Michael Platt Receives Duke's Receives Duke's Master Teacher/Clinician Award

   Michael Platt receives honor

Michael Platt Receives Duke's Receives Duke's Master Teacher/Clinician Award. More information will be coming....

 Erich Jarvis Named Howard Hughes Investigator

   Erich Jarvis Named Howard Hughes Investigator

Erich Jarvis, Ph.D., an associate professor of neurobiology at Duke University Medical Center, has been named a Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) investigator by HHMI. He is one of 42 men and 14 women chosen this year in a highly selective national competition that occurs about every three years.

"These 56 scientists will bring new and innovative ways of thinking about biology to the HHMI community," said Thomas R. Cech, president of HHMI. "They are poised to advance scientific knowledge dramatically in the coming years, and we are committed to providing them with the freedom and flexibility to do so."

 Brain Pleasure Pathway Responds to Calorie-Rich Foods, Not Just Sugar Flavor

   the brain can respond to the calorie content of food, even in the absence of taste

DURHAM, N.C. – Researchers at Duke University Medical Center have discovered that the brain can respond to the calorie content of food, even in the absence of taste.

Their findings about the brain's dopamine-reward system may help shed light on why many people who drink diet sodas still gain weight. A mismatch between artificially sweet taste and zero calorie content may lead to some kind of rebound eating that may in part be explained by these results: the brain is wired to respond to both calorie content and sweetness.

For years, scientists have known that when mammals, including humans, taste sweet foods, dopamine levels increase in the ventral striatum, a brain region related to reward and reinforcement. The neural pathways have been well established for palatability (the power of a food to make one eat it spontaneously and with gusto) as food is being eaten. With this set of experiments, the Duke team studied the brain's response to food after it was ingested.

 Monkey Brains Provide Clues to Understanding Social Behavior

   Monkey Brain Gives Clues to Human Interaction

DURHAM, N.C. – Duke University Medical Center researchers have pinpointed neurons in the brains of monkeys that may help explain how people make decisions in social situations and could aid understanding of autism.

Little is known about how the brain evaluates social information and uses this information to guide behavior. Even less is known about how this process breaks down in autism, a disease that affects more than a million Americans.

"Our prior studies described how social attention of rhesus monkeys is similar to humans -- motivated by status and sex, and sensitive to the attentive states of other individuals," said Michael Platt, Ph.D., associate professor of neurology at Duke. "Here we show that the parietal cortex, which plays a critical role in guiding attention, becomes active according to the social value of images seen and ultimately enables the behavior of the animal."

 McNamara lab identifies a novel mechanism of TrkB transactivation.

   Huang et al. have now identified a novel mechanism of TrkB transactivation.

In a Neuron Preview article highlighting the publication by Yang Z. Huang, Enhui Pan, Zhi-Qi Xiong and James O. McNamara,

Titled: Ama“Zinc” Link between TrkB Transactivation and Synaptic Plasticity, by Guhan Nagappan1, Newton H. Woo1 and Bai Lu, they wrote:

"While Trk receptors can be activated in a neurotrophin-independent manner through “transactivation” by GPCR ligands, its physiological significance in the brain remains unknown. Huang et al. have now identified a novel mechanism of TrkB transactivation. They show that zinc ions can transactivate TrkB independent of neurotrophins and that such a transactivation is important for mossy fiber long-term potentiation (LTP)."

 Precise auditory–vocal mirroring in neurons for learned vocal communication

   Songbirds' Brains Provide Clues to Human Speech

Analyzing how the brains of songbirds respond to singing patterns has provided new information about how humans learn to communicate with each other, according to Duke University researchers.

A study in the latest edition of Nature reveals that individual cells in the brain display remarkably similar patterns of activity whether a sound associated with communication is being heard or produced. The study was performed using songbirds that sing back and forth in the wild to defend territory.

The researchers think that these specialized cells in the brain may be especially important for helping an individual be both a sender and a receiver in communication.

“The ability of the animals to communicate with each other through song and their ability to learn their vocal signals from other birds provide a powerful system for understanding how the brain enables learned forms of communication, including human speech,” said Professor Richard Mooney, a Duke Medical Center neuroscientist who led the research. The study was supported by the National Institute of Deafness and Other Communication Disorders and the National Science Foundation.

 Miguel Nicolelis Lab: Monkey’s Thoughts Makes Robot Walk from Across the Globe

   Monkey’s Thoughts Propel Robot, a Step That May Help Humans

In a first-of-its-kind experiment, the brain activity of a monkey has been used to control the real-time walking patterns of a robot half way around the world, according to researchers at Duke University Medical Center.

The researchers are reporting the successful completion of a demonstration that harnesses the brain cell activity associated with leg movement in a monkey to manipulate the complex walking and standing tasks of a robot. The Duke team is working with the Computational Brain Project of the Japan Science and Technology Agency in Kyoto, Japan to complete this research that they hope will one day help those with paralysis regain the ability to walk with the assistance of prosthetic devices.

“We believe this research could have significant implications for severely paralyzed patients. It is a breakthrough in our understanding of how the brain controls the movement of our legs, which is vital information needed to ultimately develop robotic prosthesis,” said senior study investigator Miguel Nicolelis, M.D., Ph.D., Anne W. Deane Professor of Neuroscience at Duke.

 Major paper - Guoping Feng - breakthrough on obsessive compulsive

   Loss of one brain protein causes compulsive grooming in mice.

People with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) repeat ritualistic actions such as hand washing or checking locks so frequently that it interferes with their everyday lives. But although the symptoms of the disease are obvious, its causes are not. By knocking out one gene, neurobiologist Guoping Feng at Duke University Medical School in Durham, North Carolina, and his colleagues have engineered mice that show OCD-like behaviours.