Brain Potentials Highlight Stronger Implicit Food Memory for Taste than Health and Context Associations

Increasingly consumption of healthy foods is advised to improve population health. Reasons people give for choosing one food over another suggest that non-sensory features like health aspects are appreciated as of lower importance than taste. However, many food choices are made in the absence of the actual perception of a food's sensory properties, and therefore highly rely on previous experiences of similar consumptions stored in memory. In this study we assessed the differential strength of food associations implicitly stored in memory, using an associative priming paradigm. Participants (N = 30) were exposed to a forced-choice picture-categorization task, in which the food or non-food target images were primed with either non-sensory or sensory related words. We observed a smaller N400 amplitude at the parietal electrodes when categorizing food as compared to non-food images. While this effect was enhanced by the presentation of a food-related word prime during food trials, the primes had no effect in the non-food trials. More specifically, we found that sensory associations are stronger implicitly represented in memory as compared to non-sensory associations. Thus, this study highlights the neuronal mechanisms underlying previous observations that sensory associations are important features of food memory, and therefore a primary motive in food choice.</p

Transgenic Insecticidal Corn: The Agronomic and Ecological Rationale for Its Use

We agree with Obrycki et al. (2001) that a broad-based ecological approach for new pest management technologies is desirable, but we unanimously and strongly disagree with some of their assumptions and conclusions about Bt corn. Bt corn is corn that has been genetically engineered to produce insecticidal proteins from the bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis. Because Bt corn is important for effective and ecologically sound management of lepidopteran pests of corn,we provide here relevant data, some of which is new, to help clarify the issues raised by Obrycki et al. (2001). Obrycki et al. (2001), citing Barry and Darrah (1991), claim that traditional plant breeding has developed corn plants that adequately protect against European corn borer. However, Barry and Darrah (1991) reported only “some resistance to whorl leaf feeding...[or] some resistance to sheath and sheath collar feeding,” which is not comparable with the nearly complete protection provided by Bt corn. Carpenter and Gianessi (2001) estimated that, nationally, during “10 of the 13 years between 1986 and 1998, European corn borer infestations...were such that corn growers would have realized a gain from planting Bt corn.” Similarly, the Environmental Protection Agency (USEPA 2000) estimated a net benefit to growers of $8.18 per hectare on 8 million hectares of Bt corn planted in 1999, or a national benefit of$65.4 million (USEPA 2000). Even considering the inherent year-to-year variability in pest population density, the EPA estimated the annual benefit to corn growers at $38–$219 million (USEPA 2001)

Biallelic mutations in SNX14 cause a syndromic form of cerebellar atrophy and lysosome-autophagosome dysfunction.

Pediatric-onset ataxias often present clinically as developmental delay and intellectual disability, with prominent cerebellar atrophy as a key neuroradiographic finding. Here we describe a new clinically distinguishable recessive syndrome in 12 families with cerebellar atrophy together with ataxia, coarsened facial features and intellectual disability, due to truncating mutations in the sorting nexin gene SNX14, encoding a ubiquitously expressed modular PX domain-containing sorting factor. We found SNX14 localized to lysosomes and associated with phosphatidylinositol (3,5)-bisphosphate, a key component of late endosomes/lysosomes. Patient-derived cells showed engorged lysosomes and a slower autophagosome clearance rate upon autophagy induction by starvation. Zebrafish morphants for snx14 showed dramatic loss of cerebellar parenchyma, accumulation of autophagosomes and activation of apoptosis. Our results characterize a unique ataxia syndrome due to biallelic SNX14 mutations leading to lysosome-autophagosome dysfunction

Biallelic Mutations in Snx14 Cause A Syndromic Form of Cerebellar Atrophy and Lysosome-Autophagosome Dysfunction

Pediatric-onset ataxias often present clinically with developmental delay and intellectual disability, with prominent cerebellar atrophy as a key neuroradiographic finding. Here we describe a novel clinically distinguishable recessive syndrome in 12 families with cerebellar atrophy together with ataxia, coarsened facial features and intellectual disability, due to truncating mutations in sorting nexin 14 (SNX14), encoding a ubiquitously expressed modular PX-domain-containing sorting factor. We found SNX14 localized to lysosomes, and associated with phosphatidyl-inositol (3,5)P2, a key component of late endosomes/lysosomes. Patient cells showed engorged lysosomes and slower autophagosome clearance rate upon starvation induction. Zebrafish morphants showed dramatic loss of cerebellar parenchyma, accumulated autophagosomes, and activation of apoptosis. Our results suggest a unique ataxia syndrome due to biallelic SNX14 mutations, leading to lysosome-autophagosome dysfunction.PubMedWo

Neuronal Functional Diversity and Collective Behaviors

A major question in today’s neuroscience is how the brain’s complex operations and organization emerge from individual components. The robustness of neuronal properties with flexible linkages between regulatory processes conceivably accounts for the adaptive, tunable, multistable dynamics; the coding schemes; and the complexity of neuronal functional (sub)systems. Interneurons and neurotransmitter diversity, resonance phenomena due to properties of the cell, time/frequency-dependent activation of dedicated neuronal assemblies, and code- and frequency-specific oscillations interact in determining the brain functional setup and operations. Such an arrangement would also provide the functional requirements for access to neural mechanisms, dedicated neuronal circuitry and the proper timing allowing for the selective differentiation among cortical neurons due to performing in different tasks. No comprehensive theory or systematic methodological approach appears yet conceivable. The scenario, however incomplete and incompletely characterized, is nevertheless promising and warrants further investigation