Increase in brain glycogen levels ameliorates Huntington's disease phenotype and rescues neurodegeneration in Drosophila.

Under normal physiological conditions, the mammalian brain contains very little glycogen, most of which is stored in astrocytes. However, the aging brain and the subareas of the brain in patients with neurodegenerative disorders tend to accumulate glycogen, the cause and significance of which remain largely unexplored. Using cellular models, we have recently demonstrated a neuroprotective role for neuronal glycogen and glycogen synthase in the context of Huntington's disease.

Combinatorial encoding of odors in the mosquito antennal lobe.

Among the cues that a mosquito uses to find a host for blood-feeding, the smell of the host plays an important role. Previous studies have shown that host odors contain hundreds of chemical odorants, which are detected by different receptors on the peripheral sensory organs of mosquitoes. But how individual odorants are encoded by downstream neurons in the mosquito brain is not known.

Mosquito Olfactory Response Ensemble enables pattern discovery by curating a behavioral and electrophysiological response database.

Many experimental studies have examined behavioral and electrophysiological responses of mosquitoes to odors. However, the differences across studies in data collection, processing, and reporting make it difficult to perform large-scale analyses combining data from multiple studies. Here we extract and standardize data for 12 mosquito species, along with for comparison, from over 170 studies and curate the Mosquito Olfactory Response Ensemble (MORE), publicly available at https://neuralsystems.

Poly-lysinated nanoscale carbon probe for low power two-photon bioimaging.

Effective outcome from dynamic live-cell-imaging requires utilization of a probe with high emission intensity and low photobleaching. It would be preferable to achieve such properties at a low power of the applied laser to avoid any probable damage to biological cells or tissue. Most of the used small-molecule fluorophores have been reported to show significant photobleaching in a time-dependent manner and require high laser power to gain significant intensity for bioimaging.