Showing papers in "Brain Research Protocols in 2002"

TL;DR: A microsurgical technique to collect blood samples from the right atrium through a catheter (cannula) implanted into the right external jugular vein of adult rats is described and application of this technique to monitor temporal changes in plasma stress hormones during stressor paradigms as well as after behavioral and pharmacological challenges is discussed.

TL;DR: This novel in vitro model of SCI is easy to reproduce, will facilitate the examination of post-trauma cell death mechanisms and the neuroprotective effects of pharmacological agents and aid in the study of transgenic murine models.

TL;DR: A method is developed, which allows the preservation of the PI signal in paraformaldehyde-fixed tissue, enabling subsequent immunohistochemical characterisation of labelled cells, and may also prove useful in characterising cell death in other in vitro and in vivo systems.

TL;DR: The results show that TMS is able to elicit phosphenes in almost all sighted subjects and in a proportion of blind subjects, and such a non-invasive method is critical for selection of suitable subjects for a cortical visual prosthesis.

TL;DR: Although anesthesia by halothane via face-mask allowed better control of depth of anesthesia than chloral hydrate, it is found this method to be unsatisfactory due to insufficient control of ventilation and waste of anesthetic gases.

TL;DR: A method for isolating vessels from the brain in order to understand the changes occurring in the vessels during the pathogenesis of cerebral malaria, which indicated it was possible to detect changes in gene expression, due to malaria infection, occurring specifically within the vessels.

TL;DR: The anatomical sampling method was found to be highly reliable with an intra-rater reliability of greater than 0.93 and the current protocol should facilitate future in vivo neuroimaging research using animal models of neurodegenerative diseases.

TL;DR: The results suggest that the conditioned place preference procedure using the newly developed airtight inhalation shuttlebox constitutes an important tool for studying the rewarding effect of abused solvents.

TL;DR: The use of whole mount in situ hybridization is described for identification of cochlear longitudinal and radial expression gradients in the neurosensory epithelium, hair cells and the developmental up-regulation and down-regulation of genes and their associated spatio-temporal expression patterns can be demonstrated.

TL;DR: The use of fresh-frozen, cryocut sections enables reliable detection of easily perturbable post-translational modifications such as phosphorylation and improves the quality of results obtained in subsequent in situ hybridization by reducing the background signal and interference from lower cell layers.

TL;DR: A protocol for analysis of gene expression in single, acutely dissociated adult rat retinal ganglion cells using RT-PCR is described, which will prove useful for the molecular characterization of adult retinal Ganglion Cells.

TL;DR: An improved, more rapid method of microcarrier preparation is described and transfection by the new method results in high levels of transfections efficiency and low variability compared to an alternative method.

TL;DR: This model can be used to investigate the mechanisms of this endogenous neuroprotection and is particularly suitable for studying the epileptic susceptibility, as reflected by the modifications of the after-discharge threshold, as well as any changes in gene expression induced associated with the preconditioning episode.

TL;DR: The method described here allows us to demonstrate that the neurogenetic timetables of midbrain dopaminergic neurons were different between control and homozygous weaver mice in the mesencephalic area studied.

TL;DR: It is suggested that real-time quantitative PCR is a useful method to study gene expression for other neurotransmitter receptors in the vestibular brainstem and cerebellum, and is also expected to be more accurate to assess the changes in gene expression following any treatment.

TL;DR: This work has developed a rapid and sensitive external-standard-based real-time quantitative PCR assay for the quantification of mRNA of P2X receptors in mouse tissue samples, and tested the reliability of this method in established experimental murine models.

TL;DR: This protocol describes an implementation of recording and analysis of evoked potentials in the hippocampal cortex, combined with lesioning using multichannel silicon probes, suggesting that the probe did not cause excessive damage to the brain.

TL;DR: A method for generating mixed and chimeric neuron/glial cultures of postnatal substantia nigra (SN), independent of other monoaminergic nuclei in the ventral midbrain, used to test potential therapies for amelioration of Parkinson's disease is described.

TL;DR: A novel culture technique of oligodendrocyte precursor cells and OL from embryonic day 16 (E16) rat cerebrum distinguished by morphological and immunocytochemical analyses and resulted in successful formation of myelin in the presence or absence of astrocytes.

TL;DR: This model of cerebral hemorrhage by inducing cyclic flow reductions in the middle cerebral artery (MCA) is different from permanent or ischemia/reperfusion MCA occlusion in rodents and may be suitable for studying hemorrhagic risks associated with the use of antithrombotic agents.

TL;DR: This neurogenic rat model provides a useful means of examining the effects of spinal cord injury on bladder function by utilizing spinal cord microdialysis, one could intervene at the level of the detrusor nuclei to modulate bladder function.

TL;DR: Conditioning the medium, controlling glial proliferation, and adding ascorbic acid improved the expression of TRH in primary culture of hypothalamic cells in DMEM-S, demonstrating that homologous conditioned medium (CM) enhances TRH expression in dissociated cell cultures from fetal mice hypothalamus, maintained in presence of serum.

TL;DR: Under the experimental system in the present study, electrical median nerve stimulation as conditioning stimulation significantly decreased both the SEP amplitude induced by electrical tooth simulation and subjective pain expressed by the VAS.

TL;DR: This finding confirms the important role of sex hormones in the modulation and control of the sensitivity of the vagina and cervix, a part of the female genital tract which is implicated in a variety of neuroendocrine, behavioral and neural changes.

TL;DR: The protocol enables the prompt availability of sufficient amount of finasteride in experimental grade, useful in examining the role of endogenous cerebrocortical AP in brain homeostasis.

TL;DR: In injection of a neuronal tracer, wheat germ agglutinin conjugated to horseradish peroxidase, into the medial mammillary nucleus of the Japanese monkey, an improved method to inject drug into deep brain structure of the macaque monkey is described.

TL;DR: A method to induce manganese accumulation in the brain of the cirrhotic rat is described and it is found that metal brain accumulation was low in sham-operated rats with both of the Mn concentrations used.

TL;DR: The protocol presented here, provides a fast and sensitive assay for the analysis of neuronal viability using LSC, and can be used to study new neuroprotective drugs in neuronal cell cultures.

TL;DR: It is demonstrated that with this novel device the onset of drug actions on hippocampal neurons can be clearly defined and that these actions occur within 2 min after minivalve activation, and that the minivalves allows one to test a large number of drug solutions, successively, within the same experimental session.

TL;DR: The 11C radioactivity that had accumulated in the striatum disappeared on treatment with veratridine, a depolarization agent, in the presence of HC-3, consistent with that of the appearance of unlabeled and labeled acetylcholine in the medium.