Publications by authors named "Kottler B"

Alpha-synuclein (α-syn) mislocalization and accumulation in intracellular inclusions is the major pathological hallmark of degenerative synucleinopathies, including Parkinson's disease, Parkinson's disease with dementia and dementia with Lewy bodies. Typical symptoms are behavioural abnormalities including motor deficits that mark disease progression, while non-motor symptoms and synaptic deficits are already apparent during the early stages of disease. Synucleinopathies have therefore been considered synaptopathies that exhibit synaptic dysfunction prior to neurodegeneration.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Insects are ectothermal animals that are constrained in their survival and reproduction by external temperature fluctuations which require either active avoidance of or movement towards a given heat source. In Drosophila, different thermoreceptors and neurons have been identified that mediate temperature sensation to maintain the animal's thermal preference. However, less is known how thermosensory information is integrated to gate thermoresponsive motor behavior.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Invertebrate glia performs most of the key functions controlled by mammalian glia in the nervous system and provides an ideal model for genetic studies of glial functions. To study the influence of adult glial cells in ageing we have performed a genetic screen in using a collection of transgenic lines providing conditional expression of micro-RNAs (miRNAs). Here, we describe a methodological algorithm to identify and rank genes that are candidate to be targeted by miRNAs that shorten lifespan when expressed in adult glia.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Corresponding attributes of neural development and function suggest arthropod and vertebrate brains may have an evolutionarily conserved organization. However, the underlying mechanisms have remained elusive. Here, we identify a gene regulatory and character identity network defining the deutocerebral-tritocerebral boundary (DTB) in This network comprises genes homologous to those directing midbrain-hindbrain boundary (MHB) formation in vertebrates and their closest chordate relatives.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Sleep is a nearly universal behavior that is regulated by diverse environmental stimuli and physiological states. A defining feature of sleep is a homeostatic rebound following deprivation, where animals compensate for lost sleep by increasing sleep duration and/or sleep depth. The fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster, exhibits robust recovery sleep following deprivation and represents a powerful model to study neural circuits regulating sleep homeostasis.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Background: Mutations in the presynaptic protein syntaxin1A modulate general anesthetic effects in vitro and in vivo. Coexpression of a truncated syntaxin1A protein confers resistance to volatile and intravenous anesthetics, suggesting a target mechanism distinct from postsynaptic inhibitory receptor processes. Hypothesizing that recovery from anesthesia may involve a presynaptic component, the authors tested whether syntaxin1A mutations facilitated recovery from isoflurane anesthesia in Drosophila melanogaster.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

The fruitfly has been extensively used as a genetic model for the maintenance of nervous system's functions. Glial cells are of utmost importance in regulating the neuronal functions in the adult organism and in the progression of neurological pathologies. Through a microRNA-based screen in adult glia, we uncovered the essential role of a major glia developmental determinant, , in the adult fly.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Action selection is a prerequisite for decision-making and a fundamental aspect to any goal-directed locomotion; it requires integration of sensory signals and internal states to translate them into action sequences. Here, we introduce a novel behavioral analysis to study neural circuits and mechanisms underlying action selection and decision-making in freely moving Drosophila. We discovered preferred patterns of motor activity and turning behavior.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Sleep is a dynamic process in most animals, involving distinct stages that probably perform multiple functions for the brain. Before sleep functions can be initiated, it is likely that behavioral responsiveness to the outside world needs to be reduced, even while the animal is still awake. Recent work in has uncovered a sleep switch in the dorsal fan-shaped body (dFB) of the fly's central brain, but it is not known whether these sleep-promoting neurons also govern the acute need to ignore salient stimuli in the environment during sleep transitions.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

A central hypothesis for brain evolution is that it might occur via expansion of progenitor cells and subsequent lineage-dependent formation of neural circuits. Here, we report amplification and functional integration of lineage-specific circuitry in Levels of the cell fate determinant Prospero were attenuated in specific brain lineages within a range that expanded not only progenitors but also neuronal progeny, without tumor formation. Resulting supernumerary neural stem cells underwent normal functional transitions, progressed through the temporal patterning cascade, and generated progeny with molecular signatures matching source lineages.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

The central complex in the insect brain is a composite of midline neuropils involved in processing sensory cues and mediating behavioral outputs to orchestrate spatial navigation. Despite recent advances, however, the neural mechanisms underlying sensory integration and motor action selections have remained largely elusive. In particular, it is not yet understood how the central complex exploits sensory inputs to realize motor functions associated with spatial navigation.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

General anesthetics achieve behavioral unresponsiveness via a mechanism that is incompletely understood. The study of genetic model systems such as the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster is crucial to advancing our understanding of how anesthetic drugs render animals unresponsive. Previous studies have shown that wild-type control strains differ significantly in their sensitivity to general anesthetics, which potentially introduces confounding factors for comparing genetic mutations placed on these wild-type backgrounds.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Background: Recent evidence suggests that general anesthetics activate endogenous sleep pathways, yet this mechanism cannot explain the entirety of general anesthesia. General anesthetics could disrupt synaptic release processes, as previous work in Caenorhabditis elegans and in vitro cell preparations suggested a role for the soluble NSF attachment protein receptor protein, syntaxin1A, in mediating resistance to several general anesthetics. The authors questioned whether the syntaxin1A-mediated effects found in these reductionist systems reflected a common anesthetic mechanism distinct from sleep-related processes.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

The fruitfly, Drosophila melanogaster, has become a critical model system for investigating sleep functions. Most studies use duration of inactivity to measure sleep. However, a defining criterion for sleep is decreased behavioral responsiveness to stimuli.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Learning based on what a fruit fly sees or what it smells might not involve distinct parts of the brain, as was previously thought.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Several general anesthetics produce their sedative effect by activating endogenous sleep pathways. We propose that general anesthesia is a two-step process targeting sleep circuits at low doses, and synaptic release mechanisms across the entire brain at the higher doses required for surgery. Our hypothesis synthesizes data from a variety of model systems, some which require sleep (e.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

How might one determine whether simple animals such as flies sleep in stages? Sleep in mammals is a dynamic process involving different stages of sleep intensity, and these are typically associated with measurable changes in brain activity (Blake and Gerard, 1937; Rechtschaffen and Kales, 1968; Webb and Agnew, 1971). Evidence for different sleep stages in invertebrates remains elusive, even though it has been well established that many invertebrate species require sleep (Campbell and Tobler, 1984; Hendricks et al., 2000; Shaw et al.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

General anesthesia remains a mysterious phenomenon, even though a number of compelling target proteins and processes have been proposed [1]. General anesthetics such as isoflurane abolish behavioral responsiveness in all animals, and in the mammalian brain, these diverse compounds probably achieve this in part by targeting endogenous sleep mechanisms [2, 3]. However, most animals sleep [4], and they are therefore likely to have conserved sleep processes.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

A central goal of neuroscience is to understand how neural circuits encode memory and guide behavior changes. Many of the molecular mechanisms underlying memory are conserved from flies to mammals, and Drosophila has been used extensively to study memory processes. To identify new genes involved in long-term memory, we screened Drosophila enhancer-trap P(Gal4) lines showing Gal4 expression in the mushroom bodies, a specialized brain structure involved in olfactory memory.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Brain abscesses are life-threatening and detection and identification of the causative pathogens are crucial for substantiating the diagnosis and for selecting the optimal antibiotic regimen. In approximately 20% of the patients microbiological cultures of abscess material remain sterile. The polymerase chain reaction (PCR) provides a methodological alternative, but data about the use of broad spectrum PCR assays to detect the causative pathogens in brain abscesses are rare.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus epidermidis (MRSE) can cause nosocomial meningitis in the presence of prosthetic devices. Vancomycin is the treatment of choice, but its penetration into the cerebrospinal fluid is poor, especially in cases without severe meningeal inflammation. We successfully used linezolid to treat a case of posttraumatic MRSE meningitis with a low-level inflammatory response.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Vri is closely related to bZIP transcription factors involved in growth or cell death. vri clonal and overexpression analyses revealed defects at the cellular level. vri clones in the adult cuticle contain smaller cells with atrophic bristles.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Experiments were conducted to determine the ability of citrate to enhance the plant uptake of weathered 2,2-bis(p-chlorophenyl)1,1-dichloroethylene (p,p'-DDE) from soil. Plots containing three rows of clover, mustard, hairy vetch, or rye grass were constructed in soils containing p,p'-DDE. On 11 occasions, the rows of each crop received water or sodium citrate (0.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

A study was conducted to determine whether the sequestration of 21 polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) in soil was correlated with their properties. From 22 to 58% of the PAHs was not extracted with n-butanol after their addition to soil. After 28 days of aging, the percentage of the PAHs remaining in the soil increased to 47-77%; however, nearly all of each compound was recovered by Soxhlet extraction.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

A study was conducted as a part of continuing investigation of the effect of soil moisture on the sequestration of organic compounds aged in the soil. Here, experiments focused on the effects of moisture changes within the soil before, during, and after contaminant addition. The extractability of aged (68 d) phenanthrene was greater from soil that had been subjected to wetting and drying cycles prior to solute addition as compared to soil initially maintained at constant moisture.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF