William T Birdsong, Bart C Jongbloets ... Tianyi Mao
By differentially modulating the two major excitatory inputs to the striatum, mu- and delta-opioid receptors regulate the balance between thalamic and cortical inputs to the striatum.
Bradley M Colquitt, Kelly Li ... Michael S Brainard
Large-scale gene expression analysis of the songbird brain identifies the molecular and cellular features of vocal motor circuits that are altered by the loss of hearing.
Seksiri Arttamangkul, Andrew Plazek ... John T Williams
Opioid sensitive neurons were identified using a traceless affinity labeling strategy to covalently label endogenous mu-opioid receptors with fluorescent compounds in living brain slices from wild type animals.
Teaching signals from "tutor" brain areas should be adapted to the plasticity mechanisms in "student" areas to achieve efficient learning in two-stage systems such as the vocal control circuit of the songbird.
A forebrain nucleus contributes specifically to the variability of syllable sequencing in songs of Bengalese finches, a songbird with complex syntactic song structure.
In songbirds, deafening leads to changes in gene expression which have now been mapped at the single-cell level across the neural circuit involved in song production.