Biomedical subjects

P Janata

Publications and source records attributed to P Janata.

5 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed2004

Impact of intravenous oxygen therapy on the expression of reticulocyte-type 15-lipoxygenase in human volunteers.

Intravenous oxygen infusion is used in complementary medicine to fight inflammatory disorders and repeated application of this therapeutic method leads to an increase in eosinophilic granulocytes in the peripheral blood. Since this subset of human peripheral leukocytes are known to express large amounts of the reticulocyte-type 15-lipoxygenase (15-lipoxygenase 1), which was suggested to exhibit anti-inflammatory activities, we profiled expression of this enzyme in the peripheral blood during the time course of typical oxygen infusion therapy. For this purpose seven volunteers were treated with intravenous infusion of oxygen gas for 4 weeks and the time-course of 15-lipoxygenase expression as well as the eosinophil count were monitored during and after the treatment interval. We found that 15-lipoxygenase 1 expression and the eosinophil count were significantly increased during the treatment period but returned to normal after the therapy was stopped. There was a striking correlation between the relative number of 15-lipoxygenase transcripts and the eosinophil counts suggesting eosinophils as major source of 15-lipoxygenase 1 expression. Since 15-lipoxygenase has been implicated in the resolving phase of acute inflammatory diseases the anti-inflammatory effects of intravenous oxygen infusion may be explained at least in part by our experimental findings.

Adult↗

PubMed2001

Chemical plume tracking. 2. Multiple-frequency modulation.

The purpose of this research is to estimate the effect of turbulent mixing on the information content in a chemically encoded signal, to investigate the effect of the presence of multiple encoded frequencies, and to evaluate the information contained in the higher harmonics of the coherence spectra. The virtual plume instrument is used to mimic the flow conditions and signal patterns in a real chemical plume. Two-frequency modulation experiments are performed using solenoid valves to introduce concentration plugs of a marker into the carrier flows at certain constant frequencies. In our experiments, the length of the delay elements and the dispersion were varied to mimic different characteristics of the turbulent plume. In addition, an artificial but uncorrelated white noise was added to the raw amperometric signals in order to simulate the "noisy" conditions existing in a real plume. Our experiments reveal that the introduced turbulence has only a marginal effect on the coherence spectra. Moreover, it is shown that when the second frequency is present in the plume, both fundamental frequencies can be unambiguously assigned. Higher harmonics in the coherence spectra have been found to depend on the distance from the source. These findings are important for understanding of the mechanism of chemotaxis and may also lead to the design of optimized search algorithms for chemical plume tracking robots.

Journal Article↗

PubMed2001

Brain electrical activity evoked by mental formation of auditory expectations and images.

Evidence for the brain's derivation of explicit expectancies in an ongoing sensory context has been well established by studies of the P300 and processing negativity (PN) components of the event-related potential (ERP). "Emitted potentials" generated in the absence of sensory input by unexpected stimulus omissions also exhibit a P300 component and provide another perspective on patterns of brain activity related to the processing of expectancies. The studies described herein extend earlier emitted potential findings in several aspects. First, high-density (128-channel) EEG recordings are used for topographical mapping of emitted potentials. Second, the primary focus is on emitted potential components preceding the P300, i.e. those components that are more likely to resemble ERP components associated with sensory processing. Third, the dependence of emitted potentials on attention is assessed. Fourth, subjects' knowledge of the structure of an auditory stimulus sequence is modulated so that emitted potentials can be compared between conditions that are identical in physical aspects but differ in terms of subjects' expectations regarding the sequence structure. Finally, a novel task is used to elicit emitted potentials, in which subjects explicitly imagine the continuations of simple melodies. In this task, subjects mentally complete melodic fragments in the appropriate tempo, even though they know with absolute certainty that no sensory stimulus will occur. Emitted potentials were elicited only when subjects actively formed expectations or images. The topographies of the initial portion of the emitted potentials were significantly correlated with the N100 topography elicited by corresponding acoustic stimuli, but uncorrelated with the topographies of corresponding silence control periods.

Acoustic Stimulation↗

PubMed2001

Quantitative assessment of vocal development in the zebra finch using self-organizing neural networks.

To understand the mechanisms of song learning by songbirds it is necessary to have in hand tools for extracting, describing, and quantifying features of the developing vocalizations. The extremely large number of vocalizations produced by juvenile zebra finches and the variability in these vocalizations during the sensorimotor learning period preclude manual scoring methods. Here we describe an approach for classification of vocalizations produced during sensorimotor learning based on self-organizing neural networks. This approach allowed us to construct probability distributions of spectrotemporal features recorded on each day. By training the network with samples obtained across the course of vocal development in individual birds, we observed developmental trajectories of these features. The emergence of stereotypy in sequences of song elements was captured by computing the entropy in the matrices of first- and second-order transition probabilities. Self-organizing maps may assist in classifying large libraries of zebra finch vocalizations and shedding light on mechanisms of vocal development.

Aging↗

PubMed1999

Gradual emergence of song selectivity in sensorimotor structures of the male zebra finch song system.

Birdsong is a model system for understanding how motor and sensory information interact to coordinate behavior. Neurons in one potential site of sensorimotor integration, the forebrain nucleus HVc, have premotor activity during singing and auditory activity during playback of the bird's own song. It is not known whether the high degree of selectivity for learned features of song observed during playback arises in HVc or also in structures afferent to HVc. We recorded in anesthetized adult zebra finches from two structures afferent to HVc: either the nucleus interfacialis (NIf) or the L1 subdivision of the field L complex, and simultaneously from a second electrode in HVc. Correlations in the bursting pattern of ongoing activity of HVc and NIf recordings were observed; these helped to localize the first electrode to NIf recording sites. Most NIf neurons exhibited song-selective responses, but as a population, they were less selective than were HVc neurons. Most L1 neurons were not song-selective. NIf neurons have also been reported to have premotor activity during singing; thus, NIf is another potential site of auditory-motor interactions in the song system. Evidence gathered to date suggests that those brain areas in the passerine forebrain that are recruited during song production also display the most selective learned auditory responses.

Acoustic Stimulation↗