Mid-Gestational Enlargement of Fetal Thalami in Women Exposed to Methadone during Pregnancy.

Methadone maintenance therapy is the standard of care in many countries for opioid-dependent women who become pregnant. Despite recent evidence showing significant neurodevelopmental changes in children and adults exposed to both licit and illicit substances in utero, data on the effects of opioids in particular remains scarce. The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of opiate use, in particular methadone, on various fetal cortical and biometric growth parameters in utero using ultrasound measurements done at 18-22 weeks gestation.

Couplons in rat atria form distinct subgroups defined by their molecular partners.

Standard local control theory, which describes Ca(2+) release during excitation-contraction coupling (ECC), assumes that all ryanodine receptor 2 (RyR2) complexes are equivalent. Findings from our laboratory have called this assumption into question. Specifically, we have shown that the RyR2 complexes in ventricular myocytes are different, depending on their location within the cell.

Analysis of Cav1.2 and ryanodine receptor clusters in rat ventricular myocytes.

We analyzed the distribution of ryanodine receptor (RyR) and Cav1.2 clusters in adult rat ventricular myocytes using three-dimensional object-based colocalization metrics. We found that ∼75% of the Cav1.

Axial tubules of rat ventricular myocytes form multiple junctions with the sarcoplasmic reticulum.

Ryanodine receptors (RyRs) are located primarily on the junctional sarcoplasmic reticulum (SR), adjacent to the transverse tubules and on the cell surface near the Z-lines, but some RyRs are on junctional SR adjacent to axial tubules. Neither the size of the axial junctions nor the numbers of RyRs that they contain have been determined. RyRs may also be located on the corbular SR and on the free or network SR.