Cellular Neuroscience
The gap between two communicating neurons.
What is a synapse?
The brain region responsible for sustaining basic life functions life breathing and heart rate.
What is the brainstem?
The ability of the brain to change and adapt to life experience and stimuli.
What is neuroplasticity?
The process of programmed cell death.
What is apoptosis?
You are a neuroscience student who is viewing neurons under the microscope in a laboratory. You identify a structure that looks like a long, thin string and is attached to two branching sections. What structure are you looking at?
What is an axon?
Chemical signals used by neurons to communicate with target cells such as another neuron or muscle cells.
What is a neurotransmitter?
The largest bundle of nerve fibers that connect the left and right hemispheres of the brain.
What is the corpus callosum?
The specific windows of development that are particularly sensitive to experience or environmental influences.
What are critical periods?
The growth of new cells.
What is proliferation?
You are a neuroscientist interested in researching the effects of various life events and environmental factors on the developing brain. You know this will require an extensive period of time working with specific individuals. What kind of research method would you use to conduct this study?
What is a longitudinal study?
The process in which a neuron generates an electrical signal.
What is an action potential?
The area of the brain that is associated with executive function, decision-making, problem-solving, judgement, emotions, and personality. This region is also known to mature the latest.
What is the prefrontal cortex?
The process in which neurons migrate from their origin to their final position in the brain during embryonic and fetal development.
What is neuronal migration?
The process in which synaptic strength is enhanced for a prolonged time.
What is long term potentiation?
You are a neuroscience professor who is demonstrating a brain dissection to a group of students in a lab. After a cross-section, your students are stunned to find out that the brain is actually made up of grey and white colors rather than pink. One students is wondering why most of the inner part of the brain is white and asks you to explain it. You tell your students that this is called the "white matter" and is made up of cells with protective and insulating coating that give it the white color. You also go on to explain how this coating is produced by specific cells in the central nervous system. What two components are you explaining to your students?
What is myelin sheath and oligodendrocytes?
The gaps in between the insulating structures on the axon.
What are Nodes of Ranvier?
The lobe in which the structure crucial for forming and storing new memories is located.
What is the temporal lobe? (Hippocampus)
The process in which stronger neural connections rule out weaker connections causing an extensive synaptic pruning event.
What is competitive elimination?
The process that shifts the electrical charge within a neuron causing the membrane potential to become less negative compared to the outside of the cell.
What is depolarization?
You are a neurologist seeing an adult patient who is experiencing increased neural stem cell activity and ongoing neurogenesis. After ordering imaging tests, the results show an area embedded near the walls of the lateral brain ventricles. In which region of the brain is this activity taking place?
What is the subventricular zone?
The thin protrusions on the dendritic membrane of neurons that play a role in neuronal development, initiating and guiding processes, forming new synapses, and interacting with the environment.
What are filopodia?
The region of the brain located on the parietal lobe that is responsible for processing environmental sensations like touch, pressure, pain, temperature and organizing and recognizing intensity of external stimuli.
What is the somatosensory cortex?
During development, neurons rely on these specialized cells to migrate from the intermediate zone to their final destinations in the cortex.
What are radial glia?
The process during development in which signals from the mesoderm trigger ectoderm cells to differentiate into neurons.
What is neural induction?
You are a neuroscientist working with a cardiologist. You are interested in learning about the types of neurotransmitters emitted by immature neurons. In your lab, you culture immature neurons and examine the secreted neurotransmitters in Experiment 1. Next, you work with the cardiologist who provides cardiac tissue samples. In Experiment 2, you culture the immature neurons with the cardiac cells and examine the neurotransmitters provided. Using your background as a neuroscientist, which neurotransmitters do you expect to be secreted in Experiment 1 and 2, respectfully?
What is norepinephrine (Exp. 1) and acetylcholine (Exp. 2)?