Striatum and the neurophysiology of movement

Neuroscience research related to the striatum and basal ganglia.

Monday, May 21, 2007

Cataloguing the striatum

How does the brain works is the result of not only the neural connectivity, but also of its molecular components. A brain region, then, may contain unique proteins that confers it a specific function.

The cDAN microarray is a technique to identify messenger RNAs (ribonucleic acid), indicating the expression of certain genes. If the gene is being transcribed, the mRNA will be there. Microarrays can detect gene expression on a large scale (i.e., detect the expression of many genes). Ghate and coworkers (Ghate et al., 2007) screen 24,000 genes to determine which of them is expressed in the striatum. To do that, they extracted mRNA from the striatum and whole brain, and converted it to cDNA. Then, they determine which genes are expressed in the striatum more than twice more than in the whole brain. They also look for genes whose expression is undetectable in the whole brain, but substantial in the striatum. Using this procedure, they found 14 genes the expression of which was restricted to the striatum. Some of these genes have been described before, such as Gpr88 and RAR-beta. But also they found new genes. For example H3076B11 is expressed exclusively in the striatum. Its function is currently unknown.

To discover new genes is very important. The next step will be to find out the cellular distribution. This can be done, for example, using the single-cell PCT technique combined with electrophysiological recordings that use the firing patters of a neurone to give a precise identification of the cell in the living brain slice. It will be interesting to know which genes are expressed in the projection neurons (medium spiny neurones). One would like to know which genes are related to the firing pattern. Do fast spiking interneurones express a particular set of genes? These questions may be answered soon. Stay tuned.

1 Comments:

At 4:42 pm, Anonymous Anonymous said...

I was so surprised when i googled things about 'microarray' and your block was also in the list. And more surprised when i saw 'คนจนเรียนเร็ว'which such an outstanding and being the most familiar letter in this world for me. Are you Thai??

 

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