Cognitive dysfunction may result from abnormality of ionotropic glutamate receptors. Although various forms of synaptic plasticity in learning that rely on altering of glutamate receptors have been considered, the evidence is insufficient from an informatics view. Dynamics could reflect neuroinformatics encoding, including temporal pattern encoding, spatial pattern encoding, and energy distribu...

Glutamate is the principal excitatory neurotransmitter in brain. Our knowledge of the glutamatergic synapse has advanced enormously in the last 10 years, primarily through application of molecular biological techniques to the study of glutamate receptors and transporters. There are three families of ionotropic receptors with intrinsic cation permeable channels [N-methyl-D-aspartate (NMDA), alph...

Glutamate is the principal excitatory neurotransmitter in brain. Our knowledge of the glutamatergic synapse has advanced enormously in the last 10 years, primarily through application of molecular biological techniques to the study of glutamate receptors and transporters. There are three families of ionotropic receptors with intrinsic cation permeable channels [N-methyl-D-aspartate (NMDA), a-am...

Ketamine, a N-methyl-D-aspartate (NMDA) receptor antagonist, impairs reaction time performance and interacts with foreperiod duration, thereby suggesting that ketamine alters motor preparation. These effects can be attributed either to the blockade of NMDA receptors or to the stimulation of alpha-amino-3-hydroxy-5-methylisoxasole-4-proprionic acid (AMPA) and kainate receptors. The purpose of th...

Learning, memory and brain development are associated with long-lasting modifications of synapses that are guided by specific patterns of neuronal activity. Such modifications include classical Hebbian plasticities (such as long-term potentiation and long-term depression), which are rapid and synapse-specific, and others, such as synaptic scaling and metaplasticity, that work over longer timesc...

AMPA and NMDA receptors mediate most excitatory synaptic transmission in the CNS. We have developed antibodies that recognize all AMPA or all NMDA receptor variants on the surface of living neurons. AMPA receptor variants were identified with a polyclonal antibody recognizing the conserved extracellular loop region of all four AMPA receptor subunits (GluR1-4, both flip and flop), whereas NMDA r...

Striatal GABAergic microcircuits are critical for motor function, yet their properties remain enigmatic due to difficulties in targeting striatal interneurons for electrophysiological analysis. Here, we use Lhx6-GFP transgenic mice to identify GABAergic interneurons and investigate their regulation of striatal direct- and indirect-pathway medium spiny neurons (MSNs). We find that the two major ...

Maturation of the glutamatergic synapse is thought to require the incorporation of AMPA receptors at pure NMDA synapses, also called "silent" synapses. However, the relative number of silent synapses at different developmental stages, and even the concept that silent synapses lack AMPA receptors, is actively debated. In the present work, spontaneous synaptic events were used to investigate the ...

In humans and in animals, mental schemas can store information within an associative framework that enables rapid and efficient assimilation of new information. Using a hippocampal-dependent paired-associate task, we now report that the anterior cingulate cortex is part of a neocortical network of schema storage with NMDA receptor-mediated transmission critical for information updating, and AMP...