Posts tagged cerebellum
Articles and news from the latest research reports.
Brain structure of infants predicts language skills at 1 year
Using a brain-imaging technique that examines the entire infant brain, researchers have found that the anatomy of certain brain areas – the hippocampus and cerebellum – can predict children’s language abilities at 1 year of age.
The University of Washington study is the first to associate these brain structures with future language skills. The results are published in the January issue of the journal Brain and Language.
“The brain of the baby holds an infinite number of secrets just waiting to be uncovered, and these discoveries will show us why infants learn languages like sponges, far surpassing our skills as adults,” said co-author Patricia Kuhl, co-director of the UW’s Institute for Learning & Brain Sciences.
Children’s language skills soar after they reach their first birthdays, but little is known about how infants’ early brain development seeds that path. Identifying which brain areas are related to early language learning could provide a first glimpse of development going awry, allowing for treatments to begin earlier.
“Infancy may be the most important phase of postnatal brain development in humans,” said Dilara Deniz Can, lead author and a UW postdoctoral researcher. “Our results showing brain structures linked to later language ability in typically developing infants is a first step toward examining links to brain and behavior in young children with linguistic, psychological and social delays.”
Is Athleticism Linked to Brain Size?
To find out, researchers at the University of California, Riverside performed laboratory experiments on house mice and found that mice that have been bred for dozens of generations to be more exercise-loving have larger midbrains than those that have not been selectively bred this way.
Theodore Garland’s lab measured the brain mass of these uniquely athletic house mice, bred for high voluntary wheel-running, and analyzed their high-resolution brain images. The researchers found that the volume of the midbrain — a small region of the brain that relays information for the visual, auditory, and motor systems — in the bred-for-athleticism mice was nearly 13 percent larger than the midbrain volume in the control or “regular” mice.
“To our knowledge, this is the first example in which selection for a particular mammalian behavior — high voluntary wheel running in house mice in our set of experiments — has been shown to result in a change in size of a specific brain region,” said Garland, a professor of biology and the principal investigator of the research project.
Study results appeared online Jan. 16 in The Journal of Experimental Biology
Purkinje neurons (yellow) generated from embryonic stem cells integrate into the cerebellum (red) when transplanted into the fetal mouse brain.
© 2010 K. Muguruma et al.
Neuronal network in the cerebellum
Fluorescence microscopy image showing the cerebellar network of Purkinje neurons from a mouse. The neurons are visualised by labelling the cells with green fluorescent protein (GFP). Purkinje cells are specialised neurons found in layers within the cerebellum (at the back of the brain). In humans they are one of the longest types of neurons in the brain and are involved in transmitting motor output from the cerebellum.
A: Fueling all this brain activity, and the basis for some imaging techniques, is a dense network of delicate blood vessels.
B: Neurons communicate with one another by releasing chemicals, such as dopamine, from pouches called vesicles. The vesicles, seen here in a fibroblast cell, have a geodesic outer coating that eventually pops through the side of the cell and releases its chemical message to be detected by the cell’s neighbors.
C: Our cells are surrounded by a scaffold of proteins that maintains a cell’s shape. Under an electron microscope, protein fibers called actin filaments look like braided ropes.
D: A few years ago, neuroscientists figured out how to take two fluorescent proteins that glowed in green or red and turn them into a rainbow of different colors that can be incorporated into individual neurons. Here the technique is used to stain cells in the cerebellum. The result? A “brainbow.”
Source: Portraits of the Mind: Visualizing the Brain from Antiquity to the 21st Century