Ten days of darkness causes temporary blindness during an early critical period in felines.

Extended periods of darkness have long been used to study how the mammalian visual system develops in the absence of any instruction from vision. Because of the relative ease of implementation of darkness as a means to eliminate visually driven neural activity, it has usually been imposed earlier in life and for much longer periods than was the case for other manipulations of the early visual input used for study of their influences on visual system development. Recently, it was shown that following a very brief (10 days) period of darkness imposed at five weeks of age, kittens emerged blind.

Binocular eyelid closure promotes anatomical but not behavioral recovery from monocular deprivation.

Deprivation of patterned vision of frontal eyed mammals early in postnatal life alters structural and functional attributes of neurones in the central visual pathways, and can produce severe impairments of the vision of the deprived eye that resemble the visual loss observed in human amblyopia. A traditional approach to treatment of amblyopia has been the occlusion of the stronger fellow eye in order to force use of the weaker eye and thereby strengthen its connections in the visual cortex. Although this monocular treatment strategy can be effective at promoting recovery of visual acuity of the amblyopic eye, such binocular visual functions as stereoscopic vision often remain impaired due in part to the lack of concordant vision during the period of unilateral occlusion.

Role of polyhydroxybutyrate in mitochondrial calcium uptake.

Polyhydroxybutyrate (PHB) is a biological polymer which belongs to the class of polyesters and is ubiquitously present in all living organisms. Mammalian mitochondrial membranes contain PHB consisting of up to 120 hydroxybutyrate residues. Roles played by PHB in mammalian mitochondria remain obscure.

Regulation of neurite growth by tumour necrosis superfamily member RANKL.

RANKL (receptor-activator of NF-κB ligand, TNFSF11) is a member of the TNF superfamily that regulates bone remodelling and the development of the thymus, lymph nodes and mammary glands. While RANKL and its membrane bound receptor RANK (TNFRSF11A) are expressed in the adult central nervous system and have been implicated in thermoregulation, the potential function of RANK signalling in the developing nervous system remains unexplored. Here, we show that RANK is expressed by sympathetic and sensory neurons of the developing mouse peripheral nervous system and that activating RANK signalling in these neurons during perinatal development by either treating cultured neurons with soluble RANKL or overexpressing RANK in the neurons inhibited neurotrophin-promoted neurite growth without affecting neurotrophin-promoted neuronal survival.

Direct quantification of inorganic polyphosphate in microbial cells using 4'-6-diamidino-2-phenylindole (DAPI).

Inorganic polyphosphate (polyP) is increasingly being recognized as an important phosphorus sink within the environment, playing a central role in phosphorus exchange and phosphogenesis. Yet despite the significant advances made in polyP research there is a lack of rapid and efficient analytical approaches for the quantification of polyP accumulation in microbial cultures and environmental samples. A major drawback is the need to extract polyP from cells prior to analysis.