Publications by authors named "S Dijkhuizen"
Background: Glioblastoma is an aggressive and incurable type of brain cancer. Little progress has been made in the development of effective new therapies in the past decades. The blood-brain barrier (BBB) and drug efflux pumps, which together hamper drug delivery to these tumors, play a pivotal role in the gap between promising preclinical findings and failure in clinical trials.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMultiparametric Assays Capture Sex- and Environment-Dependent Modifiers of Behavioral Phenotypes in Autism Mouse Models.
Biol Psychiatry Glob Open Sci
November 2024
Background: Current phenotyping approaches for murine autism models often focus on one selected behavioral feature, making the translation onto a spectrum of autistic characteristics in humans challenging. Furthermore, sex and environmental factors are rarely considered. Here, we aimed to capture the full spectrum of behavioral manifestations in 3 autism mouse models to develop a "behavioral fingerprint" that takes environmental and sex influences under consideration.
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- Discrimination and generalization of responses are essential for adapting to changing environments, particularly in understanding Pavlovian conditioning responses.
- In an experiment, mice were trained to associate a 10 kHz tone with a puff of air (CS+) while being exposed to other tones (CS-) without the air puff to investigate how different training methods affect response generalization.
- Results showed that higher differences between CS+ and CS- tones led to increased generalization in probability and amplitude of eyelid responses, but not in timing, emphasizing the importance of discrimination in learning.
Neuroscience heavily relies on animal welfare in laboratory rodents as it can significantly affect brain development, cognitive function and memory formation. Unfortunately, laboratory animals are often raised in artificial environments devoid of physical and social stimuli, potentially leading to biased outcomes in behavioural assays. To assess this effect, we examined the impact of social and physical cage enrichment on various forms of motor coordination.
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- Four-dimensional ultrasound imaging of complex biological systems, like the brain, faces challenges due to the need for precise spatial and temporal data collection.
- The introduced method, computational ultrasound imaging (cUSi), utilizes sophisticated ultrasound fields generated by basic hardware and a wave prediction model to overcome these limitations.
- cUSi enables high-resolution, four-dimensional imaging of blood flow in the brains of both awake and anesthetized mice.