Department of Pharmacodynamics
Department of Pharmacodynamics
Research
The faculty in this department have a broad range of academic interests including the following.
- Hypertension
- Glaucoma
- Diabetes
- Epilepsy
- Aging
- Alcohol addiction and drug abuse
- Neurophysiological and cardiovascular changes caused by pregnancy
- Abnormal temperature regulatory states
- Obesity
- Parkinson’s disease and other neurodegenerative diseases
Some representative figures are included below:
Fig. 1. A photomicrograph depicting the inflammation-mediated selective degeneration of nigral dopamine neurons in the LPS model of Parkinson’s disease. Nanogram quantity of lipopolysaccharide (LPS), a powerful stimulator of brain immune cells, was infused into a supra-nigral region of an adult rat brain. A week later, coronal brain sections were double labeled for dopamine neurons (TH) and neurons in general (New-N). Notice that only TH neurons in the nigra, but not those in the adjacent VTA region, were destroyed. For more information, please contact the Liu Lab.
Fig. 2. An electropherogram of brain dialysate from an awake behaving rat after an amphetamine injection showing the levels of amino acids and catacholamines in the extracellular fluid. Over 300 electropherograms can be collected on-line per hour. For more information, please contact the Peris Lab.
Fig. 3. An infrared differential contrast image of the CA1 pyramidal cell layer in a living slice from the rat hippocampus. A glass pipette is visible from the left, which is being used to record spontaneous excitatory postsynaptic currents (sEPSCs) from a single cell (superimposed). For more information, please contact the Frazier lab.
Fig. 4. Ghrelin-induced GH secretion in 4-5 month old female mice. The inset graph shows area under the curve that was calculated by the trapezoidal method. Group numbers are indicated in figure legends and values are mean ± SEM. *p<0.05 vs. saline-treated control within genotype; † p<0.05 vs. ghrelin-treated WT. For more information, contact the Millard Lab.
Fig. 5. Chronic in vivo treatment with deoxycorticosterone acetate (DOCA) or angiotensin II (Ang II) both lead to the buildup of collagen (blue stain) in heart tissue. Treatment with angiotensin 1-7 (Ang 1-7) reverses this effect in both models of hypertension. For more information about gene therapy for hypertension and hypertension-associated diseases, contact the Katovich Lab.
Fig. 6. Binding of cortisol to the two corticosteroid receptors, MR (left) and GR (right) measured in a pool of hippocampal cytosol from sheep. Insets show the corresponding Scatchard analyses of these data. This figure illustrates that cortisol has a higher affinity for MR than for GR in sheep, as in other species, implicating MR in cortisol actions at low concentrations of the steroid. For more information please see the Keller-Wood lab page.
Fig. 7. A schematic of the signal transduction pathway by which nitric oxide mediates the cholinergic-induced inhibition of the the Na,K-ATPase in ciliary process epithelium. For more information please visit the Ellis Lab.
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