Six types of loves differentially recruit reward and social cognition brain areas.

Feelings of love are among the most significant human phenomena. Love informs the formation and maintenance of pair bonds, parent-offspring attachments, and influences relationships with others and even nature. However, little is known about the neural mechanisms of love beyond romantic and maternal types.

Activity of botulinum neurotoxin X and its structure when shielded by a non-toxic non-hemagglutinin protein.

Botulinum neurotoxins (BoNTs) are the most potent toxins known and are used to treat an increasing number of medical disorders. All BoNTs are naturally co-expressed with a protective partner protein (NTNH) with which they form a 300 kDa complex, to resist acidic and proteolytic attack from the digestive tract. We have previously identified a new botulinum neurotoxin serotype, BoNT/X, that has unique and therapeutically attractive properties.

Structure and activity of botulinum neurotoxin X.

Botulinum neurotoxins (BoNTs) are the most potent toxins known and are used to treat an increasing number of medical disorders. All BoNTs are naturally co-expressed with a protective partner protein (NTNH) with which they form a 300 kDa complex, to resist acidic and proteolytic attack from the digestive tract. We have previously identified a new botulinum neurotoxin serotype, BoNT/X, that has unique and therapeutically attractive properties.

Eye movement behavior in a real-world virtual reality task reveals ADHD in children.

Eye movements and other rich data obtained in virtual reality (VR) environments resembling situations where symptoms are manifested could help in the objective detection of various symptoms in clinical conditions. In the present study, 37 children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and 36 typically developing controls (9-13 y.o) played a lifelike prospective memory game using head-mounted display with inbuilt 90 Hz eye tracker.

Dynamics of retinotopic spatial attention revealed by multifocal MEG.

Visual focal attention is both fast and spatially localized, making it challenging to investigate using human neuroimaging paradigms. Here, we used a new multivariate multifocal mapping method with magnetoencephalography (MEG) to study how focal attention in visual space changes stimulus-evoked responses across the visual field. The observer's task was to detect a color change in the target location, or at the central fixation.

Disrupted Attention to Other's Eyes is Linked to Symptoms of ADHD in Childhood.

Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is associated with impaired social interaction. Other's eyes are important for understanding the social world. Here, we examined concurrent and longitudinal links between attention to other's eyes and symptoms of ADHD and comorbid externalizing and internalizing symptoms.

Neuronavigated TMS of early visual cortex eliminates unconscious processing of chromatic stimuli.

Some neurological patients with primary visual cortex (V1) lesions can guide their behavior based on stimuli presented to their blind visual field. One example of this phenomenon is the ability to discriminate colors in the absence of awareness. These so-called patients with blindsight must have a neural pathway that bypasses V1, explaining their ability to unconsciously process stimuli.

Rapid Invariant Encoding of Scene Layout in Human OPA.

Successful visual navigation requires a sense of the geometry of the local environment. How do our brains extract this information from retinal images? Here we visually presented scenes with all possible combinations of five scene-bounding elements (left, right, and back walls; ceiling; floor) to human subjects during functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and magnetoencephalography (MEG). The fMRI response patterns in the scene-responsive occipital place area (OPA) reflected scene layout with invariance to changes in surface texture.

Optimization of Proprioceptive Stimulation Frequency and Movement Range for fMRI.

For vision, audition and tactile sense, the optimal stimulus frequency for fMRI is somewhat known. For proprioception, i.e.

MutT homologue 1 (MTH1) catalyzes the hydrolysis of mutagenic O6-methyl-dGTP.

Nucleotides in the free pool are more susceptible to nonenzymatic methylation than those protected in the DNA double helix. Methylated nucleotides like O6-methyl-dGTP can be mutagenic and toxic if incorporated into DNA. Removal of methylated nucleotides from the nucleotide pool may therefore be important to maintain genome integrity.

Structural characterisation of the catalytic domain of botulinum neurotoxin X - high activity and unique substrate specificity.

Botulinum neurotoxins (BoNTs) are among the most potent toxins known and are also used to treat an increasing number of medical disorders. There are seven well-established serotypes (BoNT/A-G), which all act as zinc-dependent endopeptidases targeting specific members of the SNARE proteins required for synaptic vesicle exocytosis in neurons. A new toxin serotype, BoNT/X, was recently identified.

Contextual and social cues may dominate natural visual search.

A framework where only the size of the functional visual field of fixations can vary is hardly able to explain natural visual-search behavior. In real-world search tasks, context guides eye movements, and task-irrelevant social stimuli may capture the gaze.

Identification and characterization of a novel botulinum neurotoxin.

Botulinum neurotoxins are known to have seven serotypes (BoNT/A-G). Here we report a new BoNT serotype, tentatively named BoNT/X, which has the lowest sequence identity with other BoNTs and is not recognized by antisera against known BoNTs. Similar to BoNT/B/D/F/G, BoNT/X cleaves vesicle-associated membrane proteins (VAMP) 1, 2 and 3, but at a novel site (Arg66-Ala67 in VAMP2).

Fixed versus mixed RSA: Explaining visual representations by fixed and mixed feature sets from shallow and deep computational models.

Studies of the primate visual system have begun to test a wide range of complex computational object-vision models. Realistic models have many parameters, which in practice cannot be fitted using the limited amounts of brain-activity data typically available. Task performance optimization (e.

Glycans Confer Specificity to the Recognition of Ganglioside Receptors by Botulinum Neurotoxin A.

The highly poisonous botulinum neurotoxins, produced by the bacterium Clostridium botulinum, act on their hosts by a high-affinity association to two receptors on neuronal cell surfaces as the first step of invasion. The glycan motifs of gangliosides serve as initial coreceptors for these protein complexes, whereby a membrane protein receptor is bound. Herein we set out to characterize the carbohydrate minimal binding epitope of the botulinum neurotoxin serotype A.

Perception and Processing of Faces in the Human Brain Is Tuned to Typical Feature Locations.

Unlabelled: Faces are salient social stimuli whose features attract a stereotypical pattern of fixations. The implications of this gaze behavior for perception and brain activity are largely unknown. Here, we characterize and quantify a retinotopic bias implied by typical gaze behavior toward faces, which leads to eyes and mouth appearing most often in the upper and lower visual field, respectively.

From evoked potentials to cortical currents: Resolving V1 and V2 components using retinotopy constrained source estimation without fMRI.

Despite evoked potentials' (EP) ubiquity in research and clinical medicine, insights are limited to gross brain dynamics as it remains challenging to map surface potentials to their sources in specific cortical regions. Multiple sources cancellation due to cortical folding and cross-talk obscures close sources, e.g.

Radial Frequency Analysis of Contour Shapes in the Visual Cortex.

Cumulative psychophysical evidence suggests that the shape of closed contours is analysed by means of their radial frequency components (RFC). However, neurophysiological evidence for RFC-based representations is still missing. We investigated the representation of radial frequency in the human visual cortex with functional magnetic resonance imaging.

Centrality of Social Interaction in Human Brain Function.

People are embedded in social interaction that shapes their brains throughout lifetime. Instead of emerging from lower-level cognitive functions, social interaction could be the default mode via which humans communicate with their environment. Should this hypothesis be true, it would have profound implications on how we think about brain functions and how we dissect and simulate them.

Faciotopy-A face-feature map with face-like topology in the human occipital face area.

The occipital face area (OFA) and fusiform face area (FFA) are brain regions thought to be specialized for face perception. However, their intrinsic functional organization and status as cortical areas with well-defined boundaries remains unclear. Here we test these regions for "faciotopy", a particular hypothesis about their intrinsic functional organisation.

Visual representations are dominated by intrinsic fluctuations correlated between areas.

Intrinsic cortical dynamics are thought to underlie trial-to-trial variability of visually evoked responses in animal models. Understanding their function in the context of sensory processing and representation is a major current challenge. Here we report that intrinsic cortical dynamics strongly affect the representational geometry of a brain region, as reflected in response-pattern dissimilarities, and exaggerate the similarity of representations between brain regions.

Retinotopic maps, spatial tuning, and locations of human visual areas in surface coordinates characterized with multifocal and blocked FMRI designs.

The localization of visual areas in the human cortex is typically based on mapping the retinotopic organization with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). The most common approach is to encode the response phase for a slowly moving visual stimulus and to present the result on an individual's reconstructed cortical surface. The main aims of this study were to develop complementary general linear model (GLM)-based retinotopic mapping methods and to characterize the inter-individual variability of the visual area positions on the cortical surface.

Unconscious response priming by shape depends on geniculostriate visual projection.

It has been suggested that unconscious visual processing of some stimulus features might occur without the contribution of early visual cortex (V1/V2). In the present study, the causal role of V1/V2 in unconscious processing of simple shapes in intact human brain was studied by applying transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) on early visual cortex or lateral occipital cortex (LO) while observers performed a metacontrast-masked response priming task with arrow figures as visual stimuli. Magnetic stimulation of V1/V2 impaired masked priming 30-90 ms after the onset of the prime.

Unconscious and conscious processing of color rely on activity in early visual cortex: a TMS study.

Chromatic information is processed by the visual system both at an unconscious level and at a level that results in conscious perception of color. It remains unclear whether both conscious and unconscious processing of chromatic information depend on activity in the early visual cortex or whether unconscious chromatic processing can also rely on other neural mechanisms. In this study, the contribution of early visual cortex activity to conscious and unconscious chromatic processing was studied using single-pulse TMS in three time windows 40-100 msec after stimulus onset in three conditions: conscious color recognition, forced-choice discrimination of consciously invisible color, and unconscious color priming.

Refractive surgery in anisometropic adult patients induce plastic changes in primary visual cortex.

Purpose: To prospectively study the effect of refractive surgery in the primary visual cortex of adult anisometropic and isometropic myopic patients.

Methods: Two anisometropic and two isometropic myopic patients were examined with multifocal functional magnetic resonance imaging technique (mffMRI) before refractive surgery and at 3, 6, 9 and 12 months postoperatively. Two controls without refractive surgery were also examined with mffMRI in the beginning and in the end of the study.