Latest Neuron Stories

Neurons in the nose could be the key to early, fast, and accurate diagnosis, says a TAU researcher A debilitating mental illness, schizophrenia can be difficult to diagnose. Because physiological evidence confirming the disease can only be gathered from the brain during an autopsy, mental health professionals have had to rely on a battery of psychological evaluations to diagnose their patients. Now, Dr. Noam Shomron and Prof. Ruth Navon of Tel Aviv University's Sackler Faculty of...

Georgia Institute of Technology Sand-dwelling and rock-dwelling cichlids living in East Africa's Lake Malawi share a nearly identical genome, but have very different personalities. The territorial rock-dwellers live in communities where social interactions are important, while the sand-dwellers are itinerant and less aggressive. Those behavioral differences likely arise from a complex region of the brain known as the telencephalon, which governs communication, emotion, movement and...

A protein known to be a key player in the development of Parkinson's disease is able to enter and harm cells in the same way that viruses do, according to a Loyola University Chicago Stritch School of Medicine study. The protein is called alpha-synuclein. The study shows how, once inside a neuron, alpha synuclein breaks out of lysosomes, the digestive compartments of the cell. This is similar to how a cold virus enters a cell during infection. The finding eventually could lead to the...

International School of Advanced Studies (SISSA) We know the world through the sensory representations within our brain. Such "reconstruction" is performed through the electrical activation of neural cells, the code that contains the information that is constantly processed by the brain. If we wish to understand what are the rules followed by the representation of the world inside the brain we have to comprehend how electrical activation is linked to the sensory experience. For this...

University of Texas Health Science Center study suggests inflammation's role in the development of the disease Parkinson's disease (PD) is a progressive degenerative disease affecting a person's ability to coordinate and control their muscle movement. What starts out as a tremor in a finger will eventually lead to difficulty in writing and speaking, and ultimately the inability to walk without assistance. Since the 1950s research has shown that people with Parkinson's have decreased levels...

Researchers at Northeastern University in Boston have developed a gene therapy approach that may one day stop Parkinson's disease (PD) in it tracks, preventing disease progression and reversing its symptoms. The novelty of the approach lies in the nasal route of administration and nanoparticles containing a gene capable of rescuing dying neurons in the brain. Parkinson's is a devastating neurodegenerative disorder caused by the death of dopamine neurons in a key motor area of the brain, the...

ROCKVILLE, Md., April 22, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- Neuralstem, Inc. (NYSE MKT: CUR) announced that it has received approval from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to begin dosing the third and final cohort of patients in its ongoing Phase Ib to test the safety of NSI-189 in the treatment of major depressive disorder (MDD). NSI-189, the lead compound in Neuralstem's neurogenic small molecule platform, is a proprietary new chemical entity that stimulates new neuron growth in the...

redOrbit Staff & Wire Reports - Your Universe Online Researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have successfully transformed human embryonic stem cells into nerve cells that helped mice regain their memory and the ability to learn. Senior author Su-Chun Zhang, a professor of neuroscience and neurology at the university, said that he and his colleagues have for the first time demonstrated that human stem cells can implant themselves in the brain and heal neurological...

High-powered microscopes open a live look at a process where mutations lead to autism and other diseases Using spinning disk microscopy on barely day-old zebra fish embryos, University of Oregon scientists have gained a new window on how synapse-building components move to worksites in the central nervous system. What researchers captured in these see-through embryos -- in what may be one of the first views of early glutamate-driven synapse formation in a living vertebrate -- were...

Promising drug target for ALS Using a new stem-cell based drug screening technology with the potential to reinvent and greatly reduce the cost of the way new pharmaceuticals are developed, Harvard Stem Cell Institute (HSCI) researchers have found a compound more effective in protecting the neurons killed in amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) – Lou Gehrig's disease – than two drugs that failed in human clinical trials after hundreds of millions of dollars had been invested in them....