The organization of behavior: A neuropsychological theory

Recent studies have demonstrated that formaldehyde (FA)-induced neurotoxicity is important in the pathogenesis of Alzheimer's disease (AD). Elevated levels of FA have been associated with memory impairments and the main hallmarks of AD pathology, including β-amyloid plaques, tau protein hyperphosphorylation, and neuronal loss. Resveratrol (Res), as a polyphenol anti-oxidant, has been considered to have therapeutic potential for the treatment of AD. However, it has not been elucidated whether Res can exert its neuroprotective effects against FA-induced neuronal damages related to AD pathology. To answer this question, the effects of Res were investigated on Neuro-2a (N2a) cells prior to and after FA exposure. The experiments found that pre-treatment with Res significantly decreased FA-induced cytotoxicity, reduced cell apoptosis rates, and inhibited the hyperphosphorylation of tau protein at Thr181 in a dose-dependent manner. Further tests revealed that this effect was associated with the suppression of glycogen synthase kinase (GSK-3β) and calmodulin-dependent protein kinase II (CaMKII) activities, both of which are important kinases for tau protein hyperphosphorylation. In addition, Res was found to increase the activity of phosphoseryl/phosphothreonyl protein phosphatase-2A (PP2A). In summary, these findings provide evidence that Res protects N2a cells from FA-induced damages and suggests that inhibition of GSK-3β and CaMKII and the activation of PP2A by Res protect against the hyperphosphorylation and/or mediates the dephosphorylation of tau protein, respectively. These possible mechanisms underlying the neuroprotective effects of Res against FA-induced damages provide another perspective on AD treatment via inhibition of tau protein hyperhosphorylation.

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Resveratrol Attenuates Formaldehyde Induced Hyperphosphorylation of Tau Protein and Cytotoxicity in N2a Cells.

Corresponding anatomical and coactivation architecture of the human precuneus showing similar connectivity patterns with macaques.

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a range of neurodevelopmental disorders with behavioral and cognitive impairment and brings huge burdens to the patients' families and the society To accurately identify patients with ASD from typical controls is important for early detection and early intervention However, almost all the current existing classification methods for ASD based on structural MRI (sMRI) mainly utilize the independent local morphological features and do not consider the covariance patterns of these features between regions In this study, by combining the convolutional neural network (CNN) and individual structural covariance network, we proposed a new framework to classify ASD patients with sMRI data from the ABIDE consortium Moreover, gradient-weighted class activation mapping (Grad-CAM) was applied to characterize the weight of features contributing to the classification The experimental results showed that our proposed method outperforms the currently used methods for classifying ASD patients with the ABIDE data and achieves a high classification accuracy of 718% across different sites Furthermore, the discriminative features were found to be mainly located in the prefrontal cortex and cerebellum, which may be the early biomarkers for the diagnosis of ASD Our study demonstrated that CNN is an effective tool to build the framework for the diagnosis of ASD with individual structural covariance brain network

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Multisite Autism Spectrum Disorder Classification Using Convolutional Neural Network Classifier and Individual Morphological Brain Networks.

Neuroregeneration and functional recovery after stroke: advancing neural stem cell therapy toward clinical application.

Neurons Differentiated from Transplanted Stem Cells Respond Functionally to Acoustic Stimuli in the Awake Monkey Brain

Alterations of Gray Matter Volume and White Matter Integrity in Maternal Deprivation Monkeys.

EGF/bFGF promotes survival, migration and differentiation into neurons of GFP-labeled rhesus monkey neural stem cells xenografted into the rat brain.

Quantitative susceptibility mapping (QSM) is used to quantify iron deposition in non‐human primates in our study. Although QSM has many applications in detecting iron deposits in the human brain, including the distribution of iron deposits in specific brain regions, the change of iron deposition with aging, and the comparison of iron deposits between diseased groups and healthy controls, few studies have applied QSM to non‐human primates, while most animal brain experiments focus on biochemical and anatomical results instead of non‐invasive experiments. Additionally, brain imaging in children's research is difficult, but can be substituted using young rhesus monkeys, which are very similar to humans, as research animals. Therefore, understanding the relationship between iron deposition and age in rhesus macaques' brains can offer insights into both the developmental trajectory of magnetic susceptibility in the animal model and the correlated evidence in children's research. Twenty‐three healthy rhesus macaque monkeys (23 ± 7.85 years, range 2–29 years) were included in this research. Seven regions of interest (ROIs—globus pallidus, substantia nigra, dentate nucleus, caudate nucleus, putamen, thalamus, red nucleus) have been analyzed in terms of QSM and R2* (apparent relaxation rate). Susceptibility in most ROIs correlated significantly with the growth of age, similarly to the results for R2*, but showed different trends in the thalamus and red nucleus, which may be caused by the different sensitivities of myelination and iron deposition in R2* and QSM analysis. By assessing the correlation between iron content and age in healthy rhesus macaques' brains using QSM, we provide a piece of pilot information on normality for advanced animal disease models. Meanwhile, this study also could serve as the normative basis for further clinical studies using QSM for iron content quantification. Due to the comparison of the susceptibility on the same experimental objects, this research can also provide practical support for future research on characteristics for QSM and R2*.

Yuhua Zhang

Papers

Neurons Differentiated from Transplanted Stem Cells Respond Functionally to Acoustic Stimuli in the Awake Monkey Brain

Alterations of Gray Matter Volume and White Matter Integrity in Maternal Deprivation Monkeys.

EGF/bFGF promotes survival, migration and differentiation into neurons of GFP-labeled rhesus monkey neural stem cells xenografted into the rat brain.

Developmental trajectory of magnetic susceptibility in the healthy rhesus macaque brain