1,323 results match your criteria: "International Max Planck Research School[Affiliation]"

Article Synopsis
  • The spinal cord plays a crucial role in brain-body communication, but traditional noninvasive recording methods in humans face significant challenges.
  • Researchers developed a new electrophysiological approach that uses high-density multichannel spinal recordings and advanced spatial-filtering analyses, allowing for detailed timing and sensitivity in spinal cord response assessments.
  • This method was further expanded to include simultaneous recordings from peripheral, spinal, and cortical areas, providing evidence that integrative processing starts in the spinal cord, and was applied to study nociceptive responses during pain stimulation, paving the way for better understanding of brain-body interactions in health and disease.
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Regulatory T cells (Tregs) establish dominant immune tolerance but obstruct tumor immune surveillance, warranting context-specific mechanistic insights into the functions of tumor-infiltrating Tregs (TIL-Tregs). We show that enhanced posttranslational O-linked N-acetylglucosamine modification (O-GlcNAcylation) of cellular factors is a molecular feature that promotes a tumor-specific gene expression signature and distinguishes TIL-Tregs from their systemic counterparts. We found that altered glucose utilization through the glucose transporter Glut3 is a major facilitator of this process.

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Plants with constitutive defense chemicals exist widely in nature. The phenomenon is backed by abundant data from plant chemical ecology. Sufficient data are also available to conclude that plant defenses act as deterrent and repellent to attacking herbivores, particularly deleterious generalist insects.

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PD-L1 blockade immunotherapy rewires cancer-induced emergency myelopoiesis.

Front Immunol

October 2024

Laboratory of Immune Regulation and Tolerance, Division of Basic Sciences, Medical School, University of Crete, Heraklion, Greece.

Introduction: Immune checkpoint blockade (ICB) immunotherapy has revolutionized cancer treatment, demonstrating exceptional clinical responses in a wide range of cancers. Despite the success, a significant proportion of patients still fail to respond, highlighting the existence of unappreciated mechanisms of immunotherapy resistance. Delineating such mechanisms is paramount to minimize immunotherapy failures and optimize the clinical benefit.

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The brainstem region, locus coeruleus (LC), has been remarkably conserved across vertebrates. Evolution has woven the LC into wide-ranging neural circuits that influence functions as broad as autonomic systems, the stress response, nociception, sleep, and high-level cognition among others. Given this conservation, there is a strong possibility that LC activity is inherently similar across species, and furthermore that age, sex, and brain state influence LC activity similarly across species.

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Intrinsically disordered regions (IDRs) play a pivotal role in organellar remodeling. They transduce signals across membranes, scaffold signaling complexes, and mediate vesicular traffic. Their functions are regulated by constraining conformational ensembles through specific intra- and intermolecular interactions, physical tethering, and posttranslational modifications.

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Comprehending speech in noise (SiN) poses a challenge for older hearing-impaired listeners, requiring auditory and working memory resources. Visual speech cues provide additional sensory information supporting speech understanding, while the extent of such visual benefit is characterized by large variability, which might be accounted for by individual differences in working memory capacity (WMC). In the current study, we investigated behavioral and neurofunctional (i.

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Representational drift-the gradual continuous change of neuronal representations-has been observed across many brain areas. It is unclear whether drift is caused by synaptic plasticity elicited by sensory experience, or by the intrinsic volatility of synapses. Here, using chronic two-photon calcium imaging in primary visual cortex of female mice, we find that the preferred stimulus orientation of individual neurons slowly drifts over the course of weeks.

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Article Synopsis
  • The co-chaperone FKBP51, linked to the FKBP5 gene, is a significant psychiatric risk factor for anxiety and depression, particularly affecting the stress response.
  • Corticotropin releasing hormone (CRH) is also important in regulating stress, and both FKBP51 and CRH work together to influence the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis.
  • Research shows that mice lacking FKBP51 in CRH-expressing neurons display increased stress effects, emphasizing the need for specific research on different cell types to develop personalized approaches for improving stress resilience and mental health.
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Everyday life requires an adaptive balance between distraction-resistant maintenance of information and the flexibility to update this information when needed. These opposing mechanisms are proposed to be balanced through a working memory gating mechanism. Prior research indicates that obesity may elevate the risk of working memory deficits, yet the underlying mechanisms remain elusive.

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Behavior is tightly synchronized with bodily physiology. Internal needs from the body drive behavior selection, while optimal behavior performance requires a coordinated physiological response. Internal state is dynamically represented by the nervous system to influence mood and emotion, and body-brain signals also direct responses to external sensory cues, enabling the organism to adapt and pursue its goals within an ever-changing environment.

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Modulation of Neuronal Excitability and Plasticity by BHLHE41 Conveys Lithium Non-Responsiveness.

bioRxiv

July 2024

Department of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy, Molecular and Behavioral Neurobiology, LMU University Hospital, LMU Munich, Germany.

Many bipolar disorder (BD) patients are non-responsive to lithium. The mechanisms underlying lithium (non-)responsiveness are largely unknown. By using gene-set enrichment analysis methods, we found that core clock gene-sets are significantly associated with lithium response.

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CACNA1C, coding for the α1 subunit of L-type voltage-gated calcium channel (LTCC) Ca1.2, has been associated with multiple psychiatric disorders. Clinical studies have revealed alterations in behavior as well as in brain structure and function in CACNA1C risk allele carriers.

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Walking is a complex motor programme involving coordinated and distributed activity across the brain and the spinal cord. Halting appropriately at the correct time is a critical component of walking control. Despite progress in identifying neurons driving halting, the underlying neural circuit mechanisms responsible for overruling the competing walking state remain unclear.

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Article Synopsis
  • * Researchers found that the Cat Ba langur has low genetic diversity, high inbreeding rates, and harmful mutations, indicating a significant genetic burden; however, some adaptive potential has been preserved.
  • * Unique genetic variants related to calcium and sodium metabolism were identified, suggesting these adaptations might help the langurs thrive in their specific environment of high calcium and saltwater.
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Background: Metagenomics is a powerful approach to study environmental and human-associated microbial communities and, in particular, the role of viruses in shaping them. Viral genomes are challenging to assemble from metagenomic samples due to their genomic diversity caused by high mutation rates. In the standard de Bruijn graph assemblers, this genomic diversity leads to complex k-mer assembly graphs with a plethora of loops and bulges that are challenging to resolve into strains or haplotypes because variants more than the k-mer size apart cannot be phased.

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Aberrant neuronal connectivity and network activity of neurons derived from patients with idiopathic schizophrenia.

Neurobiol Dis

October 2024

NMI Natural and Medical Sciences Institute at the University of Tübingen, 72770 Reutlingen, Germany; International Max Planck Research School, Graduate Training Centre of Neuroscience, University of Tübingen, 72076 Tübingen, Germany; German Center for Mental Health (DZPG), Partner Site Tübingen, 72076 Tübingen, Germany. Electronic address:

Schizophrenia (SCZ) is a psychiatric disorder with a strong genetic determinant. A major hypothesis to explain disease aetiology comprises synaptic dysfunction associated with excitatory-inhibitory imbalance of synaptic transmission, ultimately contributing to impaired network oscillation and cognitive deficits associated with the disease. Here, we studied the morphological and functional properties of a highly defined co-culture of GABAergic and glutamatergic neurons derived from induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSC) from patients with idiopathic SCZ.

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Dissecting depression symptoms: Multi-omics clustering uncovers immune-related subgroups and cell-type specific dysregulation.

Brain Behav Immun

January 2025

Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry, Kraepelinstr. 2-10, 80804 Munich, Germany; Institute of Computational Biology, Helmholtz Zentrum München, Ingolstädter Landstraße 1, 85764 Neuherberg, Germany. Electronic address:

In a subset of patients with mental disorders, such as depression, low-grade inflammation and altered immune marker concentrations are observed. However, these immune alterations are often assessed by only one data type and small marker panels. Here, we used a transdiagnostic approach and combined data from two cohorts to define subgroups of depression symptoms across the diagnostic spectrum through a large-scale multi-omics clustering approach in 237 individuals.

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Extracellular vesicle-mediated trafficking of molecular cues during human brain development.

Cell Rep

October 2024

Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry, Munich, Germany; Division of Physiological Genomics, Biomedical Center (BMC), Faculty of Medicine, Ludwig Maximilian University (LMU), Munich, Germany. Electronic address:

Cellular crosstalk is an essential process influenced by numerous factors, including secreted vesicles that transfer nucleic acids, lipids, and proteins between cells. Extracellular vesicles (EVs) have been the center of many studies focusing on neurodegenerative disorders, but whether EVs display cell-type-specific features for cellular crosstalk during neurodevelopment is unknown. Here, using human-induced pluripotent stem cell-derived cerebral organoids, neural progenitors, neurons, and astrocytes, we identify heterogeneity in EV protein content and dynamics in a cell-type-specific and time-dependent manner.

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Article Synopsis
  • KT2440 is a bacterium that thrives in soil and uses hard-to-digest carbon sources, relying on two key enzymes influenced by the availability of lanthanides (Ln).
  • Experiments showed light lanthanides promote bacterial growth while heavy lanthanides can hinder it due to mismetallation issues, which affect the bacterium’s ability to sense and respond to these elements.
  • The study enhances our understanding of how KT2440 adjusts gene expression based on the type of lanthanides present, revealing a nuanced regulatory mechanism between calcium and lanthanide-dependent enzymes.
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Background: Recent advances in multivariate pattern recognition have fostered the search for reliable neuroimaging-based biomarkers in psychiatric conditions, including schizophrenia. These approaches consider the complex pattern of alterations in brain function and structure, overcoming the limitations of traditional univariate methods. To assess the reliability of neuroimaging-based biomarkers and the contribution of study characteristics in distinguishing individuals with schizophrenia spectrum disorder (SSD) from healthy controls (HCs), we conducted a systematic review of the studies that used multivariate pattern recognition for this objective.

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Serving as a channel for communication with locked-in patients or control of prostheses, sensorimotor brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) decode imaginary movements from the recorded activity of the user's brain. However, many individuals remain unable to control the BCI, and the underlying mechanisms are unclear. The user's BCI performance was previously shown to correlate with the resting-state signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of the mu rhythm and the phase synchronization (PS) of the mu rhythm between sensorimotor areas.

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The Stroop effect is one of the most often studied examples of cognitive conflict processing. Over time, many variants of the classic Stroop task were used, including versions with different stimulus material, control conditions, presentation design, and combinations with additional cognitive demands. The neural and behavioral impact of this experimental variety, however, has never been systematically assessed.

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During collective vigilance, it is commonly assumed that individual animals compromise their feeding time to be vigilant against predators, benefiting the entire group. One notable issue with this assumption concerns the unclear nature of predator 'detection', particularly in terms of vision. It remains uncertain how a vigilant individual utilizes its high-acuity vision (such as the fovea) to detect a predator cue and subsequently guide individual and collective escape responses.

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Article Synopsis
  • - EEG is a valuable tool for studying brain activity and, when combined with machine learning, can help identify biomarkers for serious mental illnesses like schizophrenia (SCZ) and major depressive disorder (MDD).
  • - A study with 735 participants successfully distinguished between SCZ, MDD, and healthy controls using EEG data, showing varying degrees of accuracy for each group.
  • - The findings suggest that age-related changes in brain activity may influence the diagnosis of SCZ and MDD, indicating a need for early and precise application of these machine learning models in clinical settings.
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