Inhibiting cholinergic signalling in the cerebellar interpositus nucleus impairs motor behaviour.

The role of neuromodulators in the cerebellum is not well understood. In particular, the behavioural significance of the cholinergic system in the cerebellum is unknown. To investigate the importance of cerebellar cholinergic signalling in behaviour, we infused acetylcholine receptor antagonists, scopolamine and mecamylamine, bilaterally into the rat cerebellum (centred on interpositus nucleus) and observed the motor effects through a battery of behavioural tests.

Cerebellar Prediction and Feeding Behaviour.

Given the importance of the cerebellum in controlling movements, it might be expected that its main role in eating would be the control of motor elements such as chewing and swallowing. Whilst such functions are clearly important, there is more to eating than these actions, and more to the cerebellum than motor control. This review will present evidence that the cerebellum contributes to homeostatic, motor, rewarding and affective aspects of food consumption.

Cerebellar modulation of memory encoding in the periaqueductal grey and fear behaviour.

The pivotal role of the periaqueductal grey (PAG) in fear learning is reinforced by the identification of neurons in male rat ventrolateral PAG (vlPAG) that encode fear memory through signalling the onset and offset of an auditory-conditioned stimulus during presentation of the unreinforced conditioned tone (CS+) during retrieval. Some units only display CS+ onset or offset responses, and the two signals differ in extinction sensitivity, suggesting that they are independent of each other. In addition, understanding cerebellar contributions to survival circuits is advanced by the discovery that (i) reversible inactivation of the medial cerebellar nucleus (MCN) during fear consolidation leads in subsequent retrieval to (a) disruption of the temporal precision of vlPAG offset, but not onset responses to CS+, and (b) an increase in duration of freezing behaviour.

Postnatal dynamics of Zeb2 expression in rat brain: analysis of novel 3' UTR sequence reveals a miR-9 interacting site.

ZEB2 is a transcription factor with established roles in neurogenesis but no defined function in postnatal brain despite extensive neuronal expression in telencephalic structures. Multiple, incompletely annotated transcripts derive from the Zeb2 locus; the purpose of the present study was to structurally characterize rat brain Zeb2 transcripts with respect to 3' untranslated (UTR) sequence in order to understand Zeb2 transcript regulation including possible interactions with regulatory molecules such as neuronal miRNAs. We cloned a 5054-nucleotide Zeb2 3' UTR that is included in the most abundant Zeb2 transcript in neonatal rat brain.