Neuroscience and Neurobiology Commons^™

The Genomics Of Champ1: Insights Into Their Cell-Type Specificity And Developmental Trajectories, Zoe Marie Van Caugherty

MUSC Theses and Dissertations

Chromosome alignment maintaining phosphoprotein 1(CHAMP1) is a gene that encodes a zinc finger protein that is involved in in the maintenance of kinetochore-microtubule attachment and regulating chromosome segregation in mitosis. (Itoh et al., 2011) CHAMP1 mutations have been shown to be major risk factors for neurodevelopmental disorders (NDDs) and autism spectrum disorder (ASD).(Asakura et al., 2021; Isidor et al., 2016; Levy et al., 2022) Although there is information on the link between CHAMP1 mutations and NDD, the role of CHAMP1 in regulating processes of human cortical development, namely, neurogenesis, proliferation, and electrophysiological properties of newly born neurons, is unknown. This …

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 …

Activity Dynamics Of The Nucleus Accumbens Neurons During Natural And Drug Reward Seeking, Reda M. Chalhoub

MUSC Theses and Dissertations

The nucleus accumbens core (NAc) represents a major neural substrate of reward encoding that has been found to play a role in differentially regulating natural and drug rewards, including cocaine. Its constituent D1- and D2- receptor expressing medium spiny neurons (MSN) are alternatively hypothesized to have either opposing effects on reward seeking or a shared role in forming encoding “ensembles” – a sparsely activated population of neurons that encode reward associations- that coordinate behavioral responding to rewards and cues predicting reward availability. Previous methods used to study these neuronal populations failed to temporal quantify the cell-type specific activity in reward …

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 …

Identifying Functional Imaging Markers In Psychosis Using Fmri, Ruiqi Wang

MUSC Theses and Dissertations

Major types of psychotic disorders include schizophrenia (SCZ), bipolar disorder (BP) and schizoaffective disorder (SZA). These disorders have profound and overlapping symptoms with marked cognitive deficits, and their diagnosis relies on symptom clusters. The treatments for psychosis are usually focused on positive symptoms such as delusions and hallucinations. Although cognitive impairments underlie both positive and negative symptoms, functional brain imaging biomarkers that can reliably predict a patient's cognitive deficits are still lacking. Therefore, this project used functional MRI to explore the feasibility of using functional connectivity (FC) to predict cognitive performance.

A total of 207 subjects (BP: 79, SZ/SZA: 48, …

The Genomics Of Autism-Related Genes Il1rapl1 And Il1rapl2: Insights Into Their Cortical Distribution, Cell-Type Specificity, And Developmental Trajectories, Jacob Weaver

MUSC Theses and Dissertations

Neuropsychiatric disorders have a significant impact on modern society. These disorders affect a large percentage of the population: schizophrenia has a world-wide prevalence of 1% and autism spectrum disorders (ASD) affects 1 in 59 school-aged children in the US. There is substantial evidence that most neuropsychiatric disorders have a genetic component. Thus, with the advent of high throughput sequencing much effort has gone into identifying genetic variants associated with these disorders. The emerging picture from these studies is a complex one where hundreds of genes with small effects interact with a varied landscape of common variants to result in disease. …