Mapping Specific Mental Content during Musical Imagery

Humans can mentally represent auditory information without an external stimulus, but the specificity of these internal representations remains unclear. Here, we asked how similar the temporally unfolding neural representations of imagined music are compared to those during the original perceived experience. We also tested whether rhythmic motion can influence the neural representation of music during imagery as during perception. Participants first memorized six 1-min-long instrumental musical pieces with high accuracy. Functional MRI data were collected during: 1) silent imagery of melodies to the beat of a visual metronome; 2) same but while tapping to the beat; and 3) passive listening. During imagery, inter-subject correlation analysis showed that melody-specific temporal response patterns were reinstated in right associative auditory cortices. When tapping accompanied imagery, the melody-specific neural patterns were reinstated in more extensive temporal-lobe regions bilaterally. These results indicate that the specific contents of conscious experience are encoded similarly during imagery and perception in the dynamic activity of auditory cortices. Furthermore, rhythmic motion can enhance the reinstatement of neural patterns associated with the experience of complex sounds, in keeping with models of motor to sensory influences in auditory processing

Neutralising capacity against Delta and other variants of concern following Comirnaty vaccination in health care workers, Israel

Since its emergence, severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus-2 (SARS-CoV-2) has been responsible for more than 170 million cases and 3.5 million deaths. During December 2020 the Comirnaty (BNT162b2 mRNA, BioNTech-Pfizer, Mainz, Germany/New York, United States (US)) vaccine was approved by the US Food and Drug Administration and shown to be 95% efficacious in preventing symptomatic coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). Clinical and real-world data demonstrated 95% effectiveness of the mRNA- based vaccine against the original SARS-CoV-2 and the Alpha variant. Since December 2020, several SARS-CoV-2 variants have emerged and were classified by the World Health Organization (WHO) as variants of concern (VOC): Alpha (Phylogenetic Assignment of Named Global Outbreak (Pango) lineage designation B.1.1.7), first detected in the United Kingdom (UK), Beta (B.1.351) first documented in South Africa [5] and Gamma (P.1) initially detected in Brazil. Most recently, in April 2021, the Delta (B.1.617.2) variant was identified in India and classified on May 11 as VOC due to its fast spread and potential immune escape. Here, we describe the neutralising response of sera from healthcare workers without prior SARS-CoV-2 infection following a second vaccine dose against viral isolates of the Delta VOC, and compared it to the response against isolates of the original, the Alpha, Beta and Gamma VOCs

OMMABA: the open multimodal music and auditory brain archive

We will create a specific neuroimaging database focused on the auditory domain. It will allow researchers to ask questions about the neural circuitry underlying auditory behaviour in the healthy brain and to understand the sources of individual variability. We will include detailed information about experiential factors, such as musicianship and bilingualism that are not documented in any existing databases, so that it will be possible to investigate plasticity-related effects. It will also provide baseline data for clinical studies.https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/brainscanprojectsummaries/1029/thumbnail.jp

The “Narratives” fMRI dataset for evaluating models of naturalistic language comprehension

The “Narratives” collection aggregates a variety of functional MRI datasets collected while human subjects listened to naturalistic spoken stories. The current release includes 345 subjects, 891 functional scans, and 27 diverse stories of varying duration totaling ~4.6 hours of unique stimuli (~43,000 words). This data collection is well-suited for naturalistic neuroimaging analysis, and is intended to serve as a benchmark for models of language and narrative comprehension. We provide standardized MRI data accompanied by rich metadata, preprocessed versions of the data ready for immediate use, and the spoken story stimuli with time-stamped phoneme- and word-level transcripts. All code and data are publicly available with full provenance in keeping with current best practices in transparent and reproducible neuroimaging

ε/ζ systems: their role in resistance, virulence, and their potential for antibiotic development

Cell death in bacteria can be triggered by activation of self-inflicted molecular mechanisms. Pathogenic bacteria often make use of suicide mechanisms in which the death of individual cells benefits survival of the population. Important elements for programmed cell death in bacteria are proteinaceous toxin–antitoxin systems. While the toxin generally resides dormant in the bacterial cytosol in complex with its antitoxin, conditions such as impaired de novo synthesis of the antitoxin or nutritional stress lead to antitoxin degradation and toxin activation. A widespread toxin–antitoxin family consists of the ε/ζ systems, which are distributed over plasmids and chromosomes of various pathogenic bacteria. In its inactive state, the bacteriotoxic ζ toxin protein is inhibited by its cognate antitoxin ε. Upon degradation of ε, the ζ toxin is released allowing this enzyme to poison bacterial cell wall synthesis, which eventually triggers autolysis. ε/ζ systems ensure stable plasmid inheritance by inducing death in plasmid-deprived offspring cells. In contrast, chromosomally encoded ε/ζ systems were reported to contribute to virulence of pathogenic bacteria, possibly by inducing autolysis in individual cells under stressful conditions. The capability of toxin–antitoxin systems to kill bacteria has made them potential targets for new therapeutic compounds. Toxin activation could be hijacked to induce suicide of bacteria. Likewise, the unique mechanism of ζ toxins could serve as template for new drugs. Contrarily, inhibition of virulence-associated ζ toxins might attenuate infections. Here we provide an overview of ε/ζ toxin–antitoxin family and its potential role in the development of new therapeutic approaches in microbial defense

Shared and Selective Neural Processes Across the Visual and Auditory Language Modalities

Linguistic content can be conveyed both in speech and in writing. But how does the human brain accommodate the much later evolved skill of literacy—visual language—on top of the previously developed ability to comprehend auditory speech? This dissertation seeks to explore which neural processes are common and which diverge across the auditory and visual language modalities. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, we perused four goals: 1) map areas that reliably activate during reading of complex written narrative, and identify which of these regions are unique to reading and not to speaking; 2) map the regions that show functional similarities when reading and when listening to the same narrative; 3) examine the extent to which top-down attention modulates response to text and speech along their processing hierarchies; and 4) identify the neural pathways through which written and spoken attended and unattended content is distributed through the brain. First, we used inter-subject correlation to map the extended reading network that activates reliably during text comprehension. Early sensory areas and some high-order parietal and frontal areas responded selectively to written and spoken versions of the narrative. By contrast, the temporal response profiles in some linguistic and extra-linguistic areas were remarkably similar for spoken and written narratives, indicating strong modality-invariance of linguistic processing in these circuits. Next, we revealed a similar hierarchical modulation effect of attention on spoken and written content, in which sensory cortices processed unattended language, unlike high-order cognitive cortices. Further, the neural communication between brain regions was examined using inter-subject functional correlation analysis, which demonstrated that although story-related responses were shared between areas in sensory cortices even when outside the focus of attention, top-down attention was required for the narrative-specific response to be shared with higher, more cognitive frontal and parietal areas. Overall, the results presented in this dissertation argue that our ability to extract the same information from spoken and written forms arises from a mixture of both selective and shared neural processes. This constitutes a major step in the understanding of the neurophysiological and functional dynamics underlying the coexistence of written and spoken language in the brain

Mapping Specific Mental Content During Musical Imagery

Humans can mentally represent auditory information without an external stimulus, but the specificity of these internal representations remains unclear. Here, we asked how similar the temporally unfolding neural representations of imagined music are compared to those during the original perceived experience. We also tested whether rhythmic motion can influence the neural representation of music during imagery as during perception. Participants first memorized six 1-min-long instrumental musical pieces with high accuracy. Functional MRI data were collected during: 1) silent imagery of melodies to the beat of a visual metronome; 2) same but while tapping to the beat; and 3) passive listening. During imagery, inter-subject correlation analysis showed that melody-specific temporal response patterns were reinstated in right associative auditory cortices. When tapping accompanied imagery, the melody-specific neural patterns were reinstated in more extensive temporal-lobe regions bilaterally. These results indicate that the specific contents of conscious experience are encoded similarly during imagery and perception in the dynamic activity of auditory cortices. Furthermore, rhythmic motion can enhance the reinstatement of neural patterns associated with the experience of complex sounds, in keeping with models of motor to sensory influences in auditory processing