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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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