Brains Breathing Connection!

Breathing is essential for survival and under precise neural control. The vagus nerve is a major conduit between lung and brain required for normal respiration.

Here, we identify two populations of mouse vagus nerve afferent (P2ry1, Npy2r), each a few hundred neurons, that exert powerful and opposing effects on breathing. These neurons densely innervate the lung and send long-range projections to different brain stem targets.

Npy2r neurons are largely slow-conducting C fibers, while P2ry1 neurons are largely fast-conducting A fibers that contact pulmonary endocrine cells (neuroepithelial bodies).

Stimulation of P2ry1 neurons acutely silences respiration, trapping animals in exhalation, while stimulating Npy2r neurons causes rapid, shallow breathing. Activating P2ry1 neurons did not impact heart rate or gastric pressure, other autonomic functions under vagal control.

Thus, the vagus nerve contains intermingled sensory neurons constituting genetically definable labeled lines with different anatomical connections and physiological roles. Source: Science Mission

Comments

Hootsuite - A modern Social Media Management Tool

Hootsuite is a social media management system for brand management created by Ryan Holmes in 2008. The system’s user interface takes the form of a dashboard, and supports social network integrations for Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, Foursquare, MySpace, WordPress, TrendSpottr and Mixi. Additional integrations are available via Hootsuite’s App Directory, including Instagram, MailChimp, Reddit, Storify, Tumblr, Vimeo and YouTube. Based in Vancouver, Hootsuite has over 500 staff located in Vancouver, San Francisco, New York, Hong Kong, London, Sydney, Singapore, and other countries. The company operates on a freemium model and has over 10 million users in more than 175 countries. The service is commonly used to manage online brands and to submit messages to a variety of social media services, including Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and Mixi. Companies and organizations known to use Hootsuite include Facebook, PrintBindaas, the Obama administration, HBO, Martha Stewart Media, ...

A new ‘Pain Sensing’ gene discovered!

Researchers analysed the genetic make-up of 11 families across Europe and Asia affected by an inherited condition known as congenital insensitivity to pain (CIP). This enabled them to pinpoint the cause of the condition to variants of the gene PRDM12. Family members affected by CIP carried two copies of the variant; however, if they had only inherited one copy from their parents, they were unaffected. PRDM12 had previously been implicated in the modification of chromatin, a small molecule that attaches to our DNA and acts like a switch to turn genes on and off (an effect known as epigenetics). The researchers showed that all the genetic variants of PRDM12 in the CIP patients blocked the gene's function. The team looked at nerve biopsies taken from the patients to see what had gone wrong and found that particular pain-sensing neurons were absent. From these clinical features of the disease, the team predicted that there would be a block to the production of pain-sensing neur...

Fifteen programming languages you need to know in 2015

1. Java 2. JavaScript 3.C# 4. PHP 5. C++ 6. Python 7. C 8. SQL 9.Ruby 10. Objective-C 11. Perl 12 .NET 13. Visual Basic 14. R 15. Swift BONUS: Teaching Kids to Code with a Board Game

Mahantesh Biradar

Search This Blog