Antibody-Based PET Imaging of Misfolded Superoxide Dismutase 1 in an Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis Mouse Model.

Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) is a rare neurodegenerative disease characterized by motor neuron loss in the motor cortex, brain stem, and spinal cord. Mutations in the superoxide dismutase 1 (SOD1) gene, resulting in misfolding of its protein product, are a common cause of ALS. Currently, there is no approved ALS diagnostic tool.

Cerebral and myocardial kinetics of [C]acetoacetate and [C]β-hydroxybutyrate: A comparative crossover study in healthy rats.

Background: Ketone metabolism has been studied using positron emission tomography (PET) with the radiotracers [C]acetoacetate and [C]β-hydroxybutyrate. However, whether these two radiotracers actually yield equivalent estimates of cerebral and myocardial ketone metabolism has not yet been investigated. This study aimed to investigate and compare the kinetics of both tracers in the brain and heart of healthy rats under varying levels of circulating ketones at baseline and after a single-dose exogenous ketone ester (KE) supplement.

The Resilience of Attitude Toward Vaccination: Web-Based Randomized Controlled Trial on the Processing of Misinformation.

Background: Before the COVID-19 pandemic, it was already recognized that internet-based misinformation and disinformation could influence individuals to refuse or delay vaccination for themselves, their families, or their children. Reinformation, which refers to hyperpartisan and ideologically biased content, can propagate polarizing messages on vaccines, thereby contributing to vaccine hesitancy even if it is not outright disinformation.

Objective: This study aimed to evaluate the impact of reinformation on vaccine hesitancy.

Neural signatures of natural behaviour in socializing macaques.

Our understanding of the neurobiology of primate behaviour largely derives from artificial tasks in highly controlled laboratory settings, overlooking most natural behaviours that primate brains evolved to produce. How primates navigate the multidimensional social relationships that structure daily life and shape survival and reproductive success remains largely unclear at the single-neuron level. Here we combine ethological analysis, computer vision and wireless recording technologies to identify neural signatures of natural behaviour in unrestrained, socially interacting pairs of rhesus macaques.

The effect of augmented reality on preoperative anxiety in children and adolescents: A randomized controlled trial.

Background And Aims: Virtual reality has been shown to be an effective non-pharmacological intervention for reducing anxiety of pediatric patients. A newer immersive technology, that of augmented reality, offers some practical advantages over virtual reality, and also seems to show beneficial effects on anxiety. The main objective of this study was to determine whether augmented reality could reduce preoperative anxiety in pediatric patients undergoing elective day surgeries.

A single-cell multi-omic atlas spanning the adult rhesus macaque brain.

Cataloging the diverse cellular architecture of the primate brain is crucial for understanding cognition, behavior, and disease in humans. Here, we generated a brain-wide single-cell multimodal molecular atlas of the rhesus macaque brain. Together, we profiled 2.

Human OPRM1 and murine Oprm1 promoter driven viral constructs for genetic access to μ-opioidergic cell types.

With concurrent global epidemics of chronic pain and opioid use disorders, there is a critical need to identify, target and manipulate specific cell populations expressing the mu-opioid receptor (MOR). However, available tools and transgenic models for gaining long-term genetic access to MOR+ neural cell types and circuits involved in modulating pain, analgesia and addiction across species are limited. To address this, we developed a catalog of MOR promoter (MORp) based constructs packaged into adeno-associated viral vectors that drive transgene expression in MOR+ cells.

Neural signatures of natural behavior in socializing macaques.

Our understanding of the neurobiology of primate behavior largely derives from artificial tasks in highly-controlled laboratory settings, overlooking most natural behaviors primate brains evolved to produce1. In particular, how primates navigate the multidimensional social relationships that structure daily life and shape survival and reproductive success remains largely unexplored at the single neuron level. Here, we combine ethological analysis with new wireless recording technologies to uncover neural signatures of natural behavior in unrestrained, socially interacting pairs of rhesus macaques within a larger colony.

A microworld simulation of dynamic cognition as a test of executive function.

Introduction: The lack of consensus regarding the nature or composition of executive functioning (EF) has led to a proliferation of executive tasks to assess the concept. Many do agree however that the theoretical concept of EF is a holistic one, leading us to consider whether it would be beneficial to assess EF in a more holistic manner. We explore how well a computerized simulation of dynamic cognition - that reproduces the context of real-world complex decision-making - can predict performance on nine classical neuropsychological tasks of EF.

Comparing a Fitbit Wearable to an Electrocardiogram Gold Standard as a Measure of Heart Rate Under Psychological Stress: A Validation Study.

Background: Wearable devices collect physiological and behavioral data that have the potential to identify individuals at risk of declining mental health and well-being. Past research has mainly focused on assessing the accuracy and the agreement of heart rate (HR) measurement of wearables under different physical exercise conditions. However, the capacity of wearables to sense physiological changes, assessed by increasing HR, caused by a stressful event has not been thoroughly studied.

Neural cognitive signals during spontaneous movements in the macaque.

The single-neuron basis of cognitive processing in primates has mostly been studied in laboratory settings where movements are severely restricted. It is unclear, therefore, how natural movements might affect neural signatures of cognition in the brain. Moreover, studies in mice indicate that body movements, when measured, account for most of the neural dynamics in the cortex.

Multiregion transcriptomic profiling of the primate brain reveals signatures of aging and the social environment.

Aging is accompanied by a host of social and biological changes that correlate with behavior, cognitive health and susceptibility to neurodegenerative disease. To understand trajectories of brain aging in a primate, we generated a multiregion bulk (N = 527 samples) and single-nucleus (N = 24 samples) brain transcriptional dataset encompassing 15 brain regions and both sexes in a unique population of free-ranging, behaviorally phenotyped rhesus macaques. We demonstrate that age-related changes in the level and variance of gene expression occur in genes associated with neural functions and neurological diseases, including Alzheimer's disease.

Understanding the Influence of Web-Based Information, Misinformation, Disinformation, and Reinformation on COVID-19 Vaccine Acceptance: Protocol for a Multicomponent Study.

Background: The COVID-19 pandemic has generated an explosion in the amount of information shared on the internet, including false and misleading information on SARS-CoV-2 and recommended protective behaviors. Prior to the pandemic, web-based misinformation and disinformation were already identified as having an impact on people's decision to refuse or delay recommended vaccination for themselves or their children.

Objective: The overall aims of our study are to better understand the influence of web-based misinformation and disinformation on COVID-19 vaccine decisions and investigate potential solutions to reduce the impact of web-based misinformation and disinformation about vaccines.

Ga-DOTATATE Prepared from Cyclotron-Produced Ga: An Integrated Solution from Cyclotron Vault to Safety Assessment and Diagnostic Efficacy in Neuroendocrine Cancer Patients.

Cyclotron production of Ga is a promising approach to supply Ga radiopharmaceuticals. To validate this capability, an integrated solution for a robust synthesis of Ga-DOTATATE prepared from cyclotron-produced Ga was achieved. A retrospective comparison analysis was performed on patients who underwent PET/CT imaging after injection of DOTATATE labeled with Ga produced by a cyclotron or eluted from a generator to demonstrate the clinical safety and diagnostic efficacy of the radiopharmaceutical as a routine standard-of-care diagnostic tool in the clinic.

Adaptive Filtering for Improved EEG-Based Mental Workload Assessment of Ambulant Users.

Recently, due to the emergence of mobile electroencephalography (EEG) devices, assessment of mental workload in highly ecological settings has gained popularity. In such settings, however, motion and other common artifacts have been shown to severely hamper signal quality and to degrade mental workload assessment performance. Here, we show that classical EEG enhancement algorithms, conventionally developed to remove ocular and muscle artifacts, are not optimal in settings where participant movement (e.

From the field to the lab and back: neuroethology of primate social behavior.

Social mammals with more numerous and stronger social relationships live longer, healthier lives. Despite the established importance of social relationships, our understanding of the neurobiological mechanisms by which they are pursued, formed, and maintained in primates remains largely confined to highly controlled laboratory settings which do not allow natural, dynamic social interactions to unfold. In this review, we argue that the neurobiological study of primate social behavior would benefit from adopting a neuroethological approach, that is, a perspective grounded in natural, species-typical behavior, with careful selection of animal models according to the scientific question at hand.

PASS: A Multimodal Database of Physical Activity and Stress for Mobile Passive Body/ Brain-Computer Interface Research.

With the burgeoning of wearable devices and passive body/brain-computer interfaces (B/BCIs), automated stress monitoring in everyday settings has gained significant attention recently, with applications ranging from serious games to clinical monitoring. With mobile users, however, challenges arise due to other overlapping (and potentially confounding) physiological responses (e.g.

WAUC: A Multi-Modal Database for Mental Workload Assessment Under Physical Activity.

Assessment of mental workload is crucial for applications that require sustained attention and where conditions such as mental fatigue and drowsiness must be avoided. Previous work that attempted to devise objective methods to model mental workload were mainly based on neurological or physiological data collected when the participants performed tasks that did not involve physical activity. While such models may be useful for scenarios that involve static operators, they may not apply in real-world situations where operators are performing tasks under varying levels of physical activity, such as those faced by first responders, firefighters, and police officers.

Prediction of Stress and Mental Workload during Police Academy Training Using Ultra-Short-Term Heart Rate Variability and Breathing Analysis.

Heart rate variability (HRV) has been studied in the context of human behavior analysis and many features have been extracted from the inter-beat interval (RR) time series and tested as correlates of constructs such as mental workload, stress and anxiety. Such constructs are crucial in assessing quality-of-life of individuals, as well as their overall performance when doing critical tasks. Most studies, however, have been conducted in controlled laboratory environments with artificially-induced psychological responses.

Automated radiosynthesis of Ga for large-scale routine production using Zn pressed target.

Gallium-68 (Ga) has attracted increasing interest in recent years due to the expanding clinical applications of Ga-based radiopharmaceuticals (Rahbar et al., 2017). Ga is mainly produced via Ge/Ga generators that are limited in yield by the Ge activity (typically up to 1.

Monofluoroalkene-Isostere as a F NMR Label for the Peptide Backbone: Synthesis and Evaluation in Membrane-Bound PGLa and (KIGAKI).

Solid-state F NMR is a powerful method to study the interactions of biologically active peptides with membranes. So far, in labelled peptides, the F-reporter group has always been installed on the side chain of an amino acid. Given the fact that monofluoroalkenes are non-hydrolyzable peptide bond mimics, we have synthesized a monofluoroalkene-based dipeptide isostere, Val-Ψ[(Z)-CF=CH]-Gly, and inserted it in the sequence of two well-studied antimicrobial peptides: PGLa and (KIGAKI) are representatives of an α-helix and a β-sheet.

The diagnosticity of psychophysiological signatures: Can we disentangle mental workload from acute stress with ECG and fNIRS?

The ability to identify reliable and sensitive physiological signatures of psychological dimensions is key to developing intelligent adaptive systems that may in turn help to mitigate human error in complex operations. The challenge of this endeavor lies with diagnosticity. Despite different underlying causes, the physiological correlates of workload and acute psychological stress manifest in rather similar ways and can be easily confounded.

Multi-Scale Heart Beat Entropy Measures for Mental Workload Assessment of Ambulant Users.

Mental workload assessment is crucial in many real life applications which require constant attention and where imbalance of mental workload resources may cause safety hazards. As such, mental workload and its relationship with heart rate variability (HRV) have been well studied in the literature. However, the majority of the developed models have assumed individuals are not ambulant, thus bypassing the issue of movement-related electrocardiography (ECG) artifacts and changing heart beat dynamics due to physical activity.

Mild traumatic brain injury: The effect of age at trauma onset on brain structure integrity.

Mounting evidence suggests that mild traumatic brain injuries (mTBI) have long-term effects that interact with the aging process to precipitate cognitive decline. This line of research predicts that early exposure to brain trauma is particularly detrimental to long-term brain integrity. However, a second line of research into the effects of age at trauma onset predict that older brains are more vulnerable to the effects of mTBI than younger brains.