Strong transcriptional changes in the HVC were detected during the transition from non-singing to singing in canaries of both sexes. Although the sex-specific genes of singing females shared little resemblance with those of males, our analysis showed potential functional convergences. Thus, male and female songbirds achieve comparable singing behaviours with sex-specific transcriptomes.Oligodendrocyte-formed myelin sheaths allow fast synaptic transmission in the brain. Impairments in the process of myelination, or demyelinating insults, might cause chronic diseases such as multiple sclerosis (MS). Under physiological conditions, remyelination is an ongoing process throughout adult life consisting in the differentiation of oligodendrocyte progenitor cells (OPCs) into mature oligodendrocytes (OLs). During pathological events, this process fails due to unfavorable environment. Adenosine and sphingosine kinase/sphingosine 1-phosphate signaling axes (SphK/S1P) play important roles in remyelination processes. Remarkably, fingolimod (FTY720), a sphingosine analog recently approved for MS treatment, plays important roles in OPC maturation. We recently demonstrated that the selective stimulation of A2 B adenosine receptors (A2 B Rs) inhibit OPC differentiation in vitro and reduce voltage-dependent outward K+ currents (I K ) necessary to OPC maturation, whereas specific SphK1 or SphK2 inhibition exerts the opposite effect. During OPC differentiation A2 B R expression increases, this effect being prevented by SphK1/2 blockade. Furthermore, selective silencing of A2 B R in OPC cultures prompts maturation and, intriguingly, enhances the expression of S1P lyase, the enzyme responsible for irreversible S1P catabolism. Finally, the existence of an interplay between SphK1/S1P pathway and A2 B Rs in OPCs was confirmed since acute stimulation of A2 B Rs activates SphK1 by increasing its phosphorylation. Here the role of A2 B R and SphK/S1P signaling during oligodendrogenesis is reviewed in detail, with the purpose to shed new light on the interaction between A2 B Rs and S1P signaling, as eventual innovative targets for the treatment of demyelinating disorders.Ultrasound and photoacoustic imaging are emerging as powerful tools to study brain structures and functions. The skull introduces significant distortion and attenuation of the ultrasound signals deteriorating image quality. For biological studies employing rodents, craniotomy is often times performed to enhance image qualities. However, craniotomy is unsuitable for longitudinal studies, where a long-term cranial window is needed to prevent repeated surgeries. Here, we propose a mouse model to eliminate sound blockage by the top portion of the skull, while minimum physiological perturbation to the imaged object is incurred. With the new mouse model, no craniotomy is needed before each imaging experiment. The effectiveness of our method was confirmed by three imaging systems photoacoustic computed tomography, ultrasound imaging, and photoacoustic mesoscopy. Functional photoacoustic imaging of the mouse brain hemodynamics was also conducted. We expect new applications to be enabled by the new mouse model for photoacoustic and ultrasound imaging.Fluorescence imaging devices have been indispensable in elucidating the workings of the brain in living animals, including unrestrained, active ones. Various devices are available, each with their own strengths and weaknesses in terms of many factors. We have developed CMOS-based needle-type imaging devices that are small and lightweight enough to be doubly implanted in freely moving mice. The design also allowed angled implantations to avoid critical areas. We demonstrated the utility of the devices by using them on GCaMP6 mice in a formalin test experiment. Simultaneous implantations to the capsular-lateral central amygdala (CeLC) and dorsal raphe nucleus (DRN) were proven to be safe and did not hinder the execution of the study. Analysis of the collected calcium signaling data, supported by behavior data, showed increased activity in both regions as a result of pain stimulation. Thus, we have successfully demonstrated the various advantages of the device in its application in the pain experiment.Miniaturized implantable devices play a crucial role in neural interfaces by monitoring and modulating neural activities on the peripheral and central nervous systems. KT 474 Research efforts toward a compact wireless closed-loop system stimulating the nerve automatically according to the user's condition have been maintained. These systems have several advantages over open-loop stimulation systems such as reduction in both power consumption and side effects of continuous stimulation. Furthermore, a compact and wireless device consuming low energy alleviates foreign body reactions and risk of frequent surgical operations. Unfortunately, however, the miniaturized closed-loop neural interface system induces several hardware design challenges such as neural activity recording with severe stimulation artifact, real-time stimulation artifact removal, and energy-efficient wireless power delivery. Here, we will review recent approaches toward the miniaturized closed-loop neural interface system with integrated circuit (IC) techniques. It is reported that radiomic features extracted from quantitative susceptibility mapping (QSM) had promising clinical value for the diagnosis of Parkinson's disease (PD). We aimed to explore the usefulness of radiomics features based on magnitude images to distinguish PD from non-PD controls. We retrospectively recruited PD patients and controls who underwent brain 3.0T MR including susceptibility-weighted imaging (SWI). A total of 396 radiomics features were extracted from the SN of 95 PD patients and 95 non-PD controls based on SWI. Intra-/inter-observer correlation coefficients (ICCs) were applied to measure the observer agreement for the radiomic feature extraction. Then the patients were randomly grouped into training and validation sets in a ratio of 73. In the training set, the maximum correlation minimum redundancy algorithm (mRMR) and the least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (LASSO) were conducted to filter and choose the optimized subset of features, and a radiomics signature was constructed.