Conditions such as generalized anxiety disorder, panic disorder, social phobia, specific phobia, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and post-traumatic stress disorder cause undue suffering and economic burden on a substantial portion of our society. The prevalence and serious d ...

Rett syndrome (RTT) is a pervasive developmental disorder, primarily affecting girls. RTT causes a wide variety of debilitating symptoms and no cure currently exists. Mutations in the gene encoding methyl-CpG-binding protein 2 (MeCP2) have been found to be responsible for about 90% of clas ...

Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) inflicts uncontrollable, intrusive thoughts and ritualistic, compulsive behaviors affecting approximately 3% of the population. Clinical symptoms of OCD can be categorized as checking, hoarding, washing, or ordering. Mounting evide ...

Schizophrenia is thought to be a polygenic disorder that is associated with considerable phenotypic heterogeneity across patients, including variations in age at onset, diagnostic symptoms and subsequent course of illness. Consequently, the generation of incisive mutant mod ...

Environmental enrichment studies of transgenic and mutant mouse models of brain disorders have facilitated exploration of gene � environment interactions and experience-dependent plasticity in response to enhanced mental and physical activity. Environmental enrichm ...

Depression, as part of a larger class of affective disorders, is one of the world’s most deleterious and widespread neurobehavioral diseases. However, much remains to be discovered concerning depression, due to the daunting complexity of its pathological mechanisms and etiology. Var ...

Estrogens are C-18 phenolic steroids derived from cholesterol and occur naturally in the forms of 17β-estradiol, estrone, and estriol. Estrogen biosynthesis begins with the transfer of cystolic cholesterol from the cytoplasm into the mitochondrion of steroidogenic cells (1-3). Th ...

Experimentally induced lesions of basal ganglia cause neurological anomalies such as hindlimb clasping and changes in motor activity, together with deficits in motor coordination and spatial learning. Some of these deficits have been described in mice genetically modified for Pa ...

The inhibitory GABAA receptor plays important roles in the control of anxiety and sleep behavior. The α1 subunit-containing GABAA receptor is the major subtype, contributing to about 60% of all GABAA receptors in the brain. In this chapter, we present phenotypes observed in a GABAA receptor alp ...

The two circling rat mutants described in this review illustrate how genetic animal models may serve to study multifaceted brain functions and dysfunctions. The LEW/Ztm-ci2/ci2 and BH.7A/Ztm-ci3/ci3 rat mutants both exhibit lateralized circling and hyperactivity and thus provide ...

Rats have been extensively used to explore the brain mechanisms underlying psychiatric disorders. However, due to a lack of sufficient tools for the generation of knockout or mutant rats, there has been a general lag in the understanding of genetic factors in psychiatric and neurodevelopm ...

Zebrafish have traditionally been used as effective genetic and developmental models in biomedical research. Recently, the scope and utility of zebrafish in biomedical research has been further expanded with the implementation of new genetic techniques aimed at developing tran ...

Opiates, such as morphine and heroin, exert their pharmacological effects by binding to highly specific receptor proteins on the cell surface of neuronal and nonneuronal cells. In 1973, researchers in three different laboratories demonstrated the presence of receptors specific for ...

Addiction exacts enormous costs on society in terms of both its clinical and social ramifications. Addiction, defined as the compulsive use of a drug despite adverse consequences, is thought to develop as a result of adaptive changes in specific brain areas. The persistence of these progress ...

Since its identification as a family of protein kinases that is activated in the presence of calcium, phosphatidyl serine, and diacylglycerol (DAG), protein kinase C (PKC) has been regarded as one of the early steps in receptor signaling (Nishizuka, 1988, Nishizuka, 1995; Berridge, 1993; Rasm ...

Although the dopamine hypothesis of schizophrenia has gained wide acceptance, it has recently become clear that it requires revision (Seeman and Niznik, 1990; Ellison, 1994; Kahn and Davis, 1995). The original hypothesis asserts that schizophrenia is produced by a hyperdopaminergic s ...

G protein-linked receptor function and regulation have received considerable attention owing to the pivotal role of these receptors in mediating cellular responses to chemical transmitters. Typically, alterations in neurotransmitter status can either result in reduced re ...

Dopamine receptors are members of a large family of neurotransmitter/hormone receptors that exert their biological actions via signal transduction pathways that involve subtype-specific guanine nucleotide binding or G proteins (see Kaziro et al., 1991; Simon et al., 1991; Hille, 19 ...

Given their ubiquitous and crucial role in the integration and amplification of signal transduction pathways, it is not surprising that anomalies in the expression and/or function of various G proteins has been implicated in a multitude of pathophysiological states: pseudohypopa ...

Cells are capable of responding to extracellular stimuli because of their ability to detect external information and to transduce this signal to intracellular effectors that may result in the generation of second messengers and/or cause alteration in the cell’s metabolism. The cell su ...