Biology subjects

Pfeifer, C.

Publications and source records attributed to Pfeifer, C..

2 recordsLinked to original sources

bioRxiv2017

White Matter Connectivity Reflects Success in Musical Improvisation

Creativity is the ability to produce work that is novel, high in quality, and appropriate to an audience. One domain of creativity comes from musical improvisation, in which individuals spontaneously create novel auditory-motor sequences that are aesthetically rewarding. Here we test the hypothesis that individual differences in creative behavior are subserved by mesial and lateral differences in white matter connectivity. We compare jazz improvising musicians against classical (non-improvising) musicians and non-musician control subjects in musical performance and diffusion tensor imaging. Subjects improvised on short musical motifs and underwent DTI. Statistical measures of fluency and entropy for musical performances predicted expert ratings of creativity for each performance. Tract-Based Spatial Statistics (TBSS) showed higher Fractional Anisotropy (FA) in the cingulate cortex and corpus callosum in jazz musicians. FA in the cingulate also correlated with entropy. Probabilistic tractography from these mesial regions to lateral seed regions of the arcuate fasciculus, a pathway known to be involved in sound perception and production, showed mesial-to-lateral connectivity that correlated with improvisation training. Results suggest that white matter connectivity between lateral and mesial structures may integrate domain-general and domain-specific components of creativity.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2016

DNA damage in 3D constricted migration or after lamin-A depletion in 2D: shared mechanisms of repair factor mis-localization under nuclear stress

Cells that migrate through small, rigid pores and that have normal levels of the nuclear structure protein lamin-A exhibit an increase in DNA damage, which is also observed with lamin-A depletion in diseases such as cancer and with many lamin-A mutations. Here we show nuclear envelope rupture is a shared feature that increases in standard culture after lamin-A knockdown, which causes nuclear loss of multiple DNA repair factors and increased DNA damage. Some repair factors are merely mis-localized to cytoplasm whereas others are partially depleted unless rescued by lamin-A expression. Compared to standard cultures on rigid glass coverslips, the growth of lamin-A low cells on soft matrix relaxes cytoskeletal stress on the nucleus, suppresses the mis-localization of DNA repair factors, and minimizes DNA damage nearly to wildtype levels. Conversely, constricted migration of the lamin-A low cells causes abnormally high levels of DNA damage, consistent with sustained loss of repair factors. The findings add insight into why monogenic progeroid syndromes that often associate with increased DNA damage and predominantly impact cells in stiff tissues result from mutations only in lamin-A or DNA repair factors.

cell biology↗