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Students in Meg Hodgin's AP Psychology class were recently divided into self-selected groups, based off of preferred learning styles, and tasked with creating a lesson plan on how a neuron fires using their selected learning approaches. The groups used musical, naturalistic, interpersonal, intrapersonal, kinesthetic and existential teaching approaches for their presentations. Video by Glenn Minshall.
A new study in mice uncovered a previously unknown role that the central amygdala can play in upgrading or downgrading pain signals in the brain’s circuitry.
Read more: www.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/nih-study-mice-expl...
Credit: National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health/NIH
this was taken in the Calgary International Airport before boarding -- it is one of those airport toys to occupy/entertain children or photographers....
This image cannot be used on websites, blogs or other media without explicit my permission. © All rights reserved
The GFP+ (green) neuron depicted is an embryonic radial glia stem cell.
These cells are found in an area called the ventricular zone during embryonic development and this area unsurprisingly flanks the ventricles of the brain.
These radial glia stem cells will give rise to neurons and glia.
Notice that there appears to be projections moving upwards (towards pial surface) and downwards (toward ventricle) from the soma of the stem cell. These are projections that are important to cellular migration of daughter cells and orienting the stem cell itself.
Image is a ~30 micron thick coronal section of the somatosensory cortex of an embryonic mouse brain.
Blue=DAPI (Binds DNA, marks nucleus)
Red = Pax6 (Transcription factor and marker of pluripotency)
Green = GFP (From jellyfish, used to identify affected cells in an experiment)
Cells within an injured mouse eye can be coaxed into regenerating neurons and those new neurons appear to integrate themselves into the eye’s circuitry, new research shows. The findings potentially open the door to new treatments for eye trauma and retinal disease.
Credit: Tom Reh, Ph.D.
This image is not owned by the NIH. It is shared with the public under license. If you have a question about using or reproducing this image, please contact the creator listed in the credits. All rights to the work remain with the original creator.
NIH support from: National Eye Institute
A mouse neuron in the striatum imaged using a two-photon optical microscope allows researchers to measure changes to dendritic spines and their influence on addiction.
More information: irp.nih.gov/our-research/research-in-action/a-conviction-...
Credit: Veronica Alvarez, National Institutes of Health
Watching the cortical video was like flying through a 3D extrusion of a Jackson Pollock.
[which reminded me of a flickr conversation that spilled over to lunch today... about how we see beauty in certain common patterns in nature... resonant homologies if you will... It seems that we like the emergent constructs, fractal and nested, that arise from iterative computations (evolution, organic growth...). In other words, we appreciate the accumulated computational complexity produced by evolutionary dynamics (genetic and memetic).]
Henry Markram from EPFL showed videos of the morphologically complex dentritic maps from the 10K neurons in one human cortical column. An IBM BlueGene computer runs at 22TFLOPS to model 10 million dynamic synapses for those 10K neurons.
The output from BlueGene is a data stream of 1 terabyte per sec. So they need another supercomputer (SGI with 300GB shared memory) for visualization to assess if the results are interesting.
Crochet neurons that I've made for the "Knit a Neuron" project. They're my first ever bit of crochet!
A fluorescent microscopic image of numerous dopaminergic neurons (the type of neurons that are degenerated in Parkinson’s disease patients) generated from human embryonic stem cells. The neuronal cell bodies with axons are visible in green and the nuclei in blue.
This photo was taken in the lab of Xianmin Zeng at the Buck Institute for Age Research.
Learn more about CIRM-funded stem cell research: www.cirm.ca.gov
Thin section of the optic lobe of a pupal Drosophila brain. Axons of photoreceptors (blue) and lamina neurons (green) bypass the lamina and project into different layers of the medulla (red, center), where the visual information is integrated and processed and further relayed to the lobula complex (red, bottom).
Credit: J. Luo, C.H. Lee, Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute for Child Health and Human Development, NIH
l'attività elettrica di un singolo neurone, extracellular registration
2014
Nikon F-601
PhotoSì expired film
50mm f1.8
A picture of an immature PSA-NCAM positive neuron. It's from an old rat, which therefore has low levels of neurogenesis, which works out nicely because it allows you to more clearly see the dendrites, unobscured by those of neighboring cells.
The pond on my parents' farm was hovering on the boundary between freezing and thawing for several days when we noticed that hundreds of these neuron-shaped fissures formed in the ice. Each was seeded by a leaf or some other object at the center.
A neuron has a soma (cell body) from which processes emerge. The processes that receive information from synapses are called dendrites, while the process that carry the information from the soma is called the axon. Neurons have only one axon. The axon emerges from the axon hillock and is covered by glial cells, in this case an oligodendrocyte of the CNS, that form the myelin. If the neuron was in the PNS, its axon would be covered by other glial cells called Schwann cells. Gaps between the myelin are called nodes of Ranvier. The axon ends in branches at the axon terminal and the branches enlarge at their ends to form synaptic end bulbs. (Image credit: "Labeled parts of a neuron" by Chiara Mazzasette is licensed under CC BY 4.0 / A derivative from the original work)
Neurons (red) converted from glial cells using a new NeuroD1-based gene therapy in mice.
It’s a race against time when someone suffers a stroke caused by a blockage of a blood vessel supplying the brain. Unless clot-busting treatment is given within a few hours after symptoms appear, vast numbers of the brain’s neurons die, often leading to paralysis or other disabilities. Thanks to gene therapy, some encouraging strides are now being made towards being able to replace those lost neurons.
In a recent study in Molecular Therapy, NIH-funded researchers reported that, in their mouse and rat models of ischemic stroke, gene therapy could actually convert the brain’s glial (support) cells into new, fully functional neurons. Even better, after gaining the new neurons, the animals had improved motor and memory skills.
Read more on the NIH Director's Blog: directorsblog.nih.gov/2019/09/24/gene-therapy-shows-promi...
Credit: Chen Laboratory, Penn State, University Park
NIH support from: National Institute on Aging; National Institute of Mental Health
Usually you don't see immature neurons in the superficial layers of the dentate gyrus. I think this happens more in mice than in rats. Sometimes I see them all the way in the molecular layer.
A major aim of the NIH-led Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies® (BRAIN) Initiative is to develop new technologies that allow us to look at the brain in many different ways on many different scales.
Here you get a close-up look at pyramidal neurons located in the hippocampus, a region of the mammalian brain involved in memory. While this tiny sample of mouse brain is densely packed with many pyramidal neurons, researchers used new ExLLSM technology to zero in on just three. This super-resolution, 3D view reveals the intricacies of each cell’s structure and branching patterns.
Read more on the NIH Director's Blog: bit.ly/2TSOng1
Credit: Yang Lab/University of California and K. Chung/MIT
NIH support from: NIMH, NINDS, and NIBIB
A mouse CA1 pyramidal cell (green) is being contacted by a neurogliaform inhibitory interneuron (red). Credit: McBain Laboratory, NICHD/NIH
Multipolar neuron in embryonic mouse brain (~E16 or so). Neuron was transfected with a plasmid expressing GFP. Blue colorization is from DAPI staining and represents DNA of nearby cells.
Hand stitched and bound shibori techniques on habotai silk
Image: Pinegate Photographics, Cardiff
Endogenous, meaning ‘from within’, refers to her own Endogenous Depression, but also to the act of giving her inner-most feelings a physical form. This series of sculptures has become the means by which she externalises her continuing battle with depression. Whilst the sculptures represent her inner self, bound by the constraints of depression, their inherent purity and beauty are a testament to the new confidence and inner peace she has gained through her art.
The act of hand stitching and binding the fabric is as important to her as the resulting sculpture. The concept of “the hand healing the mind” is a significant aspect of her work; the repetitive rhythmical action of stitching or binding the cloth being a meditative one. By becoming “one with the cloth” one is taken out of oneself. The act of engaging with the cloth removes one from depressive self-absorption. The realisation of her own depression has led to her preoccupation with how other sufferers envision their own condition. Her resolve is to explore/record these through an extensive series of sculptural pieces.
Her work records the actions found within shibori; stitching, binding, gathering, manipulating and folding - not through the expected dye process, but purely as texture and form. It was whilst in Japan as part of her Embroiderers' Guild mature scholarship studies (May/June 2002) that she first observed the artisans who had spent their entire lives manipulating cloth prior to its being dyed. As a trained musician, she was fascinated to see that the repetitive shibori actions were not only represented on the cloth as pattern and texture, but were also imprinted upon the artisans hands and minds. She wished to learn more about these traditional techniques in order that these skills would not be lost with the passing generations, whilst at the same time developing her own personal shibori vocabulary suitable for the 21st Century.
Dorsal root ganglia (DRG) are sensory neurons that form on the outside of the spinal cord and extend axons throughout our bodies as part of our peripheral nervous system during development. This DRG has been grown in medium conditioned by endothelial cells, and shows significantly longer axonal extensions from the center of the explant (circular region of dense staining for β-III tubulin, red) than explants grown in standard medium. Isolating the factors that are responsible for this enhanced growth is essential to understand how vascular and neuronal systems pattern together during development. These findings will be used to develop 3D model systems to study these processes and direct the angiogenic response in regenerating tissues to ultimately encourage re-innervation.
This image was chosen as a winner of the 2016 NIH funded research image call.
This image is not owned by the NIH. It is shared with the public under license. If you have a question about using or reproducing this image, please contact the creator listed in the credits. All rights to the work remain with the original creator.
Credit: Jonathan Grasman and David Kaplan, Tufts University
Three views of an olfactory projection neuron in the brain of an adult locust: Dorsal (top), anterior (bottom left), and lateral (bottom right). Credit: T. Miyazaki, NICHD
GFP expressing neurons in the Drosophila larval (maggot) body wall. This picture was snapped from a live specimen using epiflourescence microscope equipped with an EM-CCD camera.
Neurons (also neurones or nerve cells or nerve fibers) are a major class of cells (parenchyma) in the nervous system. In vertebrates, neurons are found in the brain, the spinal cord and in the nerves and ganglia of the peripheral nervous system. Their main role is to process and transmit information. Morphologically, a prototypical neuron is composed of a cell body, a dendritic tree and an axon. In the classical view of the neuron, the cell body and dendritic tree receive inputs from other neurons, and axon transmits output signals. Neurons have excitable membranes, which allow them to generate and propagate electrical impulses. Neurons make connections with other neurons and transmit information to them via synaptic transmission. Different types of neurons have different shapes, possess specific electrical properties adopted for their function and use different neurotransmitters.
Les neurones à GnRH (cellules visualisées en rouges) qui naissent dans le nez au cours du développement embryonnaire, utilisent les fibres olfactives (marquage vert et bleu) pour migrer dans le cerveau jusqu'à l'hypothalamus pendant la vie fœtale. De là, ils orchestreront plus tard la fertilité.
©Vincent Prévot ; European Research Council/Agence Nationale de la Recherche Médicale/Métropole Européenne de Lille/Inserm.licence CC-BY-NC 4.0 international
Image accompagnant le communiqué de presse publié le 17 septembre 2020 : "Puberté précoce : une piste d’explication pour certains cas ?" presse.inserm.fr/puberte-precoce-une-piste-dexplication-p...
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Jusqu’à récemment, il était communément admis que c’était l’accélération de la croissance qui déclenchait la puberté. Or, une équipe de recherche de l’Inserm, du CHU de Lille et de l’Université de Lille, au sein du laboratoire Lille Neuroscience et Cognition, a découvert en 2020 chez la souris un mécanisme associé au pic de croissance prépubère et au déclenchement d’une puberté précoce. Ce mécanisme est régulé par les neurones à GnRH, les chefs d’orchestre de la fertilité, via l’expression de leur protéine Nrp1. Ces travaux, publiés dans The EMBO Journal, remettent en question les connaissances sur les déclencheurs de la puberté et ouvrent la voie à l’étude de ce mécanisme chez l’humain et à son implication possible dans certains cas de puberté précoce.
A fluorescent microscopic image of neural precursors generated from human embryonic stem cells. The neural cell bodies are visible in red and the nuclei in blue.
This photo was taken in the lab of Xianmin Zeng at the Buck Institute for Age Research.
Learn more about CIRM-funded stem cell research: www.cirm.ca.gov
Neuroscience Prof. Anil Seth argues that conscious human intelligence is tightly coupled to our living, biological substrate, not replicable or simulatable in silicon. Here are some of my reactions to his thought-provoking piece:
If human intelligence and consciousness is substrate dependent, as asserted, even down to individual neurons being irreplaceable by silicon substrates, then some precise and strong claims emerge: uploading human consciousness to a new substrate (as referenced in the article) would not be possible, and the BCI companies should not be able to augment the core of human intelligence. This would have profound implications on the possibility of “humanity” going along for the ride of exponential progress in AI.
(As an aside, it’s far more likely that our biology is left behind, and building an AI that exceeds human intelligence will likely happen before we fully understand the brains we have. It’s easier to build a new one than reverse engineer the complex product of an iterative algorithm like evolution, cortical pruning, or neural net development. The locus of learning shifts to the process, not the product of development.)
Let me lend further evidence to the article’s claim that neural complexity vastly exceeds the neural net abstractions of current AI, and that human intelligence may be substrate dependent. At the high level of the connectome, the average adult has 1000 input synapses to each neuron, and a newborn baby has 10,000. Silicon chips do not have enough metal layers to implement this level of fan-in per gate. And these connections are dynamic; 90% are pruned in childhood development, and neurons that fire together wire together in a dynamic and ongoing remapping over time. Pure, detailed biomimicry of the brain in mainstream CMOS silicon may be impossible, for now and the foreseeable future. Dynamic interconnect is the issue, and it may require a fully 3D, fluid, low power substrate. Like the brain. And it might take some of the special chemical properties of carbon to capture the richness (I wondered about this in 2005)
On the other end of the spectrum, the complexity of the neuron vastly exceeds a simple sigmoid voting circuit or digital gate abstraction. Ion channels activate like a bucket brigade down each synapse. HIV-like particles and endogenous cannabinoids may play a role in nearest neighbor interactions outside the synapse. The extra-cellular matrix, like the potting soil outside the neuron, relaxes in a long series of critical periods of childhood development, and under the influence of psychedelics, changing the neuroplasticity for interconnect changes. And the neuron types may be vastly more varied that the observable phenotypic buckets (pyramidal, mirror neurons, etc.). MIT’s Ed Boyden believes that the gene expression of each neuron is unique — literally billions of different neuron types.
But, even if human intelligence and consciousness are fully substrate dependent, it does not follow that human-level intelligence is impossible with a different substrate. We may have only one existence proof from biological evolution, but that does not imply exclusivity in the space of possibilities. The substrate of our brains is not very different from less intelligent animals; our unique advancement came from layering on more self-similar cortex — not a better substrate but more of it.
There is much of our substrate that is unique from its evolutionary origins and as a way to make the most of it – it’s quite a miracle that meat can think at all… and do math and compute, even if we choose not to. We can imagine a certain percentage of our substrate is for basic metabolic support and garbage collection and not fundamentally essential for the thinking at hand, when abstracted at the right level. It’s like the power supply implementation of a computer not being essential to the computation architecture itself. Some portion of the genetic code in each neuron is a vestigial passenger from viral transposons of the past.
It’s safe to say that some fraction of our substrate is critical to the architecture of intelligence, and the critical exercise of biomimicry is to figure out the right level of abstraction, the right level of detail, if we wish to follow a similar path in a different substrate.
The critique of current AI approaches as falling short with an over-simplistic simplification may be correct, but not insurmountable. Or the shortcomings could be a vestige of the architecture and process of training the LLMs of today. A number of the AI advances of the past decade were focused on Reinforcement Learning. It was Deep Mind’s initial focus. There has been a revival of late, with some like Yann LeCun arguing that LLMs will never get us there… but RL will. We have believed for many years that the future of AI compute will be analog in-memory compute, as implemented in Mythic chips, and the brain. Some believe it will require an embodied intelligence interacting with the world of physical AI. Jeff Hawkins is working on a memory prediction architecture arguing that the brain is not a computer at all (and perhaps the qualia of consciousness is the merely the retrospective sensemaking of predictions occurring continuously at all layers of the cortex). Perhaps we will need a coincidence detector for asynchronous circuits to mimic the fire-together/wire-together paradigm (perhaps with reversible-computing resonators). Perhaps a neurosymbolic hybrid will bear fruit in mimicking different brain regions distinctly. Perhaps we will need a series of critical periods, like human children, with a path dependence on the sequencing of neural net training. There are many possibilities and exciting work to come, a Cambrian explosion of sorts, exploring different abstractions of architecture and processes of training.
While we humans want to feel special, unique, and central to the future, it does not make it so. One day, we will have a more advanced non-human intelligence that is conscious. That will happen quite simply by considering the next million years of continued biological evolution, with a selection function that rewards intelligence. To argue otherwise is to argue that homo sapiens are somehow the endpoint of evolution. Evolution does not suddenly end, even if we wish it to. The biological substrate of our successor species will likely be similar to ours, as the primary vector of evolutionary progress operates most rapidly at the highest level of abstraction. The open question is whether non-biological evolutionary algorithms will usher in non-biological intelligence that is superhuman and conscious in a handful of years if we are pursuing the right level of abstraction for conscious intelligence or maybe decades if we need to explore radically different analogs to our analog meat minds.
— Anil Seth is the director of the Centre for Consciousness Science at the University of Sussex. Here is his article in Noema
In a study conducted by NIDA intramural scientists, details of the role of glutamate, the brain’s excitatory chemical, in a drug reward pathway were identified for the first time. (Pictured –partial view of labelled neurons in reward circuitry that starts in dorsal raphe; ventral tegmental area)
Credit: National Institute of Drug Abuse, National Institutes of Health