So today the list of “official” SFN neurobloggers was released at the SFN website. And it immediately created a bit of an uproar. My initial beef was that I couldn’t ever seem to find the SFN blogging info without using Google. And also, I would like to know which other…
If you’ve been paying attention to the adult hippocampal neurogenesis literature at all, you noticed that “pattern separation” is gaining popularity as a research topic. A few quick searches on Pubmed confirm that a trend is indeed afoot. For the years prior to 1999, only 15 Pubmed-indexed papers answer to…
Based on a true story – how progress is made in the field of adult neurogenesis* A group of scientists reduce neurogenesis and report a memory deficit. A second group repeats the experiment, with only a few minor differences in protocol, and fails to find a memory deficit. A third…
And here we have the latest, craziest hypothesis of granule cell function. Crazy not because the authors have lost their minds but because the story of the dentate gyrus, where adult neurogenesis occurs, is becoming more peculiar every day. The underlying premise of this paper by Alme et al. (which we…
And now for a journey outside (rostral, to be precise) of my comfort zone. These three pictures show new neurons in the mouse olfactory bulb at successively greater magnifications. Probably inspired by the science magazine I read as a kid that would show high mag photos of everyday objects (with corresponding…
I was recently reading a number of old papers on memory and synaptic tagging and found myself wondering whether they were bloggable. My instincts said yes but the more I thought about it the more I realized they’re several years old and that is ancient by the standards of Twitter…
It’s fun to zoom out and get the big picture sometimes. This is one such picture I took long ago when I wanted to see if staining for zinc transporter 3 effectively labels the mossy fiber axons of the dentate gyrus. You can see by the perfect overlap with calbindin…
A fundamental property of the hippocampus is its ability to rapidly encode memories while simultaneously keeping them distinct. Recording from hippocampal neurons one can clearly see that different populations of neurons are active as a rat explores two environments. This is thought to be one mechanism by which information is…
Dendrites are the extensions of neurons that receive incoming information. Neurons have primary dendrites that further split off into secondary and tertiary dendritic branches. On each of these branches are thousands of synaptic connections with axons of neurons carrying incoming information. The result is a dendritic tree that is capable of receiving…
Yesterday I was taking pictures of 1-day-old neurons, which was irritating me for several reasons. First, at this age they’re small, irregular and uglier than the mature neurons I’m used to examining. Second, very immature neurons are located amongst a mess of proliferating cells and fellow young neurons so it…