Effects of Aging and Corticofugal Modulation on Startle Behavior and Auditory Physiology

Frequency-modulated (FM) sweeps play a key role in species specific communication. Evidence from previous studies have shown that central auditory processing has been shown to vary based on the language spoken, which leads to the idea of experience-driven pitch encoding. Other studies have also shown that there is a decrease in this pitch encoding with aging. Using both iterated rippled noise (IRN) and frequency modulated amplitude modulation (FM/AM) methods to create complex pitch sweeps mimicking speech, allows for the processing of pitch to be determined. Neuromodulation using pharmacogenetics allows for the targeted inhibition of a specific neural pathway. Based on previous studies, the primary auditory cortex to inferior colliculus (A1/IC) pathway is hypothesized to be important in pitch encoding. However, there is a lack of evidence on specifically how the pitch information is encoded in the auditory system and how aging impacts the processing. To solve these issues, age-related changes in pitch encoding and maintaining pitch encoding through neuromodulation were characterized in the using behavioral and electrophysiology methods. Behavioral discrimination abilities, measured by modulation of the acoustic startle response, between pitch sweep direction and pitch sweep creation methods highlighted a reduced discrimination in aging and A1/IC inhibited rats. Electrophysiology changes was assessed using envelope-following responses (EFRs) and suggested a decreased initial frequency locking in aging and decrease in frequency locking overall with A1/IC pathway inhibition. Comparison of behavioral and electrophysiology to IRN and FM/AM stimuli show that the decrease in age-related processing as well as A1/IC pathway processing is larger in the behavioral pitch sweep discrimination than in the reduction in EFRs

United States Congressional COVID-19 Legislation: Recent Laws and Future Topics

Copyright: © 2020 Dowling et al. Disclaimer: Due to the rapidly evolving nature of this outbreak, and in the interests of rapid dissemination of reliable, actionable information, this paper went through expedited peer review. Additionally, information should be considered current only at the time of publication and may evolve as the science develops

United States congressional COVID-19 legislation: Recent laws and future topics

Copyright: © 2020 Dowling et al. Disclaimer: Due to the rapidly evolving nature of this outbreak, and in the interests of rapid dissemination of reliable, actionable information, this paper went through expedited peer review. Additionally, information should be considered current only at the time of publication and may evolve as the science develops

Searching for the origins of musicality across species

In the introduction to this theme issue, Honing et al. suggest that the origins of musicality—the capacity that makes it possible for us to perceive, appreciate and produce music—can be pursued productively by searching for components of musicality in other species. Recent studies have highlighted that the behavioural relevance of stimuli to animals and the relation of experimental procedures to their natural behaviour can have a large impact on the type of results that can be obtained for a given species. Through reviewing laboratory findings on animal auditory perception and behaviour, as well as relevant findings on natural behaviour, we provide evidence that both traditional laboratory studies and studies relating to natural behaviour are needed to answer the problem of musicality. Traditional laboratory studies use synthetic stimuli that provide more control than more naturalistic studies, and are in many ways suitable to test the perceptual abilities of animals. However, naturalistic studies are essential to inform us as to what might constitute relevant stimuli and parameters to test with laboratory studies, or why we may or may not expect certain stimulus manipulations to be relevant. These two approaches are both vital in the comparative study of musicality

Fast and versatile sequence-independent protein docking for nanomaterials design using RPXDock.

Computationally designed multi-subunit assemblies have shown considerable promise for a variety of applications, including a new generation of potent vaccines. One of the major routes to such materials is rigid body sequence-independent docking of cyclic oligomers into architectures with point group or lattice symmetries. Current methods for docking and designing such assemblies are tailored to specific classes of symmetry and are difficult to modify for novel applications. Here we describe RPXDock, a fast, flexible, and modular software package for sequence-independent rigid-body protein docking across a wide range of symmetric architectures that is easily customizable for further development. RPXDock uses an efficient hierarchical search and a residue-pair transform (RPX) scoring method to rapidly search through multidimensional docking space. We describe the structure of the software, provide practical guidelines for its use, and describe the available functionalities including a variety of score functions and filtering tools that can be used to guide and refine docking results towards desired configurations

The impacts of warming on the toxicity of carbon nanoparticles in mussels

With the increased production and research on nanoparticles, the presence of carbon nanotubes (CNTs) in aquatic systems is very likely to increase. Although it has been shown that CNTs may cause toxicity in marine organisms, to our knowledge, the possible impacts under global temperature increase is still unknown. For this reason, biochemical and physiological impacts induced in Mytilus galloprovincialis due to the presence of functionalized multi-walled CNTs (f-MWCNTs) and increased temperature were investigated in the present study. The mussels exposed to increased temperature alone presented higher metabolic capacity and expenditure of glycogen as an energy resource to fuel up defense mechanisms and thus preventing oxidative damage. Contrarily, organisms exposed to f-MWCNTs alone seemed not stressed enough to demonstrate differences in the metabolism capacity. Furthermore, f-MWCNTs seemed not able to significantly activate their antioxidant and biotransformation enzymes, which in turn may led to oxidative damage in the cells especially when organisms were exposed to a warmer temperature. In fact, at higher temperature, the antioxidant response of organisms exposed to f-MWCNTs was not effective and oxidative damage levels were observed. Nevertheless, no additive or synergetic effects were observed when mussels were exposed to both stressors simultaneously.publishe