7,575 research outputs found
The Scalable Brain Atlas: instant web-based access to public brain atlases and related content
The Scalable Brain Atlas (SBA) is a collection of web services that provide
unified access to a large collection of brain atlas templates for different
species. Its main component is an atlas viewer that displays brain atlas data
as a stack of slices in which stereotaxic coordinates and brain regions can be
selected. These are subsequently used to launch web queries to resources that
require coordinates or region names as input. It supports plugins which run
inside the viewer and respond when a new slice, coordinate or region is
selected. It contains 20 atlas templates in six species, and plugins to compute
coordinate transformations, display anatomical connectivity and fiducial
points, and retrieve properties, descriptions, definitions and 3d
reconstructions of brain regions. The ambition of SBA is to provide a unified
representation of all publicly available brain atlases directly in the web
browser, while remaining a responsive and light weight resource that
specializes in atlas comparisons, searches, coordinate transformations and
interactive displays.Comment: Rolf K\"otter sadly passed away on June 9th, 2010. He co-initiated
this project and played a crucial role in the design and quality assurance of
the Scalable Brain Atla
ICLab: A Global, Longitudinal Internet Censorship Measurement Platform
Researchers have studied Internet censorship for nearly as long as attempts
to censor contents have taken place. Most studies have however been limited to
a short period of time and/or a few countries; the few exceptions have traded
off detail for breadth of coverage. Collecting enough data for a comprehensive,
global, longitudinal perspective remains challenging. In this work, we present
ICLab, an Internet measurement platform specialized for censorship research. It
achieves a new balance between breadth of coverage and detail of measurements,
by using commercial VPNs as vantage points distributed around the world. ICLab
has been operated continuously since late 2016. It can currently detect DNS
manipulation and TCP packet injection, and overt "block pages" however they are
delivered. ICLab records and archives raw observations in detail, making
retrospective analysis with new techniques possible. At every stage of
processing, ICLab seeks to minimize false positives and manual validation.
Within 53,906,532 measurements of individual web pages, collected by ICLab in
2017 and 2018, we observe blocking of 3,602 unique URLs in 60 countries. Using
this data, we compare how different blocking techniques are deployed in
different regions and/or against different types of content. Our longitudinal
monitoring pinpoints changes in censorship in India and Turkey concurrent with
political shifts, and our clustering techniques discover 48 previously unknown
block pages. ICLab's broad and detailed measurements also expose other forms of
network interference, such as surveillance and malware injection.Comment: To appear in Proceedings of the 41st IEEE Symposium on Security and
Privacy (Oakland 2020). San Francisco, CA. May 202
Electrophysiology of glioma: a Rho GTPase-activating protein reduces tumor growth and spares neuron structure and function
Background. Glioblastomas are the most aggressive type of brain tumor. A successful treatment should aim at halting tumor growth and protecting neuronal cells to prevent functional deficits and cognitive deterioration. Here, we exploited a Rho GTPase-activating bacterial protein toxin, cytotoxic necrotizing factor 1 (CNF1), to interfere with glioma cell growth in vitro and vivo. We also investigated whether this toxin spares neuron structure and function in peritumoral areas. Methods. We performed a microarray transcriptomic and in-depth proteomic analysis to characterize the molecular changes triggered by CNF1 in glioma cells. We also examined tumor cell senescence and growth in vehicle-and CNF1-treated glioma-bearing mice. Electrophysiological and morphological techniques were used to investigate neuronal alterations in peritumoral cortical areas. Results. Administration of CNF1 triggered molecular and morphological hallmarks of senescence in mouse and human glioma cells in vitro. CNF1 treatment in vivo induced glioma cell senescence and potently reduced tumor volumes. In peritumoral areas of glioma-bearing mice, neurons showed a shrunken dendritic arbor and severe functional alterations such as increased spontaneous activity and reduced visual responsiveness. CNF1 treatment enhanced dendritic length and improved several physiological properties of pyramidal neurons, demonstrating functional preservation of the cortical network. Conclusions. Our findings demonstrate that CNF1 reduces glioma volume while at the same time maintaining the physiological and structural properties of peritumoral neurons. These data indicate a promising strategy for the development of more effective antiglioma therapies
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