Julie J Mirzabekov's research while affiliated with Stanford University and other places

... The mPFC afferent to BLA and BLA input to mPFC regulate the anxiety and depressive-like behavior which depends on the sub-region of mPFC. For instance, activation of ventromedial PFC (vmPFC) input to BLA decreases anxiety while activation of dorsal medial PFC (dmPFC) has no effect (Adhikari et al., 2015). Other studies have shown that stimulation of BLA projection to dmPFC and vmPFC effect distinctly fear and anxiety (Burgos-Robles et al., 2017;Klavir et al., 2017;Senn et al., 2014). ...

... In rodents, sweet foods/solutions and social interactions constitute natural rewards, and as such, they have potent motivational properties and activate brain's primary reward pathway-the mesolimbic DA system [283][284][285][286][287][288][289][290][291] . A growing body of evidence indicates that ELS in the form of MS and LBN disrupts later life responses to rewards, including natural rewards, as measured on a variety of behavioral tasks [ 52 , 292 ].For instance, both male and female rats reared under ELS conditions exhibit alterations across a spectrum of reward-related processes throughout development, including intake of palatable solutions and/or foods as well as motivated social behaviors known to be rewarding to rats, including play and sexual behaviors [52] . ...

... Lee et al. [94] described the multiplexed examination of the tumor microenvironment using a modified protocol for imaging whole tumors or individual organs. In the original method described by Chung et al. [95], optical transparency is achieved through a long process of infusion of formaldehyde and hydrogel monomers into the organ (for one to three days), hydrogel polymerization in the tissue (for about three days), and subsequent electrophoretic purification with an ionic detergent (for five to nine days) to wash off lipids from the specimen while leaving proteins bound to the hydrogel. The obvious disadvantage of this method is the enormous time consumption, which makes it unsuitable in clinical use, where quick and simple methods are required. ...

... Rats were acclimated to the testing chamber for 20-30 min before the onset of examination. A traditional Dixon up-down method with von Frey filaments of incremental stiffness (5,7,8,11,14,18,23,38,49,53,90,122, 135 g/mm 2 ) was used to measure mechanical hypersensitivity. A positive response was considered if the paw was sharply withdrawn or flinching occurred. ...

... [25][26][27] The forced swim test (FST) 28 challenges rats with inescapable adversity and uses passive coping (immobility) as a measure of similarity to the human demographic, and behavior in the FST is mediated by medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) projection to the dorsal raphe nucleus (DRN). 29 Antidepressants selectively increase active coping in the FST without affecting overall locomotor activity (LCA). 18,30 Impaired pattern separation is another characteristic of depression 31,32 as well as other conditions that impair cognition, such as age-related dementias 33,34 and Parkinson's Disease. ...

... Specifically, the activation of VTA dopaminergic neurons causes place preference, 52 and the suppression of VTA dopaminergic neurons by activating VTA GABAergic neurons leads to place aversion. 57 The activation of LHA GABAergic neurons promotes feeding and reward phenotypes, 6 whereas that of LHA glutamatergic neurons suppresses feeding and produces aversive behavioral phenotypes. 7 Based on these previous findings, we hypothesize that PCG glutamatergic and GABAergic axons can converge onto single VTA GABAergic neurons in a circuit configuration analogous to a so-called ''opposing components'' motif. ...