
Neng GongInstitute of Neuroscience
Neng Gong
PhD
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23
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Publications (23)
Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is a complicated neurodegenerative disorder involving multi-factorial pathogeneses and still lacks effective clinical treatment. Recent studies show that lithium exerts disease-modifying effects against AD. However, the intolerant side effects at conventional effective dosage limit the clinical use of lithium in treating AD...
Zhe Yu Qi Fang Xian Xiao- [...]
Tian-Le Xu
The mechanism underlying the pathogenesis of schizophrenia remains poorly understood. The hyper-dopamine and hypo-NMDA receptor hypotheses have been the most enduring ideas. Recently, emerging evidence implicates alterations of the major inhibitory system, GABAergic neurotransmission in the schizophrenic patients. However, the pathophysiological ro...
γ-Aminobutyric acid (GABA) is the major inhibitory neurotransmitter in the central nervous system. The termination of GABA
transmission is through the action of a family of membrane proteins, called GABA transporters (GAT1–4). It is well established
that GABA system is involved in the modulation of memory. Our previous study showed that homozygous...
Alzheimer's disease (AD) is a complex disease with characteristic pathological hallmarks of senile plaques and neurofibrillary tangles, the occurrence and development of which are involved in multiple neurodegenerative processes. Conventional AD therapies target only at single disease-causing mechanisms. However, these have been mostly shown to be...
Glycine is a primary inhibitory neurotransmitter in the spinal cord and brainstem. It acts at glycine receptor (GlyR)-chloride channels, as well as a co-agonist of NMDA receptors (NMDARs). In the hippocampus, the study of GlyRs has largely been under-appreciated due to the apparent absence of glycinergic synaptic transmission. Emerging evidence has...
Reduction of glucose metabolism in brain is one of the main features of Alzheimer's disease. Thiamine (vitamin B1)-dependent processes are critical in glucose metabolism and have been found to be impaired in brains from patients with Alzheimer's disease. However, thiamine treatment exerts little beneficial effect in these patients. Here, we tested...
The network oscillation and synaptic plasticity are known to be regulated by GABAergic inhibition, but how they are affected by changes in the GABA transporter activity remains unclear. Here we show that in the CA1 region of mouse hippocampus, pharmacological blockade or genetic deletion of GABA transporter-1 (GAT1) specifically impaired long-term...
Lack of menthol effect on currents mediated by ionotropic glutamate receptors. (A) Representative traces showing the currents evoked by 100 µM glutamate in the absence or presence of 300 µM menthol. All experiments were performed in Mg2+-free extracellular solution containing 1 µM glycine. (B) Summary results from all experiments similar to that sh...
Lack of effect of menthol on action-potential discharge. (A) Representative traces showing the sustained action-potential discharges evoked by injection of various depolarizing current (30 pA, 110 pA and 190 pA) in cultured hippocampal neurons in the absence or presence of 300 µM menthol. Synaptic transmission was blocked by CNQX (10 µM), D-AP5 (20...
Lack of TRPM8 expression in cultured hippocampal neurons and hippocampus tissue. (A) Reverse transcriptase-PCR primers to probe TRPM8. (B) Agarose gel electrophoresis of mRNA products obtained after amplification of base pair sequence specific for TRPM8 with reverse transcriptase-PCR. Evaluation of the constitutively expressed actin gene was includ...
General anesthetics thiopental and pentobarbital possess very similar chemical structures whereas their clinical potency is
quite different. The underlying molecular mechanism is not fully understood. This study was designed to assess the differential
effects of thiopental and pentobarbital on GABAA receptors of mechanically dissociated rat spinal...
D-Serine, the endogenous coagonist of N-methyl-D-aspartate receptors (NMDARs), is considered to be an important gliotransmitter, and is essential for the induction of long-term potentiation. However, less is known about the role of D-serine in another form of synaptic plasticity, long-term depression (LTD). In this study, we found that exogenous D-...
Salicylate is the major metabolite and active component of aspirin (acetylsalicylic acid), which is widely used in clinical medicine for treating inflammation, pain syndromes and cardiovascular disorders. The well-known mechanism underlying salicylate's action mainly involves the inhibition of cyclooxygenase and subsequent decrease in prostaglandin...
It has not been reported whether thiamine deficiency (TD) affects hippocampal neurogenesis or not. Here, we explored the influence of TD at early pre-pathological lesion stage on hippocampal neurogenesis and the correlation between affected hippocampal neurogenesis and cognitive dysfunction. We prepared TD mouse model by feeding a thiamine-depleted...
Functional glycine receptors (GlyRs) are enriched in the hippocampus, but their role in hippocampal function remains unclear. Since the concentration of ambient glycine is determined by the presence of powerful glycine transporter (GlyT), we blocked the reuptake of glycine in hippocampal slices to examine the role of GlyRs. Antagonists of GlyT type...
Menthol is a widely-used cooling and flavoring agent derived from mint leaves. In the peripheral nervous system, menthol regulates sensory transduction by activating TRPM8 channels residing specifically in primary sensory neurons. Although behavioral studies have implicated menthol actions in the brain, no direct central target of menthol has been...
GABA transporter-1 (GAT1) plays a key role in GABA reuptake, and deletion of GAT1 leads to a largely increased GABA-induced tonic conductance in the GAT1(-/-) mice. We hypothesized that homeostatic plasticity of GABA(A) receptor-mediated inhibition takes place to balance the increased tonic inhibition and maintains stability of the nervous system....
Enhancing inhibition via gamma-aminobutyric acid type A (GABA(A)) receptors contributes to anesthetic-induced impairment of long-term potentiation (LTP) of excitatory synaptic transmission, which may account for general anesthesia-associated memory impairment (amnesia). The neuron-specific K+ -Cl- cotransporter 2 (KCC2) is necessary for fast synapt...
GABAergic synaptic inhibition plays a critical role in regulating long-term potentiation (LTP) of glutamatergic synaptic transmission and circuit output. The K(+)-Cl(-) cotransporter 2 (KCC2) is an important factor in determining inhibitory GABAergic synaptic strength besides the contribution of GABA(A) receptor. Although much knowledge has been ga...
The molecular mechanisms underlying the involvement of oligodendrocytes in formation of the nodes of Ranvier (NORs) remain poorly understood. Here we show that oligodendrocyte-myelin glycoprotein (OMgp) aggregates specifically at NORs. Nodal location of OMgp does not occur along demyelinated axons of either Shiverer or proteolipid protein (PLP) tra...
The chronic effects of glycine transporter 1 and 2 inhibitors (sarcosine and ALX-1393, respectively) on miniature inhibitory postsynaptic currents were studied in cultured spinal neurons. We found that sarcosine increased the frequency of overall miniature inhibitory postsynaptic currents without affecting the ratio of glycinergic, mixed and GABAer...
Sodium salicylate is one of the nonsteroidal antiinflammatory drugs and is clinically used for antiinflammation and chronic pain relief. In the present study, we investigated the actions of sodium salicylate on gamma-aminobutyric acid type A receptor (GABA(A)) current in cultured rat spinal dorsal horn neurons. Sodium salicylate was found to reduce...
Drosophila mutants provide an ideal model to study channel-type specificity of ion channel regulation in situ. In this study, the effects of divalent cations on voltage-gated K+ currents were investigated in acutely dissociated central neurons of Drosophila third instar larvae using the whole-cell patch-clamp recording. Our data showed that micromo...