News – BRG

Age dependency of trauma-induced neocortical epileptogenesis. Timofeev I1, Sejnowski TJ, Bazhenov M, Chauvette S, Grand LB. Front Cell Neurosci. 2013 Sep 18;7:154.

Trauma and brain infection are the primary sources of acquired epilepsy, which can occur at any age and may account for a high incidence of epilepsy in developing countries. We have explored the hypothesis that penetrating cortical wounds cause deafferentation of the neocortex, which triggers homeostatic plasticity and lead to epileptogenesis (Houweling etal., 2005). In partial deafferentation experiments of adult cats, acute seizures occurred in most preparations and chronic seizures occurred weeks to months after the operation in ...

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2013
SEP

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Our research on epileptic seizures prediction is awarded by grant from the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke

Epilepsy comprises a group of disorders of the brain characterized by the periodic and unpredictable occurrence of seizures. Reliable means of detecting changes which occur during the pre-seizure state could serve as a method of seizure prediction, a benchmark in epilepsy research. A fast optical signal that coincides with the actual onset of neural activity has been observed both in vitro and in vivo. Pre-seizure fast optical signal, characterized by a reduction in near-infrared (NIR) optical scattering, occurs seconds to ...

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2013
SEP

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Apis mellifera octopamine receptor 1 (AmOA1) expression in antennal lobe networks of the honey bee (Apis mellifera) and fruit fly (Drosophila melanogaster). Sinakevitch IT, Smith AN, Locatelli F, Huerta R, Bazhenov M, Smith BH. Front Syst Neurosci. 2013 Oct 25;7:70.

Octopamine (OA) underlies reinforcement during appetitive conditioning in the honey bee and fruit fly, acting via different subtypes of receptors. Recently, antibodies raised against a peptide sequence of one honey bee OA receptor, AmOA1, were used to study the distribution of these receptors in the honey bee brain (Sinakevitch et al., 2011). These antibodies also recognize an isoform of the AmOA1 ortholog in the fruit fly ...

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2013
AUG

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Our research on sleep and memory consolidation is awarded by grant from the Office of Naval Research.

During slow-wave sleep, the cortex is decoupled from external inputs, and can be devoted to consolidating previously acquired labile memories into stable memories. Recently, memory replay has been demonstrated during sleep, and associated with characteristic oscillations, giving rise to the hypothesis that these may form the critical neural substrate of memory consolidation. However, these studies have mainly focused on the rat hippocampus; while replay has also been demonstrated in other structures and species, evidence remains sparse, especially concerning the specific ...

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2013
JUN

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Dynamics of high-frequency synchronization during seizures. Krishnan GP, Filatov G, Bazhenov M. J Neurophysiol. 2013 May;109(10):2423-37.

The role of changes in ion concentrations in epilepsy remains unclear. It had been long known that increase of [K+]o (Hodgkin and Horovicz, 1959) and/or decrease of [Ca2+]o (Frankenhauser and Hodgkin, 1957) lead to neuronal hyperexcitability and possible epilepsy. But, in epilepsy, the exact mechanisms of the ionic changes, and the contributions of network dynamics remain to be clarified. Here we used multi electrode array (MEA) recordings combined with K-selective electrode and optical measurements from in vitro hippocampal ...