During the night 180 lateral-line organs allow the clawed frog Xenopus to localize prey by detecting water waves emanating from insects floundering on the water surface. Not only can the frog localize prey but it can also determine its character. This suggests waveform reconstruction, and a key question is how the frog can establish the appropriate neuronal hardware. Detecting time differences arising from the input on the skin is a key to neuronal information processing, and spike-timing-dependent synaptic plasticity (STDP) therefore seems to be the natural tool. We show how supervised STDP allows a frog to learn what is where in the dark. Learning can also be derived from a minimization principle.
Download full-text PDF |
Source |
---|---|
http://dx.doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.95.078106 | DOI Listing |
Vet Sci
January 2025
Taronga Institute of Science and Learning, Taronga Conservation Society Australia, Mosman, NSW 2088, Australia.
Reproductive technologies, including sperm cryopreservation, offer conservationists enhanced capacity to genetically manage populations and improve the outcomes of conservation breeding programs (CBPs). Despite this potential, the post-thaw quality of amphibian sperm is highly variable following cryopreservation, and research focused on protocol refinement is needed. The aim of this study was twofold: (1) to investigate the effect of the addition of bovine serum albumin (BSA) to the cryopreservation medium (pre-freeze), and (2) the effect of the addition of caffeine to the activation medium (post-thaw), on post-thaw sperm characteristics in the critically endangered Booroolong frog ().
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSci Rep
January 2025
Institute of Agricultural Information Technology, Henan Academy of Agricultural Sciences, Zhengzhou, 450002, China.
Identification and diagnosis of tobacco diseases are prerequisites for the scientific prevention and control of these ailments. To address the limitations of traditional methods, such as weak generalization and sensitivity to noise in segmenting tobacco leaf lesions, this study focused on four tobacco diseases: angular leaf spot, brown spot, wildfire disease, and frog eye disease. Building upon the Unet architecture, we developed the Multi-scale Residual Dilated Segmentation Model (MD-Unet) by enhancing the feature extraction module and integrating attention mechanisms.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFEClinicalMedicine
January 2025
University of Paris Cité, Inserm UMR-S 942, Cardiovascular Markers in Stress Conditions (MASCOT), Paris, France.
Background: Cardiogenic shock (CS) is a heterogeneous clinical syndrome, making it challenging to predict patient trajectory and response to treatment. This study aims to identify biological/molecular CS subphenotypes, evaluate their association with outcome, and explore their impact on heterogeneity of treatment effect (ShockCO-OP, NCT06376318).
Methods: We used unsupervised clustering to integrate plasma biomarker data from two prospective cohorts of CS patients: CardShock (N = 205 [2010-2012, NCT01374867]) and the French and European Outcome reGistry in Intensive Care Units (FROG-ICU) (N = 228 [2011-2013, NCT01367093]) to determine the optimal number of classes.
Elife
December 2024
Department of Chemistry and Physics, Indiana State University, Terre Haute, United States.
Understanding the origins of novel, complex phenotypes is a major goal in evolutionary biology. Poison frogs of the family Dendrobatidae have evolved the novel ability to acquire alkaloids from their diet for chemical defense at least three times. However, taxon sampling for alkaloids has been biased towards colorful species, without similar attention paid to inconspicuous ones that are often assumed to be undefended.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMethods Mol Biol
December 2024
Department of Chromosome Science, National Institute of Genetics, Shizuoka, Japan.
The bipolar shape of the microtubule-based spindle is a pivotal morphological phenotype for accurate chromosome segregation during cell division. However, existing descriptions of spindle morphogenesis remain largely qualitative. Here, we introduce a method that provides a quantitative description of the morphological growth dynamics of spindles using Xenopus egg cytoplasmic extract and a computational image analysis pipeline.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFEnter search terms and have AI summaries delivered each week - change queries or unsubscribe any time!