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

Endocrine therapy has become the fundamental treatment option for hormone receptor-positive (HR) and receptor tyrosine-protein kinase erbB-2-negative (HER2) metastatic breast cancer (mBC). While treatments incorporating cyclin-dependent kinase (CDK)4 and 6 inhibitors are more prevalent than ever, comparisons among those regimens are scarce. The aim of the present study was to identify the most effective maintenance treatment for patients with HR and HER2 mBC.

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Color is an important visual feature that informs behavior, and the retinal basis for color vision has been studied across various vertebrate species. While many studies have investigated how color information is processed in visual brain areas of primate species, we have limited understanding of how it is organized beyond the retina in other species, including most dichromatic mammals. In this study, we systematically characterized how color is represented in the primary visual cortex (V1) of mice.

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  • - Aging significantly impacts the brain, increasing the risk for neurodegenerative disorders, especially in individuals with psychiatric conditions.
  • - A study analyzed transcriptomic changes in the orbitofrontal cortex from nearly 800,000 brain cell nuclei of 87 people, revealing that aging affects all brain cell types, particularly certain interneurons.
  • - Findings indicate that the transcriptomic aging process is accelerated in those with psychiatric disorders, highlighting shared biological pathways between aging and mental health issues.
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  • The study investigates the relationship between obesity and schizophrenia by comparing brain structures in patients with schizophrenia who have different waist circumferences.
  • It finds that patients with higher waist circumference exhibit lower white matter integrity and cortical thickness in specific brain regions compared to healthy controls, while those with lower waist circumference also show reduced white matter integrity.
  • Cognitive performance was notably worse in the patients with higher waist circumference, who also had higher triglyceride levels, highlighting potential neurocognitive deficits related to excessive abdominal obesity in schizophrenia.
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Spatially nonlinear stimulus integration by retinal ganglion cells lies at the heart of various computations performed by the retina. It arises from the nonlinear transmission of signals that ganglion cells receive from bipolar cells, which thereby constitute functional subunits within a ganglion cell's receptive field. Inferring these subunits from recorded ganglion cell activity promises a new avenue for studying the functional architecture of the retina.

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The impact of task measurements on sequential dependence: a comparison between temporal reproduction and discrimination tasks.

Psychol Res

November 2024

General and Experimental Psychology, Department of Psychology, LMU Munich, 80802, Munich, Germany.

Decisions about a current stimulus are influenced by previously encountered stimuli, leading to sequential bias. However, the specific processing levels at which serial dependence emerges remain unclear. Despite considerable evidence pointing to contributions from perceptual and post-perceptual processes, as well as response carryover effects impacting subsequent judgments, research into how different task measurements affect sequential dependencies is limited.

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Distinguishing faces requires well distinguishable neural activity patterns. Contextual information may separate neural representations, leading to enhanced identity recognition. Here, we use functional magnetic resonance imaging to investigate how predictions derived from contextual information affect the separability of neural activity patterns in the macaque face-processing system, a 3-level processing hierarchy in ventral visual cortex.

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Decision-making under unpredictable conditions can cause discomfort in autistic persons due to their preference for predictability. Decision-making impairments might furthermore be associated with a dysregulation of sex and stress hormones. This prospective, cross-sectional study investigated decision-making in 32 autistic participants (AP, 14 female) and 31 non-autistic participants (NAP, 20 female) aged 18-64 years.

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Neural encoding of linguistic speech cues is unaffected by cognitive decline, but decreases with increasing hearing impairment.

Sci Rep

August 2024

Computational Neuroscience of Speech and Hearing, Department of Computational Linguistics, University of Zurich, 8050, Zurich, Switzerland.

The multivariate temporal response function (mTRF) is an effective tool for investigating the neural encoding of acoustic and complex linguistic features in natural continuous speech. In this study, we investigated how neural representations of speech features derived from natural stimuli are related to early signs of cognitive decline in older adults, taking into account the effects of hearing. Participants without ( ) and with ( ) early signs of cognitive decline listened to an audiobook while their electroencephalography responses were recorded.

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In the nervous system, alternative RNA processing is particularly prevalent, which results in the expression of thousands of transcript variants found in no other tissue. Neuron-specific RNA-binding proteins co-transcriptionally regulate alternative splicing, alternative polyadenylation, and RNA editing, thereby shaping the RNA identity of nervous system cells. Recent evidence suggests that interactions between RNA-binding proteins and cis-regulatory elements such as promoters and enhancers play a role in the determination of neuron-specific expression profiles.

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Generalized epilepsy (GE) encompasses a heterogeneous group of hyperexcitability disorders that clinically manifest as seizures. At the whole-brain level, distinct seizure patterns as well as interictal epileptic discharges (IEDs) reflect key signatures of hyperexcitability in magneto- and electroencephalographic (M/EEG) recordings. Moreover, it had been suggested that aperiodic activity, specifically the slope of the 1/ decay function of the power spectrum, might index neural excitability.

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In insects, olfactory receptor neurons (ORNs) are localized in sensilla. Within a sensillum, different ORN types are typically co-localized and exhibit nonsynaptic reciprocal inhibition through ephaptic coupling. This inhibition is hypothesized to aid odor source discrimination in environments where odor molecules (odorants) are dispersed by wind, resulting in turbulent plumes.

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The hippocampus is considered essential for several forms of declarative memory, including spatial and social memory. Despite the extensive research of the classic subfields of the hippocampus, the fasciola cinerea (FC)-a medially located structure within the hippocampal formation-has remained largely unexplored. In the present study, we performed a morpho-functional characterization of principal neurons in the mouse FC.

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Amyloid-β (Aβ) is thought to be neuronally derived in Alzheimer's disease (AD). However, transcripts of amyloid precursor protein (APP) and amyloidogenic enzymes are equally abundant in oligodendrocytes (OLs). By cell-type-specific deletion of Bace1 in a humanized knock-in AD model, APP, we demonstrate that OLs and neurons contribute to Aβ plaque burden.

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CalciSeg: A versatile approach for unsupervised segmentation of calcium imaging data.

Neuroimage

September 2024

Neuroscience Paris-Seine - Institut de biologie Paris-Seine, Sorbonne Université, INSERM, CNRS, 75005 Paris, France. Electronic address:

Recent advances in calcium imaging, including the development of fast and sensitive genetically encoded indicators, high-resolution camera chips for wide-field imaging, and resonant scanning mirrors in laser scanning microscopy, have notably improved the temporal and spatial resolution of functional imaging analysis. Nonetheless, the variability of imaging approaches and brain structures challenges the development of versatile and reliable segmentation methods. Standard techniques, such as manual selection of regions of interest or machine learning solutions, often fall short due to either user bias, non-transferability among systems, or computational demand.

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Improved genetically encoded calcium indicators (GECIs) are essential for capturing intracellular dynamics of both muscle and neurons. A novel set of GECIs with ultrafast kinetics and high sensitivity was recently reported by Zhang et al. (2023).

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Understanding how biological visual systems process information is challenging because of the nonlinear relationship between visual input and neuronal responses. Artificial neural networks allow computational neuroscientists to create predictive models that connect biological and machine vision. Machine learning has benefited tremendously from benchmarks that compare different model on the same task under standardized conditions.

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Single particle inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (spICP-MS) is a well-established technique to characterize the size, particle number concentration (PNC), and elemental composition of engineered nanoparticles (NPs) and colloids in aqueous suspensions. However, a method capable of directly analyzing water-sensitive or highly reactive NPs in alcoholic suspension has not been reported yet. Here, we present a novel spICP-MS method for characterizing the main cement hydration product, i.

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Article Synopsis
  • Pontocerebellar hypoplasia type 2a (PCH2a) is a rare genetic disorder affecting children, characterized by underdeveloped brain regions (cerebellum and pons) and progressive small head size (microcephaly).
  • The disorder is caused by a specific genetic variant in the TSEN54 gene, which impacts a key protein involved in RNA processing, but the underlying mechanisms of the disease are not well understood.
  • Researchers created human models of PCH2a using stem cells to study the disease, finding that cerebellar organoids from affected individuals were smaller and showed altered cell growth patterns, suggesting a developmental issue in the brain as part of the disease's
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The ability of an organism to overcome infectious diseases has traditionally been linked to killing invading pathogens. Accumulating evidence, however, indicates that, apart from restricting pathogen loads, organismal survival is coupled to an additional yet poorly understood mechanism called disease tolerance. Here we report that p16 immune cells play a key role in establishing disease tolerance.

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Verbal short term memory contribution to sentence comprehension decreases with increasing syntactic complexity in people with aphasia.

Neuroimage

August 2024

Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Department of Neuropsychology & Department of Neurology, 04103 Leipzig, Germany; International Max Planck Research School on Neuroscience of Communication, Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, 04103 Leipzig, Germany(#).

Sentence comprehension requires the integration of linguistic units presented in a temporal sequence based on a non-linear underlying syntactic structure. While it is uncontroversial that storage is mandatory for this process, there are opposing views regarding the relevance of general short-term-/working-memory capacities (STM/WM) versus language specific resources. Here we report results from 43 participants with an acquired brain lesion in the extended left hemispheric language network and resulting language deficits, who performed a sentence-to-picture matching task and an experimental task assessing phonological short-term memory.

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  • The Illumina MethylationEPIC BeadChip microarray platform has two versions (v1.0 and v2.0), which show high correlation overall but varying results at the probe level for tools assessing DNA methylation effects.
  • Research using blood samples from different adult age groups found that samples clustered more by the EPIC version used than by other characteristics, indicating significant differences in data outputs between the two versions.
  • The study emphasizes the need to consider which EPIC version is used when analyzing data for meta-analyses and longitudinal studies, as these differences can impact findings in epigenome-wide association studies (EWAS).
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  • This study investigates the genetic molecular regulation of the placenta by analyzing chorionic villus samples from early pregnancy and placenta tissue at birth in a Finnish cohort of 574 individuals.* -
  • Results showed that there were more quantitative trait loci (QTLs) in birth placenta compared to first-trimester samples, indicating enhanced genetic effects over the course of pregnancy, with many overlaps in gene expression and DNA methylation.* -
  • Notably, specific SNPs associated with immunological, skeletal, and respiratory traits, such as QTL-SNP rs1737028, highlight the placenta's role in gene regulation and potential impacts on health outcomes across various traits.*
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Spontaneous and evoked synaptic vesicle release arises from a single releasable pool.

Cell Rep

July 2024

Department of Cellular Biophysics, Institute of Medical Physics and Biophysics, University of Münster, Robert-Koch-Str. 31, 48149 Münster, Germany; Center for Soft Nanoscience SoN, University of Münster, Busso-Peus-Str.10, 48149 Münster, Germany; Cells in Motion Interfaculty Center, University of Münster, 48149 Münster, Germany. Electronic address:

The quantal content of an evoked postsynaptic response is typically determined by dividing it by the average spontaneous miniature response. However, this approach is challenged by the notion that different synaptic vesicle pools might drive spontaneous and evoked release. Here, we "silence" synaptic vesicles through pharmacological alkalinization and subsequently rescue them by optogenetic acidification.

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Background: The COVID-19 pandemic led to a global reduction in health care accessibility for both infected and noninfected patients, posing a particular burden on those with chronic conditions, including mental health issues. Peru experienced significant devastation from the pandemic, resulting in a collapsed health care system and leading to the world's highest per capita mortality rate as a result of COVID-19. Understanding the trends in health care utilization, particularly in mental health care, is crucial for informing pandemic response efforts and guiding future recovery strategies.

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