The synaptic basis of activity-dependent eye-specific competition.

Binocular vision requires proper developmental wiring of eye-specific inputs to the brain. In the thalamus, axons from the two eyes initially overlap in the dorsal lateral geniculate nucleus and undergo activity-dependent competition to segregate into target domains. Here, we combine eye-specific tract tracing with volumetric super-resolution imaging to measure the nanoscale molecular reorganization of developing retinogeniculate eye-specific synapses in the mouse brain. We show there are eye-specific differences in presynaptic vesicle pool size and vesicle association with the active zone at the earliest stages of retinogeniculate refinement but find no evidence of eye-specific differences in subsynaptic domain number, size, or transsynaptic alignment across development. Genetic disruption of spontaneous retinal activity decreases retinogeniculate synapse density, delays the emergence eye-specific differences in vesicle organization, and disrupts subsynaptic domain maturation. These results suggest that activity-dependent eye-specific presynaptic maturation underlies synaptic competition in the mammalian visual system.

Bioinductive and anti-inflammatory properties of Propolis and Biodentine on SHED.

Objectives: This study aimed to evaluate and compare the cell viability, differentiation potential and anti-inflammatory potential of propolis and Biodentine™ on stem cells isolated from human exfoliated deciduous teeth (SHED). Materials and methods: SHED were segregated and cultured from the dental pulp of children after therapeutic extraction. Microculture Tetrazolium Assay (MTT) assay was carried out for assessing cell proliferation potential of propolis and Biodentine at different concentrations. As per the results from cell proliferation assay, cell differentiation potential of SHED was evaluated at concentration of 12.5 µg/ml using Alizarin Red staining. The anti-inflammatory potential of test materials was evaluated using gelatin zymography by detecting MMP-2 and MMP-9. Results: The maximum cell proliferation percentage of SHED treated with propolis and Biodentine was observed at a concentration of 12.5 µg/ml, on day 7, 14 and 21 with Biodentine having maximum cell proliferation potential followed by propolis. SHED treated with Biodentine showed maximum cell differentiation on day 7 (107.16), 14 (106.29) and 21 (107.72). However, anti-inflammatory activity against MMP-2 was 95 % with propolis and 85 % with Biodentine and whereas, against MMP-9 it was 65 % for propolis and 47 % for Biodentine. Conclusion: Propolis shows comparable cell viability, cell proliferation and differentiation potential on SHED when compared to Biodentine. It also exhibits better invitro anti-inflammatory activity on SHED compared to Biodentine. Further studies are warranted to validate the application of propolis as an effective and economical alternative biocompatible agent to Biodentine for vital pulp therapies.

Nonmonotonic confining potential and eigenvalue density transition for generalized random matrix model.

We consider several limiting cases of the joint probability distribution for a random matrix ensemble with an additional interaction term controlled by an exponent γ (called the γ ensembles). The effective potential, which is essentially the single-particle confining potential for an equivalent ensemble with γ=1 (called the Muttalib-Borodin ensemble), is a crucial quantity defined in solution to the Riemann-Hilbert problem associated with the γ ensembles. It enables us to numerically compute the eigenvalue density of γ ensembles for all γ>0. We show that one important effect of the two-particle interaction parameter γ is to generate or enhance the nonmonotonicity in the effective single-particle potential. For suitable choices of the initial single-particle potentials, reducing γ can lead to a large nonmonotonicity in the effective potential, which in turn leads to significant changes in the density of eigenvalues. For a disordered conductor, this corresponds to a systematic decrease in the conductance with increasing disorder. This suggests that appropriate models of γ ensembles can be used as a possible framework to study the effects of disorder on the distribution of conductances.

Fermi surfaces of the topological semimetal CaSn3probed through de Haas van Alphen oscillations.

In the search of topological superconductors, nailing down the Fermiology of the normal state is as crucial a prerequisite as unraveling the superconducting pairing symmetry. In particular, the number of time-reversal-invariant momenta (TRIM) in the Brillouin zone enclosed by Fermi surfaces is closely linked to the topological class of time-reversal-invariant systems, and can experimentally be investigated. We report here a detailed study of de Haas van Alphen quantum oscillations in single crystals of the topological semimetal CaSn3with torque magnetometry in high magnetic fields up to 35 T. In conjunction with density functional theory based calculations, the observed quantum oscillations frequencies indicate that the Fermi surfaces of CaSn3enclose an odd number of TRIM, satisfying one of the proposed criteria to realize topological superconductivity. Nonzero Berry phases extracted from the magnetic oscillations also support the nontrivial topological nature of CaSn3.