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Malignant gliomas are primary brain tumors considered to be one of the deadliest cancers. Despite surgical intervention followed by aggressive radio- and chemo-therapies, average survival is approximately 15 months of diagnosis. Recurrent tumors resembling all the characteristics of the original tumor mass and growing in close vicinity to the original site are frequent due to presence of a self-renewing population of cells, glioma stem cells. The cells are resistant to therapies and able to invade the surrounding healthy brain tissue. Indeed, infiltrative growth assisted by numerous interactions with microenvironment are hallmarks of glioma growth. Many research efforts are put forward to understand the mechanisms of invasion. Glioma cells adopted numerous biological strategies to their own advantage to viciously propagate and navigate narrow spaces within the brain. Despite enormous amount of data on malignant gliomas generated by –omics approach which broaden our knowledge on glioma physiology in the last decade, parallel success in discovering new therapies did not happen. Thus, new therapeutic approaches may employ healthy cells of the microenvironment to tame malignant growth are necessary. Here, we highlight current knowledge on glioma origin, infiltrative growth, interactions with the microenvironment and potentials for new therapies.

The aim of the investigation was to assess antihypoxic and neuroprotective properties of the glial cell line-derived neurotrophic factor (GDNF) in hypoxia models in vitro and in vivo. In vitro experiments were carried out on primary hippocampal cultures. Hypoxia modeling was performed on day 14 of culture development in vitro (DIV) by replacing the normoxic cultural medium with a medium containing low oxygen for 10 minutes. Registration of extracellular action potentials was conducted by MEA systems (Multichannel Systems, Germany) application. Study the effect of GDNF on synaptic plasticity was performed using SmartFlare RNA Detection Probes (Merck Millipore, France) and fluorescent microscopy. In vivo experiments were carried out on C57BL/6j male mice. For acute hypobaric hypoxia a vacuum flow-through chamber was used at the ambient temperature of 20–22°C. We have investigated the resistance of animals to hypoxia and their spatial memory retention in Morris water maze test 24 hours after hypoxia. In vitro and in vivo data demonstrated that GDNF has strong antihypoxic and neuroprotective properties. Preventive GDNF application before hypoxia contributed to the animal survival and spatial memory retention as well as the maintenance of cells viability in primary hippocampal cultures. 

Today many fundamental questions in Neuroscience can be addressed with Microfluidics methods which provide unique approaches for cell patterning and control neural branch outgrowth. Such methods can be used to gwoe separate subpopulations of dissociated neurons connected with uni-directional connectivity. Combined with microelectrode arrays such approach can be used to simulate and study neurogenesis, learning and information coding in neural networks.

The aim of the investigation was to study a role of cannabinoid receptors type 1 (СВ1) and type 2 (СВ2) in implementation of antihypoxic and neuroprotective effects of N-ADA in hypoxia model in vitro. The experiments were carried out on primary hippocampal cultures. N-ADA effect on the spontaneous bioelectrical and calcium network activity in dissociated hippocampal cultures in normal and hypoxic conditions as well as the role of CB1 and CB2 in the implementation of these effects were investigated. Registration of extracellular action potentials was conducted by MEA systems (Multichannel Systems, Germany) application. For the detection of patterns of spontaneous calcium oscillations we used fluorescent calcium dye Oregon Green 488 BAPTA-1 AM (Invitrogen) and a confocal laser scanning microscope (Zeiss LSM510, Germany). Study the expression of mRNA CB1 receptors was performed using SmartFlare RNA Detection Probes (Merck Millipore, France) and fluorescent microscopy. Our data demonstrated that N-ADA has strong antihypoxic and neuroprotective properties associated with activation of cannabinoid receptors type 1. 

In this work we report two successful cases of developing neural networks of spiking neurons for controlling mobile robots. In the first case we use a toy robot, a crocodile, driven by a neural network in-silico. We show that this so-called neuroanimat is capable of detecting internal events of synchronization of network responses to stimuli. In the second example we employ a spiking neural network for building a human-robot interface. Using a bracelet with eight electromyographic sensors we have shown that the interface can faithfully detect myographic signals, classify them according to hand gestures, and send the corresponding commands to the robot. Although the two applications belong to different areas of Neuroscience, they are based on a common approach of neural computations. We note that in both cases besides neural networks there are no additional external algorithms for the decision-making. 

This article may be regarded as a quick reference to laboratory staff who are wishing to develop their own microscopy system for self-service and modernization of the system and in order to save the lab budget.