Warren symposium follows legacy of geneticist giant

If we want to understand how the brain creates memories, and how genetic disorders distort the brain’s machinery, then the fragile X gene is an ideal place to start. That’s why the Stephen T. Warren Memorial Symposium, taking place November 28-29 at Emory, will be a significant event for those interested in neuroscience and genetics. Stephen T. Warren, 1953-2021 Warren, the founding chair of Emory’s Department of Human Genetics, led an international team that discovered Read more

Mutations in V-ATPase proton pump implicated in epilepsy syndrome

Why and how disrupting V-ATPase function leads to epilepsy, researchers are just starting to figure Read more

Tracing the start of COVID-19 in GA

At a time when COVID-19 appears to be receding in much of Georgia, it’s worth revisiting the start of the pandemic in early 2020. Emory virologist Anne Piantadosi and colleagues have a paper in Viral Evolution on the earliest SARS-CoV-2 genetic sequences detected in Georgia. Analyzing relationships between those virus sequences and samples from other states and countries can give us an idea about where the first COVID-19 infections in Georgia came from. We can draw Read more
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functional connectivity

Inflammation linked to weakened reward circuits in depression

About one third of people with depression have high levels of inflammation markers in their blood. New research indicates that persistent inflammation affects the brain in ways that are connected with stubborn symptoms of depression, such as anhedonia, the inability to experience pleasure.

The results were published online on Nov. 10 in Molecular Psychiatry.

The findings bolster the case that the high-inflammation form of depression is distinct, and are guiding researchers’ plans to test treatments tailored for it.

Anhedonia is a core symptom of depression that is particularly difficult to treat, says lead author Jennifer Felger, PhD, assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Emory University School of Medicine and Winship Cancer Institute.

“Some patients taking antidepressants continue to suffer from anhedonia,” Felger says. “Our data suggest that by blocking inflammation or its effects on the brain, we may be able to reverse anhedonia and help depressed individuals who fail to respond to antidepressants.”

In a study of 48 patients with depression, high levels of the inflammatory marker CRP (C-reactive protein) were linked with a “failure to communicate”, seen through brain imaging, between regions of the brain important for motivation and reward.

Emory researchers have found that high inflammation in depression is linked to a "failure to communicate" between two parts of the brain: the ventral striatum (VS, vertical cross section) and the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC, horizontal).

Emory researchers have found that high inflammation in depression is linked to a “failure to communicate” between two parts of the brain: the ventral striatum (VS, vertical cross section) and the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC, horizontal). Images from Felger et al, Molecular Psychiatry (2015).

Neuroscientists can infer that two regions of the brain talk to each other by watching whether they light up in magnetic resonance imaging at the same times or in the same patterns, even when someone is not doing anything in particular. They describe this as “functional connectivity.”

More here.

Posted on November 20, 2015 by Quinn Eastman in Neuro Leave a comment

Dynamic functional connectivity

How can neuroscientists tell that distant parts of the brain are talking to each other?

They can look for a physical connection, like neurons that carry signals between the two. They could probe the brain with electricity. However, to keep the brain intact and examine cheap oakley function in a living person or animal, a less invasive approach may be in order.

Looking for functional connectivity has grown in popularity in recent years. This is a way of analyzing fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) scans, which measure activity in the brain by looking at changes in blood oxygen. If two regions of the brain “light up” at the same time, and do so in a consistent enough pattern, that indicates that those two regions are connected.*

Functional connectivity networks

Shella Keilholz and her colleagues have been looking at functional connectivity data very closely, and how the apparent connections fluctuate over short time periods. This newer form of analysis is called “dynamic” or “time-varying” functional connectivity. Functional connectivity analyses can be performed while the person or animal in the scanner is at rest, not doing anything complicated.

“Even if you’re lying in the scanner daydreaming, your mind is jumping around,” she says. “But the way neuroscientists usually average fMRI data over several minutes means losing lots of information.”

Keilholz is part of the Wallace H Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory. She participated in a workshop at the most recent Human Brain Mapping meeting in Seattle devoted to the topic. She says neuroscientists have already started using dynamic functional connectivity to detect differences in the brain’s network properties in schizophrenia. However, some of that information may be noise. Skeptical tests have shown that head motion or breathing can push scientists into inferring connections that aren’t really there. For dynamic analysis especially, preprocessing can lead to apparent correlations between two randomly matched signals.

“I got into this field as a skeptic,” she says. “Several years ago, I didn’t believe functional connectivity really reflects coordinated brain activity.”

Now Keilholz and her colleagues have shown for the first time that dynamic functional connectivity data is “grounded”, because it is linked with changes in electrical signals within the brain. The results were published in July in the journal NeuroImage. The first author is graduate student Garth Thompson. Read more

Posted on August 21, 2013 by Quinn Eastman in Neuro Leave a comment