Ricerc@Sapienza

Throughout life, stress stimuli act upon the brain leading to morphological and functional
changes in advanced age, when it is likely to develop neurodegenerative disorders.
There is an increasing need to unveil the molecular mechanisms underlying aging,
in a world where populations are getting older. Egr-1 (early growth response 1), a
transcriptional factor involved in cell survival, proliferation and differentiation – with a role
also in memory, cognition and synaptic plasticity, can be implicated in the molecular

Rhythmic non-invasive brain stimulations are promising tools to modulate brain activity by entraining neural oscillations in specific cortical networks. The aim of the study was to assess the possibility to influence the neural circuits of the wake-sleep transition in awake subjects via a bilateral transcranial alternating current stimulation at 5 Hz (theta-tACS) on fronto-temporal areas. 25 healthy volunteers participated in two within-subject sessions (theta-tACS and sham), one week apart and in counterbalanced order.

A key question in biology is to understand how interspecies morphological diversities originate. Plant roots present a huge interspecific phenotypical variability, mostly because roots largely contribute to adaptation to different kinds of soils. One example is the interspecific cortex layer number variability, spanning from one to several.