Phase of beta-frequency tACS over primary motor cortex modulates corticospinal excitability

The assessment of corticospinal excitability by means of transcranial magnetic stimulation-induced motor evoked potentials is an established diagnostic tool in neurophysiology and a widely used procedure in fundamental brain research. However, concern about low reliability of these measures has grown recently. One possible cause of high variability of MEPs under identical acquisition conditions could be the influence of oscillatory neuronal activity on corticospinal excitability. Based on research showing that transcranial alternating current stimulation can entrain neuronal oscillations we here test whether alpha or beta frequency tACS can influence corticospinal excitability in a phase-dependent manner. We applied tACS at individually calibrated alpha- and beta-band oscillation frequencies, or we applied sham tACS. Simultaneous single TMS pulses time locked to eight equidistant phases of the ongoing tACS signal evoked MEPs. To evaluate offline effects of stimulation frequency, MEP amplitudes were measured before and after tACS. To evaluate whether tACS influences MEP amplitude, we fitted one-cycle sinusoids to the average MEPs elicited at the different phase conditions of each tACS frequency. We found no frequency-specific offline effects of tACS. However, beta-frequency tACS modulation of MEPs was phase-dependent. Post hoc analyses suggested that this effect was specific to participants with low (<19 Hz) intrinsic beta frequency. In conclusion, by showing that beta tACS influences MEP amplitude in a phase-dependent manner, our results support a potential role attributed to neuronal oscillations in regulating corticospinal excitability. Moreover, our findings may be useful for the development of TMS protocols that improve the reliability of MEPs as a meaningful tool for research applications or for clinical monitoring and diagnosis. (C) 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved

Draft genome sequence of Pseudomonas moraviensis R28-S

We report the draft genome sequence of Pseudomonas moraviensis R28-S, isolated from the municipal wastewater treatment plant of Moscow, ID. The strain carries a native mercury resistance plasmid, poorly maintains introduced IncP-1 antibiotic resistance plasmids, and has been useful for studying the evolution of plasmid host range and stability

Emotional Voice and Emotional Body Postures Influence Each Other Independently of Visual Awareness

Multisensory integration may occur independently of visual attention as previously shown with compound face-voice stimuli. We investigated in two experiments whether the perception of whole body expressions and the perception of voices influence each other when observers are not aware of seeing the bodily expression. In the first experiment participants categorized masked happy and angry bodily expressions while ignoring congruent or incongruent emotional voices. The onset between target and mask varied from −50 to +133 ms. Results show that the congruency between the emotion in the voice and the bodily expressions influences audiovisual perception independently of the visibility of the stimuli. In the second experiment participants categorized the emotional voices combined with masked bodily expressions as fearful or happy. This experiment showed that bodily expressions presented outside visual awareness still influence prosody perception. Our experiments show that audiovisual integration between bodily expressions and affective prosody can take place outside and independent of visual awareness