Social stress drives the multi-wave dynamics of COVID-19 outbreaks.

The dynamics of epidemics depend on how people's behavior changes during an outbreak. At the beginning of the epidemic, people do not know about the virus, then, after the outbreak of epidemics and alarm, they begin to comply with the restrictions and the spreading of epidemics may decline. Over time, some people get tired/frustrated by the restrictions and stop following them (exhaustion), especially if the number of new cases drops down.

Astrocyte as Spatiotemporal Integrating Detector of Neuronal Activity.

The functional role of astrocyte calcium signaling in brain information processing was intensely debated in recent decades. This interest was motivated by high resolution imaging techniques showing highly developed structure of distal astrocyte processes. Another point was the evidence of bi-directional astrocytic regulation of neuronal activity.

Features of Neural Network Formation and Their Functions in Primary Hippocampal Cultures in the Context of Chronic TrkB Receptor System Influence.

Discovering the mechanisms underlying homeostatic regulation in brain neural network formation and stability processes is one of the most urgent tasks in modern neuroscience. Brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) and the tropomyosin-related kinase B (TrkB) receptor system have long been considered the main regulators of neuronal survival and differentiation. The elucidation of methods for studying neural network activity makes investigating the complex mechanisms underlying neural network structure reorganization during development and detecting new mechanisms for neuronal activity remodeling possible.

Glial cell line-derived neurotrophic factor (GDNF) counteracts hypoxic damage to hippocampal neural network function in vitro.

Glial cell line-derived neurotrophic factor (GDNF) is regarded as a potent neuroprotector and a corrector of neural network activity in stress conditions. This work aimed to investigate the effect of GDNF on primary hippocampal cultures during acute normobaric hypoxia. Hypoxia induction was performed using day 14 in vitro cultures derived from mouse embryos (E18) with the preventive addition of GDNF (1 ng/ml) to the culture medium 10 min before oxygen deprivation.