Neuroscience and Neurobiology Commons^™

Exploring Neuroplasticity Changes In Neurotoxin-Induced Parkinson’S Disease: A Preliminary Analysis Using Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation, Tomas Gomez Jr., Daniel Salinas, Kelsey Potter-Baker, Nawaz Hack, Ramu Vadukapuram

Research Symposium

Background: Parkinson’s disease (PD) is a neurodegenerative condition that affects movement, cognition, gait, and significantly impacts one's quality of life. Studies have suggested that neurotoxin pre-exposure is related to PD pathology and progressive motor/non-motor deficits, though it remains unclear how neurotoxin exposure affects neuroplasticity. The present study aimed to examine neurotoxin–induced PD-associated neuroplasticity changes in relationship to mental acuity and PD motor functionalities.

Methods: 7 voluntary participants experiencing early-stage PD symptoms with self-reported neurotoxin pre-exposure were enrolled in the longitudinal, repeated-measures clinical study; 2 sex-matched, age-matched, and occupation-matched healthy subjects were recruited for controlled comparative analysis (n=9). UTRGV’s Institute …

A Potential Role Of Urinary P75ecd As A Biomarker For Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis In An American Cohort, Swati Dhasmana, Anupam Dhasmana, Sheema Khan, Acharan S. Narula, Murali Yallapu, Subhash Chauhan

Research Symposium

Background: Neurological disorders present a unique complexity compared to other diseases, involving multiple risk factors, causes, treatments, and outcomes. These disorders often exhibit various molecular and morphological changes indicative of disruptions in cellular plasticity and resilience. The pathogenesis of many neurological disorders remains unclear, necessitating ongoing investigations. Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) exemplifies an idiopathic and fatal neurodegenerative disease marked by the degeneration of upper and lower motor neurons. The average life expectancy post-diagnosis is a mere 36 months, primarily attributed to respiratory muscle denervation.The persistent challenges in ALS clinical trials and the absence of effective therapeutic options have intensified interest …

Methamphetamine-Induced Dna Double-Stranded Breaks: The Impact Of The Dopamine Transporter And Insights Into The Mechanisms Of Dna Damage In Mouse Neuro 2a Cells, Lizette Couto

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Methamphetamine (METH) abuse remains a global health concern, with emerging evidence highlighting its genotoxic potential. In the central nervous system METH enters dopaminergic cells primarily through the dopamine transporter (DAT), which controls the dynamics of dopamine (DA) neurotransmission by driving the reuptake of extracellular DA into the presynaptic neuronal cell. Additional effects of METH on the storage of DA in synaptic vesicles lead to the dysregulated cytosolic accumulation of DA. Previous studies have shown that after METH disrupts intracellular vesicular stores of DA, the excess DA in the cytosol is rapidly oxidized. This generates an abundance of reactive oxygen species …

Zebrafish Electroretinogram Responses, Brooke Campbell

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

The goal of this project is to be able to streamline a protocol for conducting ERGs on zebrafish from mice ERG protocol already present in Dr. Renna’s lab. The objective is to create a protocol specifically for zebrafish and to eliminate any issues that occur when transiting from a mice ERG protocol to a zebrafish ERG protocol and to obtain a light response from zebrafish retinae in differing light intensities. Dr. Renna’s lab has designed an Ex Vivo ERG system with less electrical interference creating defined electrical responses from mouse retina. The setup allows for continual perfusion of the retinal …

The Psychology Of The Stage: Intersections Of Cognitive Science And Theatre, Ariya Selvakumar

Student Scholar Symposium Abstracts and Posters

By engaging audiences in a stranger’s story, theatre often depends on emotional contagion and empathetic responses to strike interest and investment in characters and their circumstances. Mirror neuron systems are those highly tied to the activation of empathy. These neurons are brain cells that activate when we perform an action and witness an action being performed. For example, when someone is crying, a subset of neurons that fire when we cry will also fire in response to seeing this action, thus often leading to emotional contagion. With an understanding of cognitive science, we can closely examine the perspective-taking and emotion-prediction …

Covid‑19‑Related Risk, Resilience, And Mental Health Among Mexican American Mothers Across The First Year Of The Pandemic, Amy L. Non, Elizabeth S. Clausing, Sandraluz Lara‑Cinisomo, Kimberly L. D’Anna Hernandez

Center for Brain, Biology, and Behavior: Faculty and Staff Publications

Background Latina mothers have been especially affected by the pandemic and historically exhibit high rates of depression and anxiety. However, few longitudinal studies have assessed the effect of the pandemic on this vulnerable population. We hypothesized that COVID-19-related stressors would associate with psychological distress among Latina mothers across the first year of the pandemic.

Methods We investigated COVID-19-related impact, stigma, and fears across two critical time points and changes in these measures in relation to changes in maternal anxiety and depression among mothers of Mexican descent living in Southern California (n=152). Surveys were administered within 5–16 weeks of …

Reduced Grey Matter Volume In Adolescents With Conduct Disorder: A Region‑Of‑Interest Analysis Using Multivariate Generalized Linear Modeling, Ru Zhang, R. James R. Blair, Karina S. Blair, Matthew Dobbertin, Jordan E. Pierce, Johannah Bashford‑Largo, Ahria J. Dominguez, Melissa Hatch, Sahil Bajaj

Center for Brain, Biology, and Behavior: Faculty and Staff Publications

Background Conduct disorder (CD) involves a group of behavioral and emotional problems that usually begins during childhood or adolescence. Structural brain alterations have been observed in CD, including the amygdala, insula, ventrolateral and medial prefrontal cortex, anterior cingulate cortex, and fusiform gyrus. The current study developed a multivariate generalized linear model (GLM) to differentiate adolescents with CD from typically developing (TD) adolescents in terms of grey matter volume (GMV).

Methods The whole‐brain structural MRI data were collected from 96 adolescents with CD (mean age = 16.188 ± 1.259 years; mean IQ = 104.292 ± 8.107 ; 63 males) and 90 …

Short Chain Fatty Acid Combination Treatment Protects Against 6-Ohda And Wt Α-Synuclein Induced Decreases In Neurite Growth In In Vitro Models Of Parkinson’S Disease., Alex Morris

ORBioM (Open Research BioSciences Meeting)

Background

Parkinson’s disease (PD) is a neurodegenerative disorder characterized by dopaminergic neuron degeneration. This degeneration is partly driven by over expression of α-synuclein (α-syn) and development of α-syn aggregates known as Lewy bodies throughout the substantia nigra. As well as motor dysfunction, PD presents with several chronic gastrointestinal comorbidities, which cause a decline of gut microbial diversity and microbially derived short chain fatty acids (SCFAs). Recent in vivo studies have shown SCFAs to be neuroprotective in various degenerative disease states, suggesting that SCFAs may protect against dopaminergic degeneration.

Methods

Human neuroblastoma SH-SY5Y cells were used as a model of human …

A Multi-Modal Imaging Analysis Of Inter-Community Hub Nodes In Subjective Cognitive Decline Linking Longitudinal Hub Function Disruption To White Matter Integrity Kurtosis, Duncan Nowling

MUSC Theses and Dissertations

Subjective Cognitive Decline (SCD) has garnered much interest as a potential identifiable preclinical stage and indicator of risk for cognitive decline in Alzheimer’s Disease and related dementias (ADRD). Identification of individuals in this stage though is difficult, as they present with objectively normal cognitive evaluation scores, relying instead upon self-report of concern about decline in cognitive abilities. The use of non-invasive in-vivo imaging methods like BOLD functional imaging and diffusion tensor have allowed for complex mapping of both the functional and structural network features unique to this condition. This study furthers this network biomarker map of SCD by investigating the …

Specialized Late Cingulo-Opercular Network Activation Elucidates The Mechanisms Underlying Decisions About Ambiguity, Jordan E. Pierce, Nathan M. Petro, Elizabeth Clancy, Caterina Gratton, Steven E. Petersen, Maital Neta

Center for Brain, Biology, and Behavior: Faculty and Staff Publications

Cortical task control networks, including the cingulo-opercular (CO) network play a key role in decision-making across a variety of functional domains. In particular, the CO network functions in a performance reporting capacity that supports successful task performance, especially in response to errors and ambiguity. In two studies testing the contribution of the CO network to ambiguity processing, we presented a valence bias task in which masked clearly and ambiguously valenced emotional expressions were slowly revealed over several seconds. This slow reveal task design provides a window into the decision-making mechanisms as they unfold over the course of a trial. In …

Investigating Monodelphis Domestica As An Alternative To The Mus Musculus As An Animal Model, Cristian M. Botello, John L. Vandeberg, Mario Gil

Research Symposium

Background: Mus Musculus is one of the first and one of the most widely used animal models in current neuroscience literature (Phifer-Riley & Nachmann, 2015). However, the research community needs alternatives to rodent models to study the mammalian brain. Research is needed to see if antibodies that target tyrosine hydroxylase, which are well researched in mice, can also be used to study the Monodelphis domestica brain.

Methods: Following transcardial perfusions and brain extractions, mouse and opossum brains were processed and stained for tyrosine hydroxylase (and with Nissl). Opossum brains will then be sliced and processed using IHC methods to compare …

All-Cause And Opioid-Related Mortality Compared Between Traumatic Spinal Cord Injury And The Us General Population, Jaden Whitehead, Beatrice Ugiliweneza

The Cardinal Edge

Individuals with spinal cord injury (SCI) are susceptible to the misuse of opioids due to the introduction of these substances for pain management. There are very few studies examining the relationship between unintentional deaths caused by opioid usage following spinal cord injury. The objective of this study was to evaluate the trend of opioid-related mortality of individuals with spinal cord injury (SCI) over the years and compare these findings to the mortality rates due to opioid misuse in the general population. In this study, we used data provided by the National Spinal Cord Injury Model Systems (NSCIMS) for SCI 1999-2016 …

Automatic Analysis Of The Frequency, Vigor, And Complexity Of Spontaneous Locomotion Bouts Of Mice With Loss And Gain Of Function Of The G Protein-Coupled Receptor Smoothened In Cholinergic Neurons, Aleksandra Feshchenko

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Locomotion, a fundamental behavior, is classically assessed using simple metrics of velocity and total distance moved in an open field. This behavior however offers rich data about the organization and breadth of actions an animal can take while only facing limitations due to the bio-mechanical constraints of the organism. Importantly, these actions are not biased towards a particular task-solution space imposed by many behavioral paradigms. Here, to analyze motor complexity in freely ambulating mice, we developed a method for the automatic and unbiased identification of locomotor bouts which we call Bout Finder (BF). This analysis utilizes Open Feld data to …

Electrophysiological Signatures Of Stress Adaptability In The Bnst-Vta Pathway, Yuka Miura

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Chronic stress has detrimental effects on psychological and physiological health. Incapability to adapt to chronic stress can lead to depression, anxiety disorders, and addiction. The brain regions critical for reward processing share diverse physiological and molecular changes linked to depressive-like behaviors as a result of chronic stress. Cumulative evidence shows that counteraction or prevention of these alterations in neurons, occasionally in a projection-specific manner, can enhance stress adaptation or resilience.

Chronic stress induces various changes in the brain, including in the bed nucleus of the stria terminalis (BNST) and the ventral tegmental area (VTA). The neural projections from the BNST …

You Hurt My Feelings: Autonomic And Behavioral Responses To Social Exclusion And The Moderating Effect Of Psychopathic Traits, Liat Kofler

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Humans have a fundamental need to form and maintain social connections, and thus experiencing social exclusion is extremely distressing as it threatens this basic human need. Individuals who are socially excluded often respond aggressively, not only towards their ostracizers but also towards innocent bystanders, with ostracism being implicated in extreme acts of violence such as school shootings. However, individual differences in behavior exist within the context of social exclusion as not everyone responds aggressively after being ostracized. Identifying risk factors for retaliatory aggressive behavior following experiences of social exclusion may facilitate the development of targeted interventions aimed at mitigating such …

Assessing Blood Oxygen Level–Dependent Signal Variability As A Biomarker Of Brain Injury In Sport-Related Concussion, Evan D. Anderson, Tanveer Talukdar, Grace Goodwin, Valentina Di Pietro, Kamal M. Yakoub, Christopher E. Zwilling, David Davies, Antonio Belli, Aron K. Barbey

Center for Brain, Biology, and Behavior: Faculty and Staff Publications

Mild traumatic brain injury is a complex neurological disorder of significant concern among athletes who play contact sports. Athletes who sustain sport-related concussion typically undergo physical examination and neurocognitive evaluation to determine injury severity and return-to-play status. However, traumatic disruption to neurometabolic processes can occur with minimal detectable anatomic pathology or neurocognitive alteration, increasing the risk that athletes may be cleared for return-to-play during a vulnerable period and receive a repetitive injury. This underscores the need for sensitive functional neuroimaging methods to detect altered cerebral physiology in concussed athletes. The present study compared the efficacy of Immediate Post-concussion Assessment and …

Novel Insights Into Oligodendrocyte Biology From Developmental Myelination Studies In Autophagy Deficient Mice And Analysis Of Oligodendrocyte Translatome Response To Contusive Spinal Cord Injury., Michael David Forston

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Loss of myelin causes severe neurological disorders and functional deficits in white matter injuries (WMI) such as traumatic spinal cord injury (SCI). This dissertation is focused on autophagy in OL development and the OL translatome after SCI. Chapter I describes the history of myelin, OL development, and their involvement in neurodegenerative diseases and SCI. The proteostasis network, in particular autophagy, and its contributions to white matter pathology is discussed. It concludes examining advantages and disadvantages of unbiased omics tools, like RiboTag, to study transcriptional/translational landscapes after SCI. Chapter II focuses on autophagy in OPC/OL differentiation, survival, and proper myelination in …

Identification Of Structural Brain Alterations In Adolescents With Depressive Symptomatology, J. Bashford‑Largo, R. James R. Blair, Karina S. Blair, Matthew Dobbertin, Ahria Dominguez, Melissa Hatch, Sahil Bajaj

Center for Brain, Biology, and Behavior: Faculty and Staff Publications

Introduction: Depressive symptoms can emerge as early as childhood and may lead to adverse situations in adulthood. Studies have examined structural brain alternations in individuals with depressive symptoms, but findings remain inconclusive. Furthermore, previous studies have focused on adults or used a categorical approach to assess depression. The current study looks to identify grey matter volumes (GMV) that predict depressive symptomatology across a clinically concerning sample of adolescents.

Methods: Structural MRI data were collected from 338 clinically concerning adolescents (mean age = 15.30 SD=2.07; mean IQ = 101.01 SD=12.43; 132 F). Depression symptoms were indexed via the Mood …

Specialized Late Cingulo-Opercular Network Activation Elucidates The Mechanisms Underlying Decisions About Ambiguity, Jordan E. Pierce, Nathan M. Petro, Elizabeth Clancy, Caterina Gratton, Steven E. Petersen, Maital Neta

Center for Brain, Biology, and Behavior: Faculty and Staff Publications

Cortical task control networks, including the cingulo-opercular (CO) network play a key role in decision-making across a variety of functional domains. In particular, the CO network functions in a performance reporting capacity that supports successful task performance, especially in response to errors and ambiguity. In two studies testing the contribution of the CO network to ambiguity processing, we presented a valence bias task in which masked clearly and ambiguously valenced emotional expressions were slowly revealed over several seconds. This slow reveal task design provides a window into the decision-making mechanisms as they unfold over the course of a trial. In …

Let Kids Sleep: The Role Of Interdisciplinary Neuroscience Outreach In Stimulating Brains And Developing Research-Informed Approaches To Community Concerns, Marc Chenard

University Honors Theses

Northwest Noggin (NW Noggin), an all-volunteer neuroscience education outreach non-profit, serves its community by bringing students, artists, scientists and other participants together for artistic collaboration and learning. The outreach takes place in K-12 schools and other institutions (such as museums, coffee shops and correctional facilities) all over the Pacific Northwest. Neuroscience education outreach generates discourse surrounding community concerns through illuminating the brain-centric qualities of issues and by drawing on neuroscience research to create solutions. The neuroscience research-informed perspectives on these concerns stimulate awareness, create momentum towards evidence-based reform, and can result in policy interventions. This thesis details how NW Noggin …

Asymmetric Event-Related Potential Priming Effects Between English Letters And American Sign Language Fingerspelling Fonts, Zed Sevcikova Sehyr, Katherine J. Midgley, Karen Emmory, Phillip J. Holcomb

Communication Sciences and Disorders Faculty Articles and Research

Letter recognition plays an important role in reading and follows different phases of processing, from early visual feature detection to the access of abstract letter representations. Deaf ASL–English bilinguals experience orthography in two forms: English letters and fingerspelling. However, the neurobiological nature of fingerspelling representations, and the relationship between the two orthographies, remains unexplored. We examined the temporal dynamics of single English letter and ASL fingerspelling font processing in an unmasked priming paradigm with centrally presented targets for 200 ms preceded by 100 ms primes. Event-related brain potentials were recorded while participants performed a probe detection task. Experiment 1 examined …

Creating Project Contrast: A Video Game Exploring Consciousness And Qualia, Pierce Papke

Honors Projects

Project Contrast is a video game that explores how the unique traits inherent to video games might engage reflective player responses to qualitative experience. Project Contrast does this through suspension of disbelief, avatar projection, presence, player agency in storytelling, visual perception, functional gameplay, and art. Considering the difficulty in researching qualitative experience due to its subjectivity and circular explanations, I created Project Contrast not to analyze qualia, though that was my original hope. I instead created Project Contrast as an avenue for player self-reflection and learning about qualitative experience. While video games might be just code and art on a …

Examining The Use Of Expressive Arts Therapies In Neurorehabilitation Treatment Planning, Rebecca J. Horner

Expressive Therapies Capstone Theses

Those undergoing neurorehabilitation after stroke and traumatic brain injury report a diminished sense of overall wellness. This paper examines the conceivable benefits of introducing expressive arts therapies, which is the therapeutic use and combination of the visual arts, movement, drama, music, writing and other intermodal creative processes, into physical therapy and neurorehabilitation treatment planning. Expressive arts therapies have the capacity to engage with an individual’s physical, emotional, social and spiritual states concurrently. They simultaneously offer the ability to promote an increased sense of well-being, address mind-body disconnects, and process trauma non-verbally.

The sections of this narrative literature review focus on …

The Role Of Complement In Stroke And Traumatic Brain Injury, Christine Couch

MUSC Theses and Dissertations

Brain and neural injury are a non-specific disease category that includes traumatic brain injury (TBI) and stroke. Both TBI and stroke are common, costly, and leading causes of severe disability in adults. Both stroke and TBI are responsible for substantial disability in working age adults, with stroke being the second leading cause of death worldwide [1] and TBI a major cause of disability in people younger than their 40's [2]. The immune response after brain injury is multifactorial and involves both local and systemic events at the cellular and molecular level. The complement system is a component of both the …

Automated Delineation Of Visual Area Boundaries And Eccentricities By A Cnn Using Functional, Anatomical, And Diffusion-Weighted Mri Data, Noah C. Benson, Bogeng Song, Toshikazu Miyata, Hiromasa Takemura, Jonathan Winawer

MODVIS Workshop

Delineating visual field maps and iso-eccentricities from fMRI data is an important but time-consuming task for many neuroimaging studies on the human visual cortex because the traditional methods of doing so using retinotopic mapping experiments require substantial expertise as well as scanner, computer, and human time. Automated methods based on gray-matter anatomy or a combination of anatomy and functional mapping can reduce these requirements but are less accurate than experts. Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) are powerful tools for automated medical image segmentation. We hypothesize that CNNs can define visual area boundaries with high accuracy. We trained U-Net CNNs with ResNet18 …

Sleep Problems In Old Age: Metabotropic Glutamate Receptor To The Rescue, Sho Inami, Dinis J.S. Afonso, Kyunghee Koh

Farber Institute for Neuroscience Faculty Papers

No abstract provided.

Improving Traumatic Brain Injury Outcomes: Early Identification And Management Of Paroxysmal Sympathetic Hyperactivity, Randi Rockwell

Doctor of Nursing Practice Projects

Abstract

Background: Paroxysmal sympathetic hyperactivity (PSH) can occur in patients with acutely acquired brain injury and is associated with mortality, poor clinical outcomes, prolonged hospitalizations, physical disability, and increased healthcare costs. The most common cause of PSH syndrome is traumatic brain injury (TBI). Symptoms consist of hyperthermia, diaphoresis, arterial hypertension, tachycardia, tachypnea, and extremity motor dystonic posturing, often in response to evoked stimuli and occurs in 8% to 33% of TBI patients. Critical care nurses are at the forefront of providing direct patient care to TBI patients and are often the first to identify PSH.

Purpose: The objective of this …

Aggression In And Out Of The Surrounding Space, Marissa Incer

Undergraduate Honors Theses

Social isolation is a type of punishment used to address misbehavior in individuals, such as children with time-outs and prisoners in solitary confinement. It was thought to be an effective method for teaching good behavior or alleviating tense situations. However, this type of punishment may worsen the punished individual’s aggression depending on the environment of isolation. The current study was divided into two experiments. In the first experiment, participants were isolated in a small (2x2 feet) or large (6x6 feet) space to observe if the space alone affected their aggression. In the second experiment, a frustration-inducing task was given to …

Immobilization And Its Effects On Functional Recovery After Spinal Cord Injury., William H. Gregory

College of Arts & Sciences Senior Honors Theses

Recovery, or rather the failure to recover, is a perplexing issue of spinal cord injury that is currently being investigated. This issue becomes more puzzling when investigating models in which spinal cord injury (SCI) is studied. There appears to be greater functional recovery experienced by animals within these models after injury as compared to patients in the clinical setting. While many things could contribute to this disparity, one difference that stands out when comparing the basic research model and clinical experience of SCI is the inactivity and limb disuse after the injury. This same level of immobility is rarely accounted …

Music & Synesthesia: An Exploration Of Synesthesia And Its Relation To Musical Perception, Raquel S. Johnson

Pacific Undergraduate Research and Creativity Conference (PURCC)

This research investigates synesthesia and its impact on musical perception. Synesthesia is the multimodal sensory phenomenon in which the stimulation of one sensory modality generates the experience of a second, otherwise unrelated sense. Discussed topics include: a description of synesthesia and its neurophysiological and perceptual characteristics, the historical conceptualization and documentation of synesthesia beginning with the ancient Greeks, and present-day scientific inquiry. This research explores three varying types of auditory synesthesia - chromesthesia (sound-to-color synesthesia), auditory-tactile synesthesia, and sound-gustatory/sound-olfactory synesthesia - and their multimodal sensory characteristics in relation to music. Prominent neurophysiological hypotheses regarding the existence of synesthesia are examined, …