Psychology in the News
APS Showcases Baghdoyan, Lydic Publication
Helen Baghdoyan
Ralph Lydic
The American Physiological Society (APS) featured a paper by Helen Baghdoyan, Beaman Professor in the UT Department of Psychology, and colleagues originally published in the Journal of Neurophysiology. The paper, “Neurotransmitter networks in mouse prefrontal cortex are reconfigured by isoflurane anesthesia,” is based on a study that quantified eight small-molecule neurotransmitters collected simultaneously from prefrontal cortex of mice during wakefulness and during isoflurane anesthesia.
Researchers hypothesized that isoflurane anesthesia differentially alters concentrations of multiple neurotransmitters and their interactions. Machine learning was applied to reveal higher order interactions among neurotransmitters. A novel finding to emerge from machine learning analyses is that neurotransmitter concentration profiles in mouse prefrontal cortex undergo functional reconfiguration during isoflurane anesthesia. Adenosine, norepinephrine, and acetylcholine showed high feature importance, supporting the interpretation that interactions among these three transmitters may play a key role in modulating levels of cortical and behavioral arousal.
The APS acknowledged all the authors for distinction in scholarship in the Journal of Neurophysiology for their article and showcased the article in their July collection.