Publications by authors named "Ashlynn Gerth"

Internationally, governments and scientists are bound by legal and treaty rights when working with Indigenous nations. These rights include the right of Indigenous people to control the conduct of science with Indigenous nations. Unfortunately, in some cases, individual scientists and scientific teams working with biological and genetic data collected from Indigenous people have not respected these international rights.

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Cocaine increases dopamine concentration in the nucleus accumbens through competitive binding to the dopamine transporter (DAT). However, it also increases the frequency of dopamine release events, a finding that cannot be explained by action at the DAT alone. Rather, this effect may be mediated by cocaine-induced modulation of brain regions that project to dopamine neurons.

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Background: During active (or REM) sleep, infant mammals exhibit myoclonic twitches of skeletal muscles throughout the body, generating jerky, discrete movements of the distal limbs. Hundreds of thousands of limb twitches are produced daily, and sensory feedback from these movements is a substantial driver of infant brain activity, suggesting that they contribute to motor learning and sensorimotor integration. It is not known whether the production of twitches is random or spatiotemporally structured, or whether the patterning of twitching changes with age; such information is critical for understanding how twitches contribute to development.

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