| OCR Text |
Show 96 astrocytes. It has been demonstrated that far infrared wavelengths can be used to induce small temperature changes in order to elicit neuronal firing (Dittami et al., 2011; Liu et al., 2014). It is possible that the high density of photons at the focal point may have a measurable effect on the cell being observed. Rodent models are very useful, but do not usually fully recapitulate human disorders. Rodent astrocytes are much less complex than human astrocytes and so more highly evolved organisms may be needed for more informative glial cell research (Oberheim et al., 2009). IUE cannot label microglia, so other approaches will need to be developed in order to label hematopoietic-derived cells with GCaMP. Transgenic technologies will soon solve this issue. There are no unique astrocyte markers. Human GFAP and GLAST enrich for astrocytes but are also expressed in other cell types (Zhuo et al., 2001). Identification of an astrocyte specific promoter or set of promoters could benefit the accuracy of astrocyte identification during experiments. Mouse GFAP, however, is not expressed by radial glial cells and so is more astrocyte specific (Herrmann et al., 2008). Future study: Aberrant cytokine-induced synaptic scaling in epilepsy How the brain is transformed into an epileptic state is not well understood. One hypothesized mechanism involves aberrant synaptic scaling, a homeostatic process that normally preserves overall synaptic strength in the cortex, and thus balances global neuronal network activity (Dityatev, 2010; Savin et al., 2009; Trasande and Ramirez, 2007). Until recently, studies have primarily focused on neuronal changes as potential causes of network hyperexcitability and neglected the role that astrocytes may play in epileptogenesis (Binder and Steinhäuser, 2006; Wetherington et al., 2008). |
