• 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