Disentangling the neural correlates of agency, ownership and multisensory processing.

The experience of the self as an embodied agent in the world is an essential aspect of human consciousness. This experience arises from the feeling of control over one's bodily actions, termed the Sense of Agency, and the feeling that the body belongs to the self, Body Ownership. Despite longstanding philosophical and scientific interest in the relationship between the body and brain, the neural systems involved in Body Ownership and Sense of Agency, and especially their interactions, are not yet understood.

Establishment of immortal multipotent rat salivary progenitor cell line toward salivary gland regeneration.

Adult salivary gland stem cells are promising candidates for cell therapy and tissue regeneration in cases of irreversible damage to salivary glands in head and neck cancer patients undergoing irradiation therapy. At present, the major restriction in handling such cells is their relatively limited life span during in vitro cultivation, resulting in an inadequate experimental platform to explore the salivary gland-originated stem cells as candidates for future clinical application in therapy. We established a spontaneous immortal integrin α6β1-expressing cell line of adult salivary progenitor cells from rats (rat salivary clone [RSC]) and investigated their ability to sustain cellular properties.