Interaction of GABA and Excitatory Amino Acids in the Basolateral Amygdala: Role in Cardiovascular Regulation

Activation of the amygdala in rats produces cardiovascular changes that include increases in heart rate and arterial pressure as well as behavioral changes characteristic of emotional arousal. The objective of the present study was to examine the interaction of GABA and excitatory amino acid (EAA) receptors in the basolateral amygdala (BLA) in regulating cardiovascular function. Microinjection of the GABAA receptor antagonist bicuculline methiodide (BMI) or the E A A receptor agonists NMDA or AMPA into the same region of the BLA of conscious rats produced dose-related increases in heart rate and arterial pressure. Injection of the nonselective EAA receptor antagonist kynurenic acid into the BLA prevented or reversed the cardiovascular changes caused by local injection of BMI or the noncompetitive GABA antagonist picrotoxin. Conversely, local pretreatment with the glutamate reuptake inhibitorl-trans-pyrrolidine-2,4-dicarboxylic acid enhanced the effects of intra-amygdalar injection of BMI. The cardiovascular effects of BMI were also attenuated by injection of either the NMDA antagonist 3-(2-carboxypiperazin-4-yl)-propyl-1-phosphonic acid (CPP) or the AMPA receptor antagonist 1,2,3,4-tetrahydro-6-nitro-2,3-dioxo-benzo[f]quinoxaline-7-sulfonamide (NBQX). When these two EAA receptor antagonists were combined, their ability to suppress BMI-induced tachycardic and pressor responses was additive. These findings indicate that the cardiovascular effects caused by blockade of GABAergic inhibition in the BLA of the rat are dependent on activation of local NMDA and AMPA receptors

Medical School Watercooler Newsletter - March 14, 2010

This is the March 14, 2010 edition of the Frederick P. Whiddon College of Medicine\u27s newsletter - Watercooler. Contents Include: Leadership During Times of Change March Med School Cafe\u27 Online Online Match Day News Coverage USA Match Day 2010 USA National Alumni Association Honors Dr. Frank deGruy III Medical Alumni Association Honors Class of 201

Neural-powered unit disk graph embedding: qubits connectivity for some QUBO problems

Graph embedding is a recurrent problem in quantum computing, for instance, quantum annealers need to solve a minor graph embedding in order to map a given Quadratic Unconstrained Binary Optimization (QUBO) problem onto their internal connectivity pattern. This work presents a novel approach to constrained unit disk graph embedding, which is encountered when trying to solve combinatorial optimization problems in QUBO form, using quantum hardware based on neutral Rydberg atoms. The qubits, physically represented by the atoms, are excited to the Rydberg state through laser pulses. Whenever qubits pairs are closer together than the blockade radius, entanglement can be reached, thus preventing entangled qubits to be simultaneously in the excited state. Hence, the blockade radius determines the adjacency pattern among qubits, corresponding to a unit disk configuration. Although it is straight-forward to compute the adjacency pattern given the qubits' coordinates, identifying a feasible unit disk arrangement that matches the desired QUBO matrix is, on the other hand, a much harder task. In the context of quantum optimization, this issue translates into the physical placement of the qubits in the 2D/3D register to match the machine's Ising-like Hamiltonian with the QUBO formulation of the optimization problems. The proposed solution exploits the power of neural networks to transform an initial embedding configuration, which does not match the quantum hardware requirements or does not account for the unit disk property, into a feasible embedding properly representing the target optimization problems. Experimental results show that this new approach overcomes in performance Gurobi solver

Contribuições da fonologia para a aula de alemão : revendo conceitos

Many teachers of German as a second language make some statements regarding this language that mix concepts from three distinct fields: Orthography (letters), Phonetics (phones or speech sounds) and Phonology (phonemes). In this paper I attempt to shed some light on these concepts and fields. I also provide examples of such statements and make comments on them