感性を通して直感的に「惹かれる」物に対する行動選択思考メカニズムの脳機能的解明

科学研究費助成事業 研究成果報告書：基盤研究(B)2015-2017課題番号 : 15H0276

First molecular phylogenetic insights into the evolution of Eriocaulon (Eriocaulaceae, Poales)

Eriocaulon is a genus of c. 470 aquatic and wetland species of the monocot plant family Eriocaulaceae. It is widely distributed in Africa, Asia and America, with centres of species richness in the tropics. Most species of Eriocaulon grow in wetlands although some inhabit shallow rivers and streams with an apparent adaptive morphology of elongated submerged stems. In a previous molecular phylogenetic hypothesis, Eriocaulon was recovered as sister of the African endemic genus Mesanthemum. Several regional infrageneric classifications have been proposed for Eriocaulon. This study aims to critically assess the existing infrageneric classifications through phylogenetic reconstruction of infrageneric relationships, based on DNA sequence data of four chloroplast markers and one nuclear marker. There is little congruence between our molecular results and previous morphology-based infrageneric classifications. However, some similarities can be found, including Fyson’s sect. Leucantherae and Zhang’s sect. Apoda. Further phylogenetic studies, particularly focusing on less well sampled regions such as the Neotropics, will help provide a more global overview of the relationships in Eriocaulon and may enable suggesting the first global infrageneric classification

A Case of Adult Respiratory Distress Syndrome Associated with Acute Pancreatitis

A 52-year-old man was admitted to our department for acute pancreatitis. He developed adult respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) on the 2nd hospital day, and was treated with respiratory management using positive endexpiratory pressure (PEEP) in addition to pharmacologic therapy for pancreatitis. The treatment was very effective, and he was discharged on the 72nd hospital day

Transmission electron microscopy observation of the half-Heusler compound Ti0.5(Zr0.5Hf0.5)0.5NiSn0.998Sb0.002

The high-performance thermoelectric compound Ti0.5(Zr0.5Hf0.5)0.5NiSn0.998Sb0.002 with half-Heusler lattice was studied by X-ray diffraction (XRD) and transmission electron microscopy (TEM). Each half-Heusler peak in the XRD pattern was accompanied by a bump at the high-angle side. Granular domains, a few nanometers in size, were observed in a bright-field TEM image. Fourier transformation and inverse Fourier transformation of the high-resolution TEM image revealed that the granular structure consists of half-Heusler domains with ordering and with disordering between second nearest neighbor atoms

Encoding temporal regularities and information copying in hippocampal circuits

Discriminating, extracting and encoding temporal regularities is a critical requirement in the brain, relevant to sensory-motor processing and learning. However, the cellular mechanisms responsible remain enigmatic; for example, whether such abilities require specific, elaborately organized neural networks or arise from more fundamental, inherent properties of neurons. Here, using multi-electrode array technology, and focusing on interval learning, we demonstrate that sparse reconstituted rat hippocampal neural circuits are intrinsically capable of encoding and storing sub-second-order time intervals for over an hour timescale, represented in changes in the spatial-temporal architecture of firing relationships among populations of neurons. This learning is accompanied by increases in mutual information and transfer entropy, formal measures related to information storage and flow. Moreover, temporal relationships derived from previously trained circuits can act as templates for copying intervals into untrained networks, suggesting the possibility of circuit-to-circuit information transfer. Our findings illustrate that dynamic encoding and stable copying of temporal relationships are fundamental properties of simple in vitro networks, with general significance for understanding elemental principles of information processing, storage and replication