Dark Rearing Promotes the Recovery of Visual Cortical Responses but Not the Morphology of Geniculocortical Axons in Amblyopic Cat

Monocular deprivation (MD) of vision during early postnatal life induces amblyopia, and most neurons in the primary visual cortex lose their responses to the closed eye. Anatomically, the somata of neurons in the closed-eye recipient layer of the lateral geniculate nucleus (LGN) shrink and their axons projecting to the visual cortex retract. Although it has been difficult to restore visual acuity after maturation, recent studies in rodents and cats showed that a period of exposure to complete darkness could promote recovery from amblyopia induced by prior MD. However, in cats, which have an organization of central visual pathways similar to humans, the effect of dark rearing only improves monocular vision and does not restore binocular depth perception. To determine whether dark rearing can completely restore the visual pathway, we examined its effect on the three major concomitants of MD in individual visual neurons, eye preference of visual cortical neurons and soma size and axon morphology of LGN neurons. Dark rearing improved the recovery of visual cortical responses to the closed eye compared with the recovery under binocular conditions. However, geniculocortical axons serving the closed eye remained retracted after dark rearing, whereas reopening the closed eye restored the soma size of LGN neurons. These results indicate that dark rearing incompletely restores the visual pathway, and thus exerts a limited restorative effect on visual function

Making Meaning of Appointed School-Transfer-Experiences for High-School Teachers: An Explorative Inquiry Through Self-Study

In Japan, school teachers are deployed to schools by the local government, so their work place must be changed every several years. This appointed school-transfer-experience should affect school teachers in various aspects of their work life, but a few researches have conducted. This study inquires how high-school teachers assess their own experiences. We shared our individual episodes through group interviews and analyzed the transcript qualitatively by using GTA (Saiki-craighill 2006). Then, we re-interpreted our own experiences in a form of story. Findings showed that high school teachers shared peculiar and implicit sense, i.e. the age equals to years of teaching career which shows their professional ability. We discussed the implicit sense functioned as a “screening test” for the newly appointed teacher, and this test varied according to human relationship within the school. Suggestions are provided for future teachers as well as teacher educators to make school climate collaborative: 1) newly coming teachers mind one’s words and behavior, 2) school teachers treat newly coming teachers as colleagues with caring mind, and 3) the school be equipped a mechanism to capture voiceless opinions, turning school staff ’s efforts to make their work place open to a divergent view

Isolation and Fusion of Protoplasts from Basella rubra Leaf and Stem Cultures

Isolation and fusion of protoplasts from Basella rubra leaf and stem were examined. In preparation of protoplasts, the enzyme solution gave a high yield of protoplasts. The diameter of protoplasts induced ranged from 30μm to 120μm. Cell division into 2 cells was observed after 24 hours of culture, then micro colonies formed after 7 days, followed by colony formation within 2 week

Genomic, Epigenomic, and Transcriptomic Profiling towards Identifying Omics Features and Specific Biomarkers That Distinguish Uterine Leiomyosarcoma and Leiomyoma at Molecular Levels

Uterine leiomyosarcoma (LMS) is the worst malignancy among the gynecologic cancers. Uterine leiomyoma (LM), a benign tumor of myometrial origin, is the most common among women of childbearing age. Because of their similar symptoms, it is difficult to preoperatively distinguish the two conditions only by ultrasound and pelvic MRI. While histopathological diagnosis is currently the main approach used to distinguish them postoperatively, unusual histologic variants of LM tend to be misdiagnosed as LMS. Therefore, development of molecular diagnosis as an alternative or confirmatory means will help to diagnose LMS more accurately. We adopted omics-based technologies to identify genome-wide features to distinguish LMS from LM and revealed that copy number, gene expression, and DNA methylation profiles successfully distinguished these tumors. LMS was found to possess features typically observed in malignant solid tumors, such as extensive chromosomal abnormalities, overexpression of cell cycle-related genes, hypomethylation spreading through large genomic regions, and frequent hypermethylation at the polycomb group target genes and protocadherin genes. We also identified candidate expression and DNA methylation markers, which will facilitate establishing postoperative molecular diagnostic tests based on conventional quantitative assays. Our results demonstrate the feasibility of establishing such tests and the possibility of developing preoperative and noninvasive methods