Research Roundup: July 2019

By Jennifer Kornbluth

Here are summaries of a selection of the papers published by Duke Neurobiology in July 2019:

Motor Learning:

The Yang lab revealed that Drosophila can remember a reward-baited location through reinforcement learning and do so quickly and without requiring vision. Read more

Neural Cell Biology:

James McNamara was part of a team that developed a publicly shared, high throughput voxel-based analysis (VBA) pipeline in a high-performance computing environment to increase throughput and reproducibility of quantitative small animal brain studies. Read more

Senses:

The Field lab discovered that after saving dying cells, the retina can restructure itself and regain normal light responses, indicating remarkable plasticity extending beyond the developmental period. This finding could support efforts to repair or replace defective rods in patients blinded by rod degeneration. Read more

Ru-Rong Ji and collaborators demonstrated distinct analgesic efficacy of D-series resolvins and revealed striking sex dimorphism of these specialized pro-resolving mediators. Read more

Commentary:

Shawn Willett provided commentary on a recent paper by Chen et al. which reports the discovery of expanded foveal magnification in superior colliculus, which is comparable to that in primary visual cortex. Read more

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