Topic: patch clamp electrophysiology

Nociceptors are a subset of sensory neurons that relay painful stimuli from the peripheral tissues. Multiple nociceptor subtypes exist and can respond to different thermal, mechanical, or chemical noxious stimuli. Recent findings with transcriptomics have identified gene expression patterns that classify these sub-types by different ion channels including NaV1.7, NaV1.8, NaV1.9, TRPV1, TRPA1, P2X3, HCN and a number of others that have been implicated in pain. In this study, we have identified a method to rapidly generate a novel TRPA1+ human induced pluripotent stem cell (hiPSC)-derived sensor

Higher-order mental representations underlying working memory function, are believed to arise in primates, with the development and expansion of the granular prefrontal cortex (PFC). For example, in vivo extracellular recordings from behaving non-human primates (NHPs) have shown that persistent firing representing the contents of working memory can be found in lateral PFC but is absent in early sensory areas such as primary visual (V1) cortex. However, the mechanistic basis of potentially unique primate PFC circuitry remains speculative, partly due to the lack of data on the biophysical and m

Dystonia is a debilitating movement disorder characterized by abnormal movements and postures. Given the absence of structural lesions in the brain of most dystonic patients, disruption of synaptic function has been long hypothesized to play a pivotal role in dystonia pathogenesis. We recently identified homozygous frameshift, nonsense, and missense variants in TSPOAP1, the gene encoding active zone RIM-binding protein 1 (RIMBP1), as a novel genetic cause of autosomal recessive dystonia (Mencacci et al., JCI, 2021). RIMBP1 is a presynaptic protein that localizes voltage-gated Ca2+ channels (VG