A joint publication of BMC, part of Springer Nature, and the Editorial Group of Molecular Brain since 2008.
Molecular Brain is affiliated with the Association for the Study of Neurons and Disease (AND).
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Evidence suggests that there are aberrations in the vitamin D-endocrine system in subjects with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). Here, we review the relationship between vitamin D and ALS. Vitamin D defici...
Loss of the translational repressor FMRP causes Fragile X syndrome. In healthy neurons, FMRP modulates the local translation of numerous synaptic proteins. Synthesis of these proteins is required for the maint...
Matrix metalloproteinases are important factors in the molecular mechanisms leading to neuronal injury in many neurological disorders. Matrix metalloproteinase (MMP)-9 is up-regulated after cerebral ischemia a...
Hippocampal N-methyl-D-aspartate receptor (NMDAR) is required for spatial working memory. Although evidence from genetic manipulation mice suggests an important role of hippocampal NMDAR NR2B subunits (NR2B-NM...
Synaptosomal-associated protein, 25 kDa (SNAP-25) regulates the exocytosis of neurotransmitters. Growing evidence suggests that SNAP-25 is involved in neuropsychiatric disorders, such as schizophrenia, attenti...
The editors of Molecular Brain would like to thank all our reviewers who have contributed to the journal in Volume 5 (2012).
Pavlovian fear conditioning is a classical form of associative learning, which depends on associative synaptic plasticity in the amygdala. Recent findings suggest that the central amygdala (CeA) plays an activ...
CaMKII is a major synaptic protein that is activated during the induction of long-term potentiation (LTP) by the Ca2+ influx through NMDARs. This activation is required for LTP induction, but the role of the kina...
Group I metabotropic glutamate receptors (mGluR) are coupled via Gαq/11 to the activation of phospholipase Cβ, which hydrolyzes membrane phospholipids to form inositol 1,4,5 trisphosphate and diacylglycerol. In a...
Opioids are associated with wide inter-individual variability in the analgesic response and a narrow therapeutic index. This may be partly explained by the presence of single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in...
Neuronal activity alters calcium ion (Ca2+) dynamics in astrocytes, but the physiologic relevance of these changes is controversial. To examine this issue further, we generated an inducible transgenic mouse model...
A consensus has famously yet to emerge on the locus and mechanisms underlying the expression of the canonical NMDA receptor-dependent form of LTP. An objective assessment of the evidence leads us to conclude t...
Astrocytes regulate neuronal excitability and synaptic activity by releasing gliotransmitters such as glutamate. Our recent study demonstrated that astrocytes release glutamate upon GPCR activation via Ca2+ activ...
The transplantation of neural stem/progenitor cells (NS/PCs) at the sub-acute phase of spinal cord injury, but not at the chronic phase, can promote functional recovery. However, the reasons for this differenc...
Loss of a sensory input causes the hypersensitivity in other modalities. In addition to cross-modal plasticity, the sensory cortices without receiving inputs undergo the plastic changes. It is not clear how th...
Extracellular acidification occurs in the brain with elevated neural activity, increased metabolism, and neuronal injury. This reduction in pH can have profound effects on brain function because pH regulates e...
Trigeminal neuropathic pain attacks can be excruciating for patients, even after being lightly touched. Although there are rodent trigeminal nerve research models to study orofacial pain, few models have been ...
Postsynaptic density (PSD)-95-like membrane-associated guanylate kinases (PSD-MAGUKs) are scaffold proteins in PSDs that cluster signaling molecules near NMDA receptors. PSD-MAGUKs share a common domain struct...
Insulin-like growth factor 2 (Igf2) is a paternally expressed imprinted gene regulating fetal growth, playing an integral role in the development of many tissues including the brain. The parent-of-origin specific...
Accumulated evidence has suggested that potentiation of cortical GABAergic inhibitory neurotransmission may be a key mechanism in the treatment of schizophrenia. However, the downstream molecular mechanisms re...
Notch signaling is well recognized as a key regulator of the neuronal fate during embryonic development, but its function in the adult brain is still largely unknown. Mind bomb-1 (Mib1) is an essential positiv...
Proper adjustment of moving direction after external mechanical stimulation is essential for animals to avoid danger (e.g. predators), and thus is vital for survival. This process involves sensory inputs, cent...
Glutamate is the major transmitter that mediates the principal form of excitatory synaptic transmission in the brain. It has been well established that glutamate is released via Ca2+-dependent exocytosis of gluta...
The medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) serves major executive functions. mPFC output to subcortical brain areas such as the amygdala controls emotional processing and plays an important role in fear extinction. I...
Parkinson’s disease (PD) is a neurodegenerative disease characterized by selective degeneration of dopaminergic neurons in the substantia nigra (SN). The familial form of PD, PARK2, is caused by mutations in the
Axonopathy is critical in the early pathogenesis of neurodegenerative diseases, including Parkinson’s disease (PD) and dementia with Lewy bodies (DLB). Axonal swellings such as globules and spheroids are a dis...
GABA, the major inhibitory neurotransmitter in CNS, has been demonstrated to paradoxically produce excitation even in mature brain. However activity-dependent form of GABA excitation in cortical neurons has no...
Memories are stored within neuronal ensembles in the brain. Modern genetic techniques can be used to not only visualize specific neuronal ensembles that encode memories (e.g., fear, craving) but also to select...
Long-term memory is believed to be maintained by persistent modifications of synaptic transmission within the neural circuits that mediate behavior. Thus, long-term potentiation (LTP) is widely studied as a po...
Mercury is a well-known neurotoxin implicated in a wide range of neurological or psychiatric disorders including autism spectrum disorders, Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, epilepsy, depression, mood ...
In the olfactory system of malacostracan crustaceans, axonal input from olfactory receptor neurons associated with aesthetascs on the animal’s first pair of antennae target primary processing centers in the me...
Huntington’s disease (HD) is an autosomal dominant neurodegenerative disease that is caused by the expansion of a polyglutamine (polyQ) stretch within Huntingtin (htt), the protein product of the HD gene. Alth...
Fragile X syndrome is caused by lack of fragile X mental retardation protein (FMRP) due to silencing of the FMR1 gene. The metabotropic glutamate receptors (mGluRs) in the central nervous system contribute to ...
Action potentials at the neurons and graded signals at the synapses are primary codes in the brain. In terms of their functional interaction, the studies were focused on the influence of presynaptic spike patt...
Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is characterized by episodic memory impairment that often precedes clinical diagnosis by many years. Probing the mechanisms of such impairment may provide much needed means of diagnosi...
Higher mammals such as primates and carnivores have highly developed unique brain structures such as the ocular dominance columns in the visual cortex, and the gyrus and outer subventricular zone of the cerebr...
The Notch signaling pathway has been shown to be involved in the development of the nervous system. Recent studies showed that Notch receptors and ligands are also expressed in the nervous system of adult anim...
There is mounting evidence for a neurodevelopmental basis for disorders such as autism and schizophrenia, in which prenatal or early postnatal events may influence brain development and predispose the young to...
The most frequent pain in patients with metastatic breast and prostate cancer is bone pain, which can be severe and difficult to treat. The mechanisms underlying this pain remain unclear. Here we investigated ...
Anxiety is a prevalent psychological disorder, in which the atypical expression of certain genes and the abnormality of amygdala are involved. Intermediate processes between genetic defects and anxiety, pathop...
Pain contains both sensory and affective dimensions. Using a rodent visceral pain assay that combines the colorectal distension (CRD) model with the conditioned place avoidance (CPA) paradigms, we measured a l...
Spinal glia, particularly microglia and astrocytes, are of the utmost importance in the development and maintenance of chronic pain. A recent study from our laboratory revealed that gabapentin, a recommended f...
Huntington’s Disease (HD) is a devastating neurodegenerative disorder that clinically manifests as motor dysfunction, cognitive impairment and psychiatric symptoms. There is currently no cure for this progress...
It has been reported that remarkable and sustained activation of astrocytes and/or microglia occurs in cancer induced pain (CIP), which is different from neuropathic and inflammatory pain. The present study wa...
Caspases are a family of cysteine proteases that play key roles in programmed cell death (apoptosis). Mounting evidence in recent years shows that caspases also have important non-apoptotic functions in multip...
The analysis of the contributions to synaptic plasticity and memory of cAMP, PKA, CRE, CREB-1, CREB-2, and CPEB has recruited the efforts of many laboratories all over the world. These are six key steps in the...
Over-activation of AMPARs (α−amino-3-hydroxy-5-methylisoxazole-4-propionic acid subtype glutamate receptors) is implicated in excitotoxic neuronal death associated with acute brain insults, such as ischemic st...
Nerve cells program the brain codes to manage well-organized cognitions and behaviors. It remains unclear how a population of neurons and astrocytes work coordinately to encode their spatial and temporal activ...
Glutathione (GSH) plays an important role in neuronal oxidant defence. Depletion of cellular GSH is observed in neurodegenerative diseases and thereby contributes to the associated oxidative stress and Ca2+ dysre...
A joint publication of BMC, part of Springer Nature, and the Editorial Group of Molecular Brain since 2008.
Molecular Brain is affiliated with the Association for the Study of Neurons and Disease (AND).
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