can be attributed to events that occur shortly after injury, it is necessary to understand how stroke affects the structure of neurons in surviving peri-infarct regions, particularly at the level of the dendritic spines, wh...

Through the use of a multi-compartmental neuron simulation, Mainen and Sejnowski demonstrated that spike generation in neurons is a function of their dendritic structure [l]. In this paper we investigate the determination of dendritic morphology given a desired set of spike traces. A genetic algorithm is used to identify optimal parameters for a developmental model which simulates the growth of...

The complex effects of stress on learning and memory are mediated, in part, by stress-induced changes in the composition and structure of excitatory synapses. In the hippocampus, the effects of stress involve several factors including glucocorticoids and the stress-released neuropeptide corticotropin-releasing hormone (CRH), which influence the integrity of dendritic spines and the structure an...

Olson, Andrew J., Arturo Picones, and Juan I. Korenbrot. Developmental switch in excitability, Ca and K currents of retinal ganglion cells and their dendritic structure. J Neurophysiol 84: 2063–2077, 2000. In the retina of teleost fish, continuous neuronal development occurs at the margin, in the peripheral growth zone (PGZ). We prepared tissue slices from the retina of rainbow trout that inclu...

Neural activity has profound effects on the development of dendritic structure. Mechanisms that link neural activity to nuclear gene expression include activity-regulated factors, such as CREB, Crest or Mef2, as well as activity-regulated immediate-early genes, such as fos and jun. This study investigates the role of the transcriptional regulator AP-1, a Fos-Jun heterodimer, in activity-depende...

Dendritic spines, the tiny protrusions that stud the surface of many neurons, are the location of over 90% of all excitatory synapses that occur in the CNS. Their small size has, in large part, made them refractory to conventional experimental approaches. Yet their widespread occurrence and likely involvement in learning and memory has motivated extensive efforts to obtain quantitative descript...

Background: Dendritic cells (DCs) are the most potent stimulators of primary T cell responses and play a key role in immune reactions after stem cell transplantation. Very little is known about the cord blood (CB) dendritic cells and their potential involvement in the low incidence and lower severity of acute graft-versus-host disease after CB transplantation.   Objectives: The aim of this stud...