In-vivo Vomeronasal Stimulation Reveals Sensory Encoding of Conspecific and Allospecific Cues by the Mouse Accessory Olfactory Bulb

The rodent vomeronasal system plays a critical role in mediating pheromone-evoked social and sexual behaviors. Recent studies of the anatomical and molecular architecture of the vomeronasal organ (VNO) and of its synaptic target, the accessory olfactory bulb (AOB), have suggested that unique features underlie vomeronasal sensory processing. However, the neuronal representation of pheromonal information leading to specific behavioral and endocrine responses has remained largely unexplored due to the experimental difficulty of precise stimulus delivery to the VNO. To determine the basic rules of information processing in the vomeronasal system, we developed a unique preparation that allows controlled and repeated stimulus delivery to the VNO and combined this approach with multisite recordings of neuronal activity in the AOB. We found that urine, a well-characterized pheromone source in mammals, as well as saliva, activates AOB neurons in a manner that reliably encodes the donor animal’s sexual and genetic status. We also identified a significant fraction of AOB neurons that respond robustly and selectively to predator cues, suggesting an expanded role for the vomeronasal system in both conspecific and interspecific recognition. Further analysis reveals that mixed stimuli from distinct sources evoke synergistic responses in AOB neurons, thereby supporting the notion of integrative processing of chemosensory information.Molecular and Cellular Biolog

Effective Stimuli for Constructing Reliable Neuron Models

The rich dynamical nature of neurons poses major conceptual and technical challenges for unraveling their nonlinear membrane properties. Traditionally, various current waveforms have been injected at the soma to probe neuron dynamics, but the rationale for selecting specific stimuli has never been rigorously justified. The present experimental and theoretical study proposes a novel framework, inspired by learning theory, for objectively selecting the stimuli that best unravel the neuron's dynamics. The efficacy of stimuli is assessed in terms of their ability to constrain the parameter space of biophysically detailed conductance-based models that faithfully replicate the neuron's dynamics as attested by their ability to generalize well to the neuron's response to novel experimental stimuli. We used this framework to evaluate a variety of stimuli in different types of cortical neurons, ages and animals. Despite their simplicity, a set of stimuli consisting of step and ramp current pulses outperforms synaptic-like noisy stimuli in revealing the dynamics of these neurons. The general framework that we propose paves a new way for defining, evaluating and standardizing effective electrical probing of neurons and will thus lay the foundation for a much deeper understanding of the electrical nature of these highly sophisticated and non-linear devices and of the neuronal networks that they compose

Cardiopoietic cell therapy for advanced ischemic heart failure: results at 39 weeks of the prospective, randomized, double blind, sham-controlled CHART-1 clinical trial

Cardiopoietic cells, produced through cardiogenic conditioning of patients' mesenchymal stem cells, have shown preliminary efficacy. The Congestive Heart Failure Cardiopoietic Regenerative Therapy (CHART-1) trial aimed to validate cardiopoiesis-based biotherapy in a larger heart failure cohort

Correlation between LDH/PDH activities ratio and tissue pH in the perfused mouse heart – a potential non-invasive indicator of cardiac pH provided by hyperpolarized magnetic resonance

<p>Primary data for DOI: 10.1002/nbm.4444</p> <p>NMR in Biomedicine. 2021;34:e4444.</p> <p>Title: Correlation between LDH/PDH activities ratio and tissue pH in the perfused mouse heart – a potential non-invasive indicator of cardiac pH provided by hyperpolarized magnetic resonance</p> <p>Authors: David Shaul, Assad Azar, Gal Sapir, Sivaranjan Uppala, Atara Nardi-Schreiber, Ayelet Gamliel, Jacob Sosna, J. Moshe Gomori, and Rachel Katz-Brull</p> <p> </p> <p>These primary datasets contain data presented in the above publication and consist of:</p> <p>1. <sup>31</sup>P-NMR spectra</p> <p>2. Hyperpolarized <sup>13</sup>C-NMR spectra</p> <p>Please consult the Archive Guide.</p&gt

When Optimal is Just Not Good Enough: Learning Fast Informative Action Cost Partitionings ∗

Several recent heuristics for domain independent planning adopt some action cost partitioning scheme to derive admissible heuristic estimates. Given a state, two methods for obtaining an action cost partitioning have been proposed: optimal cost partitioning, which results in the best possible heuristic estimate for that state, but requires a substantial computational effort, and ad-hoc (uniform) cost partitioning, which is much faster, but is usually less informative. These two methods represent almost opposite points in the tradeoff between heuristic accuracy and heuristic computation time. One compromise that has been proposed between these two is using an optimal cost partitioning for the initial state to evaluate all states. In this paper, we propose a novel method for deriving a fast, informative cost-partitioning scheme, that is based on computing optimal action cost partitionings for a small set of states, and using these to derive heuristic estimates for all states. Our method provides greater control over the accuracy/computation-time tradeoff, which, as our empirical evaluation shows, can result in better performance

Loyal Resistances to "the Spirit’s Tongue" [in: Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit in Hebrew: A Symposium]

רב-שיח לרגל פרסום התרגום לעברית של הכרך הראשון של הספר פנומנולוגיה של הרוח לג. ו. פ. הגל. התרגום, שנעשה בידי רועי בר ואלעד לפידות ואשר ראה אור בהוצאת רסלינג, הוא אירוע אינטלקטואלי רב חשיבות והקריאה בו מעלה שאלות רבות שחוצות את תחומי הפילוסופיה, התיאולוגיה, המחשבה הפוליטית וחקר התרבות. פנינו לארבעה חוקרי הגל, ביקשנו מכל אחד ואחת מהם לכתוב מסה קצרה על הספר ותרגומו, ולאחר מכן כינסנו את ארבעתם לרב-שיח כתוב. המסות והשיחה נעות בין דיון בהגותו של הגל – בפרוצדורה הדיאלקטית, במקומו של האחר ובמעמדו של הידע המוחלט – ובין דיון באקטואליות של מחשבת הגל ברגע הפוליטי הנוכחי ובמשמעות תרגומה לעברית של הרוח האוניברסלית. ויכוח סוער ניטש על עצם האפשרות או הרצון ״לשוב להגל״ ולעשות זאת משמאל, על קיומם או היעדרם של דפוסי מחשבה הגליאניים בלב המציאות הפוליטית של זמננו, ועל הכרעות תרגום שונות. הדיון בספר ובתרגומו משתרגים זה בזה, כך שהדיון בתרגום של הגל לעברית הופך לדיון בעניינים שעולים בספר עצמו: השאלה מהו ספר זה בעצמו עוברת דרך השאלה מהו עבורנו, מיהו האחר שלו ומה הוא יכול להיות עבורו, והאם – כמו אצל הגל – כל אלה מתלכדים לבסוף