Cohen Bertelsen (woolenparent5)

The offering of a rewarded odor mimicking the sunflower floral fragrance promoted higher foraging activity, increased the proportion of dances advertising the target inflorescences and reduced delays in dance onset, positively affected the density of bees on the crop, and increased yields from 29% to 57% in different sunflower hybrids. This study highlights the role of olfactory learning within the social context of the hive to bias foraging preferences in a novel agricultural environment and suggest that improvements in the tested parameters were due to beeś anticipated response to the sunflower scent.Cryptochromes and photolyases are blue-light photoreceptors and DNA-repair enzymes, respectively, with conserved domains and a common ancestry [1-3]. Photolyases use UV-A and blue light to repair lesions in DNA caused by UV radiation, photoreactivation, although cryptochromes have specialized roles ranging from the regulation of photomorphogenesis in plants, to clock function in animals [4-7]. A group of cryptochromes (cry-DASH) [8] from bacteria, plants, and animals has been shown to repair in vitro cyclobutane pyrimidine dimers (CPDs) in single-stranded DNA (ssDNA), but not in double-stranded DNA (dsDNA) [9]. Cry-DASH are evolutionary related to 6-4 photolyases and animal cryptochromes, but their biological role has remained elusive. The analysis of several crystal structures of members of the cryptochrome and photolyase family (CPF) allowed the identification of structural and functional similarities between photolyases and cryptochromes [8, 10-12] and led to the proposal that the absence of dsDNA repair activity in cry-DASH is due to the lack of an efficient flipping of the lesion into the catalytic pocket [13]. However, in the fungus Phycomyces blakesleeanus, cry-DASH has been shown to be capable of repairing CPD lesions in dsDNA as a bona fide photolyase [14]. Here, we show that cry-DASH of a related fungus, Mucor circinelloides, not only repairs CPDs in dsDNA in vitro but is the enzyme responsible for photoreactivation in vivo. A structural model of the M. circinelloides cry-DASH suggests that the capacity to repair lesions in dsDNA is an evolutionary adaptation from an ancestor that only had the capacity to repair lesions in ssDNA.Converging evidence suggests that the brain encodes time through dynamically changing patterns of neural activity, including neural sequences, ramping activity, and complex spatiotemporal dynamics. However, the potential computational significance and advantage of these different regimes have remained unaddressed. We combined large-scale recordings and modeling to compare population dynamics between premotor cortex and striatum in mice performing a two-interval timing task. Conventional decoders revealed that the dynamics within each area encoded time equally well; however, the dynamics in striatum exhibited a higher degree of sequentiality. Analysis of premotor and striatal dynamics, together with a large set of simulated prototypical dynamical regimes, revealed that regimes with higher sequentiality allowed a biologically constrained artificial downstream network to better read out time. These results suggest that, although different strategies exist for encoding time in the brain, neural sequences represent an ideal and flexible dynamical regime for enabling downstream areas to read out this information.Uncovering the neural mechanisms underlying human natural ambulatory behavior is a major challenge for neuroscience. selleck kinase inhibitor Current commercially available implantable devices that allow for recording and stimulation of deep brain activity in humans can provide invaluable intrinsic brain signals but are not inherently designed for research and thus lack flexible control and integration with wearable sensors. We developed a mobile deep brain recording and stimulation (Mo-DBRS) platform that enables wireless and programmable intracranial electroencephalographic recording an