Publications by authors named "Paola Malerba"

Background: Sleep slow oscillations (SOs), characteristic of NREM sleep, are causally tied to cognitive outcomes and the health-promoting homeostatic functions of sleep. Due to these known benefits, brain stimulation techniques aiming to enhance SOs are being developed, with great potential to contribute to clinical interventions, as they hold promise for improving sleep functions in populations with identified SO deficits (e.g.

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Brain oscillations of non-rapid eye movement sleep, including slow oscillations (SO, 0.5-1.5 Hz) and spindles (10-16 Hz), mirror underlying brain maturation across development and are associated with cognition.

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Background: Given sleep's crucial role in health and cognition, numerous sleep-based brain interventions are being developed, aiming to enhance cognitive function, particularly memory consolidation, by improving sleep. Research has shown that Transcranial Alternating Current Stimulation (tACS) during sleep can enhance memory performance, especially when used in a closed-loop (cl-tACS) mode that coordinates with sleep slow oscillations (SOs, 0.5-1.

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Stroke is a leading cause of death and disability worldwide and there is a very short period of increased synaptic plasticity, fundamental in motor recovery. Thus, it is crucial to acquire data to guide the rehabilitation treatment. Promising results have been achieved with kinematics and neurophysiological data, but currently, few studies integrate these different modalities.

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Sleep slow oscillations (SOs, 0.5-1.5 Hz) are thought to organize activity across cortical and subcortical structures, leading to selective synaptic changes that mediate consolidation of recent memories.

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Current clinical practice does not leverage electroencephalography (EEG) measurements in stroke patients, despite its potential to contribute to post-stroke recovery predictions. We review the literature on the effectiveness of various quantitative and qualitative EEG-based measures after stroke as a tool to predict upper limb motor outcome, in relation to stroke timeframe and applied experimental tasks. Moreover, we aim to provide guidance on the use of EEG in the assessment of upper limb motor recovery after stroke, suggesting a high potential for some metrics in the appropriate context.

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A prominent and robust finding in cognitive neuroscience is the strengthening of memories during nonrapid eye movement (NREM) sleep, with slow oscillations (SOs;<1Hz) playing a critical role in systems-level consolidation. However, NREM generally shows a breakdown in connectivity and reduction of synaptic plasticity with increasing depth: a brain state seemingly unfavorable to memory consolidation. Here, we present an approach to address this apparent paradox that leverages an event-related causality measure to estimate directional information flow during NREM in epochs with and without SOs.

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Sleep spindles are important for sleep quality and cognitive functions, with their coordination with slow oscillations (SOs) potentially organizing cross-region reactivation of memory traces. Here, we describe the organization of spindles on the electrode manifold and their relation to SOs. We analyzed the sleep night EEG of 34 subjects and detected spindles and SOs separately at each electrode.

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Study Objectives: From childhood through adolescence, brain rhythms during non-rapid eye movement (NREM) sleep show dramatic development that mirror underlying brain maturation. For example, the function and characteristics of slow oscillations (SOs, <1 Hz) in healthy children are linked to brain development, motor skill, and cognition. However, little is known of possible changes in pediatric populations with neurologic abnormalities.

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Hippocampal sharp-wave ripples (SWRs) support the reactivation of memory representations, relaying information to neocortex during "offline" and sleep-dependent memory consolidation. While blockade of NMDA receptors (NMDAR) is known to affect both learning and subsequent consolidation, the specific contributions of NMDAR activation to SWR-associated activity remain unclear. Here, we combine biophysical modeling with in vivo local field potential (LFP) and unit recording to quantify changes in SWR dynamics following inactivation of NMDAR.

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The dialogue between cortex and hippocampus is known to be crucial for sleep-dependent memory consolidation. During slow wave sleep, memory replay depends on slow oscillation (SO) and spindles in the (neo)cortex and sharp wave-ripples (SWRs) in the hippocampus. The mechanisms underlying interaction of these rhythms are poorly understood.

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Despite its critical importance in experimental and clinical neuroscience, at present there is no systematic method to predict which neural elements will be activated by a given stimulation regime. Here we develop a novel approach to model the effect of cortical stimulation on spiking probability of neurons in a volume of tissue, by applying an analytical estimate of stimulation-induced activation of different cell types across cortical layers. We utilize the morphology and properties of axonal arborization profiles obtained from publicly available anatomical reconstructions of the twelve main categories of neocortical neurons to derive the dependence of activation probability on cell type, layer and distance from the source.

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Overexpression of cyclooxygenase-1 (COX-1) is associated with the initiation and progression of ovarian cancer, and targeted imaging of COX-1 is a promising strategy for early detection of this disease. We report the discovery of -[(5-carboxy-X-rhodaminyl)but-4-yl]-3-(1-(4-methoxyphenyl)-5-(-tolyl)-1-pyrazol-3-yl)propenamide (CMP) as the first COX-1-targeted optical agent for imaging of ovarian cancer. CMP exhibits light emission at 604 nm (λ), thereby minimizing tissue autofluorescence interference.

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Reduced models of neuronal spiking activity simulated with a fixed integration time are frequently used in studies of spatio-temporal dynamics of neurobiological networks. The choice of fixed time step integration provides computational simplicity and efficiency, especially in cases dealing with large number of neurons and synapses operating at a different level of activity across the population at any given time. A network model tuned to generate a particular type of oscillations or wave patterns is sensitive to the intrinsic properties of neurons and synapses and, therefore, commonly susceptible to changes the time step of integration.

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In vivo targeting and visualization of cyclooxygenase-1 (COX-1) using multimodal positron emission tomography/computed tomography imaging represents a unique opportunity for early detection and/or therapeutic evaluation of ovarian cancer because overexpression of COX-1 has been characterized as a pathologic hallmark of the initiation and progression of this disease. The furanone core is a common building block of many synthetic and natural products that exhibit a wide range of biological activities. We hypothesize that furanone-based COX-1 inhibitors can be designed as imaging agents for the early detection, delineation of tumor margin, and evaluation of treatment response of ovarian cancer.

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Unlabelled: Electrophysiological sleep rhythms have been shown to impact human waking cognition, but their spatio-temporal dynamics are not understood. We investigated how slow oscillations (SOs; 0.5-4 Hz) are organized during a night of polysomnographically-recorded sleep, focusing on the scalp electrode manifold.

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The hippocampus is important for memory and learning, being a brain site where initial memories are formed and where sharp wave - ripples (SWR) are found, which are responsible for mapping recent memories to long-term storage during sleep-related memory replay. While this conceptual schema is well established, specific intrinsic and network-level mechanisms driving spatio-temporal patterns of hippocampal activity during sleep, and specifically controlling off-line memory reactivation are unknown. In this study, we discuss a model of hippocampal CA1-CA3 network generating spontaneous characteristic SWR activity.

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Stroke is a leading cause of worldwide disability, and up to 75% of survivors suffer from some degree of arm paresis. Recently, rehabilitation of stroke patients has focused on recovering motor skills by taking advantage of use-dependent neuroplasticity, where high-repetition of goal-oriented movement is at times combined with non-invasive brain stimulation, such as transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS). Merging the two approaches is thought to provide outlasting clinical gains, by enhancing synaptic plasticity and motor relearning in the motor cortex primary area.

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Memories are stored and consolidated as a result of a dialogue between the hippocampus and cortex during sleep. Neurons active during behavior reactivate in both structures during sleep, in conjunction with characteristic brain oscillations that may form the neural substrate of memory consolidation. In the hippocampus, replay occurs within sharp wave-ripples: short bouts of high-frequency activity in area CA1 caused by excitatory activation from area CA3.

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The presence of voltage fluctuations arising from synaptic activity is a critical component in models of gain control, neuronal output gating, and spike rate coding. The degree to which individual neuronal input-output functions are modulated by voltage fluctuations, however, is not well established across different cortical areas. Additionally, the extent and mechanisms of input-output modulation through fluctuations have been explored largely in simplified models of spike generation, and with limited consideration for the role of non-linear and voltage-dependent membrane properties.

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Cyclooxygenase-1 (COX-1), but not COX-2, is expressed at high levels in the early stages of human epithelial ovarian cancer where it seems to play a key role in cancer onset and progression. As a consequence, COX-1 is an ideal biomarker for early ovarian cancer detection. A series of novel fluorinated COX-1-targeted imaging agents derived from P6 was developed by using a highly selective COX-1 inhibitor as a lead compound.

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Cyclooxygenase(COX)-1 role in some diseases is increasingly studied. 3-(5-Chlorofuran-2-yl)-5-methyl-4-phenylisoxazole (P6), a highly selective cyclooxygenase-1 inhibitor, was used as a "lead" to design new isoxazoles (2a-m), differently selective towards COX-1. Those isoxazoles might be useful as novel theranostic agents and also to better clarify COX-1 role in the human physiology and diseases.

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3-(5-Chlorofuran-2-yl)-5-methyl-4-phenylisoxazole (P6), a known selective cyclooxygenase-1 (COX-1) inhibitor, was used to design a new series of 3,4-diarylisoxazoles in order to improve its biochemical COX-1 selectivity and antiplatelet efficacy. Structure-activity relationships were studied using human whole blood assays for COX-1 and COX-2 inhibition in vitro, and results showed that the simultaneous presence of 5-methyl (or -CF3), 4-phenyl, and 5-chloro(-bromo or -methyl)furan-2-yl groups on the isoxazole core was essential for their selectivity toward COX-1. 3g, 3s, 3d were potent and selective COX-1 inhibitors that affected platelet aggregation in vitro through the inhibition of COX-1-dependent thromboxane (TX) A2.

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In active networks, excitatory and inhibitory synaptic inputs generate membrane voltage fluctuations that drive spike activity in a probabilistic manner. Despite this, some cells in vivo show a strong propensity to precisely lock to the local field potential and maintain a specific spike-phase relationship relative to other cells. In recordings from rat medial entorhinal cortical stellate cells, we measured spike phase-locking in response to sinusoidal "test" inputs in the presence of different forms of background membrane voltage fluctuations, generated via dynamic clamp.

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