To achieve neuroprotection is one of the main interests for neuroscientist: understanding the control mechanisms of neuronal death allows developing new tools for preventing it. Neuronal death plays a critical role in most of the important neural pathologies, including stroke, epil ...
Noninvasive tomographic imaging methods including positron emission tomography (PET) and single photon emission computed tomography (SPECT) are extremely sensitive and are capable of measuring biochemical processes that occur at concentrations in the nanomolar range. I ...
Cell degeneration and death, be it extensive and widespread, such as in metabolic disorders, or focal and selective as in Parkinson’s disease (PD), is the underlying feature of many neurological diseases. Thus, the replacement of cells lost by injury or disease has become a central tenet in strate ...
Short basic amino acid sequences, often called cell-penetrating peptides (CPPs), allow the delivery of proteins and other molecules into cells and across the blood-brain barrier (BBB). Although the ability of basic proteins to facilitate such trafficking is known for a long time, only the ap ...
Neurotrophic factors are among the most potent neuroprotective and neuroregenerative agents known. However, they cross the adult mammalian blood-brain barrier very poorly and can have serious peripheral side effects. These problems can be solved by using chronic infusions with sm ...
The search of potential novel therapeutical targets for neuroprotection has been widely intensified since the usefulness of microarray techniques. Indeed, this recent technology (also called Gene chip) provides a powerful tool to examine gene expression changes of thousands of g ...
How neurons differ from each other is largely determined by their specific repertoire of mRNAs. The genes expressed by a given neuron reflect its developmental history, its interaction with other cells, and its synaptic activity. Since the introduction of reverse transcription polyme ...
From an early start, more than two decades ago, Ca2+ measurements have evolved from the use of simple systems, built around an epifluorescent microscope, a fluorescent lamp and a photomultiplier, into highly complex set-ups exploiting solid-state light sources and Electron Multiplied c ...
Calcium ions are the most ubiquitous and pluripotent signalling molecules, which regulate a wide array of physiological and pathological reactions. The specific system, controlling cellular Ca2+ homeostasis appeared very early in the evolution, being initially survival syst ...
Glial cells are besides neurons the second major cell type of nervous systems and are either of neuroectodermal (macroglia) or mesodermal (microglia) origin. As electrically non-excitable cells, they employ calcium signals in response to most external stimuli, which initiate cellu ...
This chapter overviews the use of acetoxymethyl (AM) ester-based multi cell bolus loading (MCBL) technique for in vivo Ca2+ imaging of neural circuits. This technique provides anatomically targeted, rapid and non-invasive staining of both neurones and glia with small molecule Ca2+ indi ...
The intracellular calcium concentration is one key parameter triggering numerous intracellular signalling pathways in neuronal cells. The development of optical techniques like fast confocal or 2-photon microscopy has made it possible to measure calcium dynamics even in sub- ...
In the last two decades, the study of Ca2+ homeostasis in living cells received a great impulse by the explosive development of genetically encoded Ca2+-indicators. The cloning of the Ca2+-sensitive photoprotein aequorin and of the green fluorescent protein (GFP) from the jellyfish Aequo ...
In this chapter, we review the theoretical and experimental foundations underling a quantitative approach to Ca2+ imaging, discuss equilibrium conditions and their violations and present a computational framework that can be used to estimate the spatial and temporal dynamics of Ca2+ ...
Ca2+-sensitive microelectrodes are time-consuming to make and require large robust cells. But, they do not add to buffering and do not require expensive equipment. I describe how to make and use the electrodes and briefly consider the leakage problem.
Calcium indicators are widely used to monitor activity in living neuronal tissue because of the tight relation between action potential firing and increases in the intracellular calcium concentration. Here, we describe the use of genetically encoded calcium indicators (GECIs) of t ...
The endoplasmic reticulum (ER) is a complex and highly dynamic three-dimensional intracellular membranous system, which acts as a dynamic calcium store in the majority of eukaryotic cells. The special arrangement of intra-ER Ca2+ buffers, characterized by low affinity for Ca2+, in comb ...
Neuronal Ca2+ signals occur in a very complex way. Direct imaging of Ca2+ changes in the soma, dendrites, and even single spines on fast time-scales greatly helps us understand the generation mechanism of diverse Ca2+ signaling events. However, Ca2+ imaging itself does not give information about ...
Calcium handling by mitochondria is important both because mitochondria can shape the cytosolic Ca2+ signals and because changes in mitochondrial Ca2+ concentration (M) are important for controlling physiological functions such as respiration or programmed cell death. Accur ...
A conventional borosilicate glass patch pipette is glued into a plastic jacket, forming the entity of a FlipTip�. One or two three-channel modules of recording tip sockets are mounted on a liquid handler platform to take up FlipTips. The tip sockets are connected to preamplifiers (HEKA) and to a suct ...
