Minocycline, a known inhibitor of microglial activation, was systemically administered to middle-aged AA rats significantly restoring the mean magnitudes of both PTP and LTP. The mean expression levels of ED1 and IL-1 beta were significantly suppressed. These observations strongly suggest that chronic systemic inflammation induces deficits in the hippocampal LTP in middle-aged rats through neuroinflammation mainly induced by microglia. (C) 2012 IBRO. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.”
“Alpha-band oscillations are the dominant oscillations in the human brain and recent evidence suggests that they

have an inhibitory Avapritinib function. Nonetheless, there is little doubt that alpha-band oscillations also play an active role in information processing. In this article, I suggest

that alpha-band oscillations have two roles (inhibition and timing) that are closely linked to two fundamental functions of attention (suppression and selection), which enable controlled knowledge access and semantic orientation (the ability to be consciously oriented in time, space, and context). As such, alpha-band oscillations reflect one of the most basic cognitive processes and can also be shown to play a key role in the coalescence of brain activity in different Selleckchem MG-132 frequencies.”
“MicroRNA (miRNA) play essential roles in biological processes ranging from cellular proliferation to apoptosis. Recently, miRNA have also been implicated in a number of diseases including cancers. However, the targets of most Bcl-w miRNA remain unknown. The majority of reports describing identification

of miRNA targets are based on computational approaches or detection of altered mRNA levels despite the fact that most miRNA are thought to regulate their targets primarily at the level of translational inhibition in animals. miR-21 is a miRNA with oncogenic activity that is involved in various cancer-related processes such as invasion and migration. Given the importance of miR-21 in tumorigenesis, we employed a quantitative proteomic strategy to systematically identify potential targets of miR-21. By knocking down the expression of endogenous miR-21 in MCF-7 breast cancer cells, we observed an increase in the abundance of 58 proteins, implying that they could be potential targets of miR-21. Validation of 12 of these candidate targets in luciferase assays showed that 6 of them were likely direct targets of miR-21. Importantly, the mRNA of the majority of the candidate targets tested did not show a concomitant increase in abundance. Overall, our results demonstrate that miR-21 affects the expression of many of its targets through translational inhibition and highlights the utility of proteomic approaches for identifying miRNA targets.”
“The locus coeruleus (LC) is the major loci of noradrenergic innervation to the forebrain.