News

In the latest issue of Neuron, Prof. Takahashi and Dr. Hori have reported the first reliable measurement of the rate that chemical neurotransmitter is replenished in the brain.

The Human Developmental Neurobiology Unit is primarily concerned not with theory or bench work, but with studying the causes and effects of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) to achieve tangible benefits for affected children and their families.

In two new papers, Prof. Bernd Kuhn and collaborators use novel techniques to visualize very different things: pH within protein crystals, and neurons in the cerebellum of the brain.

In a paper published last month in the Journal of Neuroscience, Prof. Erik De Schutter and his former postdoc Gabriela Antunes report that by constructing a computational model of many molecules in a part of the neuron that regulates synapse strength, they have gained new and surprising insight into what determines that strength.

By implanting a tiny drug delivery device into the brains of rats, researchers in OIST’s Neural Computation Unit were able to temporarily lower serotonin levels in the part of the brain responsible for patience, and to show that this loss caused the rats to give up before receiving an expected reward.

After a neuron fires an electrical impulse, this impulse needs to be chemically transmitted to another neuron to propagate into the neuronal circuit; otherwise communication would grind to a halt. In a paper published on May 10, 2012 in the journal Neuron, researchers at OIST identify a critical part of that chemical transmission.

The Japanese Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT) announced on April 9 that OIST faculty members Kenji Doya and Hidetoshi Saze will receive Commendations for Science and Technology by the Minister of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology.

The Human Frontiers Science Program (HFSP) announced Monday that a team that includes OIST’s Jeff Wickens has been awarded a three-year Program Grant.

A central, controversial, and long-standing question in neuroscience is how neurons encode the information they are sending along: is it the rate of spike firing that carries the message, or is the timing of the output spikes from a neuron relative to the input to that neuron more important?

An amazing learning period occurs during the early lives of both humans and song birds.