Branches of Neuroscience

• Branches
  • Clinical
  • Preclinical
  • Translational
  • Basic Science
  • cell + molecular

Clinical

• using human brain

• look at human pathology from post-mortem tissue for analysis

• Noninvasive brain imaging techniques

  • structural
  • functional

• Structural

  • cerebral an
  • EEG
  • not imaging, measures electrical activity
  • cortical summated field potentials for excitatory activity in the brain using electrode nets/arrays
  • not getting a specific neuron but a group
  • fMRI
  • usually look at brain blood oxygenation-dependent imaging (BOLD) and how a task can change this to assess brain activity
  • Study found that the similar activation when you’r ein pain and you see a loved one pain

Preclinical

• uses an animal model; invertebae
• rodents very common
• Animal Behavioral paradigms for diffent behaviors
  • motor behaviors, sensory function, learning and memory, attention, and impulsivity, reward behaviors, mood related behaviors, social behavior
  • locomotor and motor behaviors
  • amount of locomotor behaviors
    • open field test
  • gait analysis and/or injury assessment
  • rotor rod; spins and mice/rats walks on it and measures grip strenghth
  • place preferred
  • thigmotaxis: spending time against wall of box, shows anxiety
  • Learning and memory
  • spatial dependent memory or non-spatial dependent memory
• morris water zone
• contextual fear of learning
• pairing sound with pain
• electro

Cell and Molecular

• Electrical activity- electrophysiology methods
• Chemical activity - methods to assess neurotransmitters or cell activity
• structure and circuitry tracing methods - molecular biomarkers, histology, electron microscopy, RNA, DNA, proteomic methods
• histology - analysis of tissue
• intracellular signaling methods - second messenger recruitment assay (what signal pathways occur in the presence of a drug etc., molecular association assays (determine position of receptors)
• Electrophysiology
  • measuring the electrical activity of neurons acro cell membranes or outside of the cell
  • electrical changes that occur during excitatory events (depolarization) or inhibitory events (hyperpolarization)
  • can measure from 1 cell or multiple cells (local field potentials)
• Immunohistochemistry
  • allows you to identify individual proteins by binging fluorescent or chromogenically labeled compounds to an antibody created to a specific peptide sequences
  • can see what proteins are expressed where
  • 2 methods of looking at glial fibriallary acid protein for astrocytes (to the right)
  • useful for beginning stages
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