Our results suggest that beat stimulation

offers a non-invasive approach for the modulation of intracranial EEG characteristics. ”
“Department of Neuroscience and Brain Technologies, Italian Institute of Technology (IIT), Via Morego, 30, 16163 Genova, Italy The olfactory bulb (OB) is the first brain region involved in the processing of olfactory information. In adult mice, the OB is highly plastic, undergoing cellular/molecular dynamic changes that are modulated by sensory experience. Odour deprivation induces down-regulation of tyrosine hydroxylase (TH) expression in OB dopaminergic interneurons located in the glomerular layer (GL), resulting in decreased dopamine in the OB. Although the effect of sensory deprivation is well established, little is known about the influence of odour enrichment on dopaminergic cells. Here we report that prolonged odour enrichment INCB024360 mw on C57BL/6J strain mice selectively increases TH-immunopositive cells in the

GL by nearly 20%. Following odour enrichment on TH–green fluorescent protein (GFP) transgenic mice, in which GFP identified both mature TH-positive cells and putative immature dopaminergic cells expressing TH mRNA but not TH protein, we found a similar 20% increase in GFP-expressing cells, with no changes in the ratio between TH-positive and TH-negative cells. These data TSA HDAC solubility dmso suggest that enriched conditions induce an expansion in the whole dopaminergic lineage. Accordingly, by using 5-bromo-2-deoxyuridine injections to label adult-generated

cells in the GL of TH–GFP mice, we found an increase in the percentage of 5-bromo-2-deoxyuridine-positive dopaminergic cells in enriched compared with control conditions, whereas no differences were found for calretinin- and calbindin-positive subtypes. Strikingly, the fraction of newborn cells among the dopaminergic population doubled in enriched conditions. On the whole, our results demonstrate that from odour enrichment drives increased integration of adult-generated dopaminergic cells that could be critical to adapt the OB circuits to the environmental incoming information. ”
“As Saddoris et al. (2011) emphasized in their exciting new study, reward-directed actions are often initiated or facilitated by conditional stimuli that have been independently associated with the reward. The influence of conditional cues over action is also thought to play a major role in drug addiction. Yet, vital as this process may be to learned behavior, it is a difficult one to isolate experimentally, and little is known about its mechanism at the level of neuronal activity. Here, the authors make new headway on the issue by measuring neural firing correlates of Pavlovian–instrumental transfer (PIT) in rats.