Balance between dopamine and adenosine signals regulates the PKA/Rap1 pathway in striatal medium spiny neurons.

Medium spiny neurons (MSNs) expressing dopamine D1 receptor (D1R) or D2 receptor (D2R) are major components of the striatum. Stimulation of D1R activates protein kinase A (PKA) through G to increase neuronal activity, while D2R stimulation inhibits PKA through G. Adenosine A2A receptor (A2AR) coupled to G is highly expressed in D2R-MSNs within the striatum.

Two New FRET Imaging Measures: Linearly Proportional to and Highly Contrasting the Fraction of Active Molecules.

We developed two new FRET imaging measures for intramolecular FRET biosensors, called linearly proportional (LP) and highly contrasting (HC) measures, which can be easily calculated by the fluorescence intensities of donor and acceptor as a ratio between their weighted sums. As an alternative to the conventional ratiometric measure, which non-linearly depends on the fraction of active molecule, we first developed the LP measure, which is linearly proportional to the fraction of active molecules. The LP measure inherently unmixes bleed-through signals and is robust against fluorescence noise.

High-speed multineuron calcium imaging using Nipkow-type confocal microscopy.

Conventional confocal and two-photon microscopy scan the field of view sequentially with single-point laser illumination. This raster-scanning method constrains video speeds to tens of frames per second, which are too slow to capture the temporal patterns of fast electrical events initiated by neurons. Nipkow-type spinning-disk confocal microscopy resolves this problem by the use of multiple laser beams.

Optimal aggregation of binary classifiers for multiclass cancer diagnosis using gene expression profiles.

Multiclass classification is one of the fundamental tasks in bioinformatics and typically arises in cancer diagnosis studies by gene expression profiling. There have been many studies of aggregating binary classifiers to construct a multiclass classifier based on one-versus-the-rest (1R), one-versus-one (11), or other coding strategies, as well as some comparison studies between them. However, the studies found that the best coding depends on each situation.

A multi-class predictor based on a probabilistic model: application to gene expression profiling-based diagnosis of thyroid tumors.

Background: Although microscopic diagnosis has been playing the decisive role in cancer diagnostics, there have been cases in which it does not satisfy the clinical need. Differential diagnosis of malignant and benign thyroid tissues is one such case, and supplementary diagnosis such as that by gene expression profile is expected.

Results: With four thyroid tissue types, i.

Adaptor-tagged competitive polymerase chain reaction: amplification bias and quantified gene expression levels.

Adaptor-tagged competitive polymerase chain reaction (ATAC-PCR) is an advanced version of quantitative competitive PCR characterized by the addition of unique adaptors to different cDNA samples. It is currently the only quantitative PCR technique that enables large-scale gene expression analysis. Multiplex application of ATAC-PCR employs seven adaptors, two or three of which are used as controls to generate a calibration curve.