APOE4 expression confers a mild, persistent reduction in neurovascular function in the visual cortex and hippocampus of awake mice.

Vascular factors are known to be early and important players in Alzheimer's disease (AD) development, however the role of the ε4 allele of the Apolipoprotein (APOE) gene (a risk factor for developing AD) remains unclear. APOE4 genotype is associated with early and severe neocortical vascular deficits in anaesthetised mice, but in humans, vascular and cognitive dysfunction are focused on the hippocampal formation and appear later. How APOE4 might interact with the vasculature to confer AD risk during the preclinical phase represents a gap in existing knowledge.

Microglial morphology in the somatosensory cortex across lifespan. A quantitative study.

Background: Microglia are long-lived cells that constantly monitor their microenvironment. To accomplish this task, they constantly change their morphology both in the short and long term under physiological conditions. This makes the process of quantifying physiological microglial morphology difficult.

An open-source pipeline for analysing changes in microglial morphology.

Changes in microglial morphology are powerful indicators of the inflammatory state of the brain. Here, we provide an open-source microglia morphology analysis pipeline that first cleans and registers images of microglia, before extracting 62 parameters describing microglial morphology. It then compares control and 'inflammation' training data and uses dimensionality reduction to generate a single metric of morphological change (an 'inflammation index').

Using event-related fMRI to examine sustained attention processes and effects of APOE ε4 in young adults.

In this study we investigated effects of the APOE ε4 allele (which confers an enhanced risk of poorer cognitive ageing, and Alzheimer's Disease) on sustained attention (vigilance) performance in young adults using the Rapid Visual Information Processing (RVIP) task and event-related fMRI. Previous fMRI work with this task has used block designs: this study is the first to image an extended (6-minute) RVIP task. Participants were 26 carriers of the APOE ε4 allele, and 26 non carriers (aged 18-28).

Fate of 4-nonylphenol in a biosolids amended soil.

The fate of the endocrine disrupting compound 4-nonylphenol (NP) in an agricultural soil amended with biosolids was assessed in a greenhouse study. A biosolids with a total NP concentration of 900 mg kg(-1) was incorporated into the 4 cm surface layer of soil columns at an agronomic rate equivalent to 1.7 kg m(2).