Interesting Papers

Every week at the Whitney Lab, we discuss each other's research or recent papers in vision science that are making an impact in the field. As I have read, discusses and debated the latter thoroughly, I have decided to include them here in case anyone is interested in the type of studies that I am interested in.

There are also other topics beyonds vision science that personally interest me, such as neurodegeneration therapy and mental illness studies, so those have been added on here as well.

C.R. Sims, 2018

Efficient coding explains the universal law of generalization in human perception

Rate-distortion theory can replace the universal law of generalization as a more specific formula for minimizing loss while conducting identification tasks with limited memory.

Ruben S. van Bergen and Janneke F.M. Jehee

Probabilistic representation in human visual cortex reflects uncertainty in serial decisions

Tested if uncertainty in sensory evidence is encoded in a way that follows a probability distribution determined by a computational model.

Howe et al, 2018

The mouse as a model for neuropsychiatric drug development

Behavioral assays simulating neuropsychiatric disorders successfully translate and back-translate from mice to humans.

Tsai et al, 2012

Austistic-like behaviour and cerebellar dysfunction in Purkinje cell Tsc1 mutant mice

Suggests that the underlying pathogenesis of ASD may be related to a loss of pukinjie cells. This was tested using a mutated version of the Tsc1 gene, which regulates mTOR signaling.

Yu et al, 2006

Reduced sodium current in GABAergic interneurons in a mouse model of severe myoclonic epilepsy in infancy

By disrupting the Scn1a gene that encodes for Na1.1 (voltage-gated Na channels) in mice, they had epilepsy and a reduced lifespan. Therapy with patch-clamp hyperpolarization reduced epilepsy effects and increased lifespan.

Saal et al, 2003

Drugs of abuse and stress trigger and common synaptic adaptation in dopamine neurons

The dopaminergic neurons retrieved from mice that went through acute stress (forced swim) showed the same ratio between AMPAR and NMDAR EPSCs as those that received addictive drugs.

Chaudhury et al, 2012

Rapid regulation of depression-related behaviours by control of midbrain dopamine neurons

Social defeat stress modeled depression in mice. They found that induced phasic firing of VTA dopamine neurons changed mice resilient to depression into the susceptible type.

Krabbe et al, 2015

Increased dopamine D2 receptor activity in the striatum alters firing pattern of dopamine neurons in the ventral tegmental area

Firing rate and burst firing of midbrain dopamine neurons is impaired in the VTA and not in the SN of mice with schizophrenia patterns.

Kordasiewicz et al, 2012

Sustained therapeutic reversal of Huntington's disease by transient repression of huntingtin synthesis

ASOs catalyze the degradation of huntingtin mRNA, which is known to cause Huntington's disease. Infusing ASOs into the cerebrospinal fluid of mice with Huntington's disease not only delayed progression of the disease but also helped to reverse it.

Kim et al, 2019

Transneuronal propagation of pathologic alpha-synuclein from the gut to the brain models Parkinson's Disease

The effects of alpha-synuclein in the gut cause changes in the brain through the vagus nerve. After a vagotomy, mice stopped showing these effects.