Arbuscular mycorrhizal fungal diversity and species dominance in a temperate soil with long-term conventional and low-input cropping systems.

The aim of this work was to study the effect of long-term contrasting cropping systems on the indigenous arbuscular mycorrhizal fungal (AMF) spore populations in the soil of a field experiment located in western Finland. Conventional and low-input cropping systems were compared, each with two nutrient management regimes. The conventional cropping system with a non-leguminous 6-year crop rotation (barley-barley-rye-oat-potato-oat) was fertilized at either full (rotation A) or half (rotation B) the recommended rate.

Evaluation of the automatic three-dimensional delineation of caudate and putamen for PET receptor occupancy studies.

Objective: PET receptor occupancy studies with a baseline study and an intervention study are increasingly used as an aid in dose-finding procedures for central nervous system drug development. The aim of this study was to evaluate, and confirm the feasibility of two automatic, paired, three-dimensional delineation methods of striatal structures (caudate and putamen) for the purposes of PET receptor occupancy studies.

Methods: The automatic extraction was done with the deformable surface models from PET binding potential images.

Voxel-based NK1 receptor occupancy measurements with [(18)F]SPA-RQ and positron emission tomography: a procedure for assessing errors from image reconstruction and physiological modeling.

Purpose: Receptor occupancy studies with positron emission tomography (PET) are widely used as aids in the drug development process. This study introduces a general procedure for assessing errors that arise from the applied image processing methods in PET receptor occupancy studies using the neurokinin-1 (NK1) receptor occupancy study as an example.

Procedures: The bias and variance among eight combinations of image reconstruction and model calculation methods for estimating voxel-level receptor occupancy results were examined.

Regression analysis utilizing subjective evaluation of emotional experience in PET studies on emotions.

A methodological study on subject-specific regression analysis (SSRA) exploring the correlation between the neural response and the subjective evaluation of emotional experience in eleven healthy females is presented. The target emotions, i.e.

Personality traits and striatal dopamine synthesis capacity in healthy subjects.

Objective: Neuroimaging and genetic studies suggest that individual differences in the brain dopaminergic system contribute to the normal variability of human personality (e.g., social detachment and novelty seeking).