Bio Saga Blog - A Chronicle of Life Sciences & Informatics

The role of dichotomous properties of D1 and D2 medium spiny neurons for the dynamics and function of striatum The striatum is the main input station of the basal ganglia and is strongly associated with motor and cognitive functions. It is a recurrently connected network of GABAergic medium spiny neurons (MSNs), which receive strong feedforward inhibition from the fast spiking interneurons and massive excitatory afferents from various regions of the neocortex via the cortico-striatal projection neurons. Interestingly, neighboring MSNs do not share their presynaptic inputs. Recently, we have shown that this special structure of cortico-striatal projections provides optimal conditions for the representation of cortical inputs in the striatum. The MSN population in the striatum can be segregated into two types: D1 type MSNs project to the globus palidus external (indirect path) and D2 MSNs project to the globus palidus internal (direct path). Recent experiments have revealed a great degr...

Inching toward the  Dawn of the GATTACA era ! , making up history as we went along.  A group of researchers will use a $2.5 million federal grant to study the ethical and legal implications of providing genetic research results to the relatives of people who donated samples to biobanks, Mayo Clinic said today. The grant from the National Cancer Institute and the National Human Genome Research Institute will fund researchers at Mayo, the University of California, San Francisco, and the University of Minnesota who will study what families prefer, will analyze the legal and ethical issues, and propose recommendations for best practices policies. "Substantial debate surrounds the question of whether researchers have an ethical obligation to return individual research results to genetic relatives of patients, especially when the patient has died, and incidental findings have potential health or reproductive importance for kin," Gloria Petersen, the Purvis and Roberta ...