(C) 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.”
“Impact of meditation on emotional processing, and selleck screening library its clinical applications, has recently drawn significant interest. In this visual event-related potential (ERP) study we investigated whether long-term meditation practitioners exhibit different ERP responses to the emotional load of stimuli (IAPS pictures) than control subjects with no experience in meditation. Differences were observed in the late positive potential (LPP). LPP amplitude is typically greater

in ERPs evoked by emotionally arousing scenes, specifically negative images, compared to neutral scenes. This effect was also replicated in our study, but not in case of meditators’ frontal scalp regions, who differed significantly in this respect from control subjects. Our findings provide support for different emotional processing in meditation practitioners: at high levels of processing meditators are less affected by stimuli with adverse emotional selleck load, while processing of positive stimuli remains unaltered. To further confirm this observation, a long-term longitudinal random assignment study would be desirable. (C) 2011 Elsevier Ireland Ltd and the Japan Neuroscience Society. All rights reserved.”
“A statistical approach has been applied to analyse

primary structure patterns at inner positions of alpha-helices in proteins. A systematic survey was carried out in a recent sample of non-redundant proteins selected from the Protein Data Bank, which were used to analyse alpha-helix structures for amino acid pairing patterns. Only residues more than three positions apart from both termini of the alpha-helix were considered as inner. Amino acid pairings i, i+k(k = 1, 2, 3,4, 5), were analysed and the corresponding 20 x 20 matrices of relative global propensities were constructed. An analysis of (i, i+4, i+8) and (i, i+3, i+4) triplet patterns was also performed. These analysis yielded information on a series of amino acid patterns (pairings

and triplets) showing either high or low preference for alpha-helical motifs and suggested a novel approach to protein alphabet reduction. In addition, it has been shown that the individual amino acid propensities are not enough to define the statistical Y 27632 distribution of these patterns. Global pair propensities also depend on the type of pattern, its composition and orientation in the protein sequence. The data presented should prove useful to obtain and refine useful predictive rules which can further the development and fine-tuning of protein structure prediction algorithms and tools. (C) 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.”
“Reward-induced burst firing of dopaminergic neurons has mainly been studied in the primate midbrain. Voltammetry allows high-speed detection of dopamine release in the projection area.