Two recent papers have attracted a lot of media attention because they draw direct links between adult neurogenesis and behavioral disorders: Noonan et al. showed that rats lacking adult neurogenesis (stopped with irradiation) are more susceptible to cocaine addiction. Jin et al. showed that mice lacking adult neurogenesis (using a…
I recently became re-acquainted with the neurogenesis literature while writing the last post, re-finding data in papers whose gist, but not details, I had remembered. I reached out a little bit, asking others if I had forgot any studies and indeed I had, including this study by Okano, Pfaff and…
Most studies of adult neurogenesis are concerned with neuronal age. Or at least they should be. This is because new neurons develop from a stage where they have no excitatory synapses to one where they have many. If we assume the traditional view that information is stored at excitatory synaptic…
Studies of adult neurogenesis often begin with the following sentence: “Adult neurogenesis occurs in all mammals examined, including humans.” More detail-oriented papers might say, “Adult neurogenesis occurs in all mammals examined, including humans…but not bats.” Here, the similarities between bats and humans become more evident than one might expect: it…
At 0.6% of the way into the decade, we’re well beyond the timeframe when most “things of the decade” articles appear. Now that “decade hype” has settled down I thought it would be fun to write a series of posts that discuss some of the major themes in adult neurogenesis…
The list as a Google spreadsheet (also excel | HTML | RSS feed of updates) List last updated 3/9/2011. I’ve always enjoyed making lists. As a kid I can remember writing lists of rhyming words, lists of all the Ocean Pacific clothes I owned, lists of all the people I knew.…
Kitamura et al. (2009) Adult Neurogenesis Modulates the Hippocampus-Dependent Period of Associative Fear Memory. Cell. 139:814-827. It’s great to see this paper finally in print. At SFN 2008 the authors had a poster that generated a lot of excitement, at least in our circles. And the poster was quite a…