The single pellet reaching task is commonly used in rodents to assess the acquisition of fine motor skill and recovery of function following nervous system injury. Although this task is useful for gauging skilled forelimb use in rodents, the process of training animals is labor intensive and variable across studies and labs. To address these limitations, we developed a single pellet reaching paradigm for training and testing group housed mice within their home cage. Mice enter a training compartment attached to the outside of the cage and retrieve millet seeds presented on a motorized pedestal that can be individually positioned to present seeds to either forelimb. To identify optimal training parameters, we compared task participation and success rates between groups of animals that were presented seeds at two different heights (floor vs mouth height) and at different intervals (fixed-time vs trial-based). The mouth height/fixed interval presentation style was most effective at promoting reaching behavior as all mice reached for seeds within 5 d. Using this paradigm, we assessed stroke-induced deficits in home-cage reaching. Following three weeks of baseline training, reaching success rate was ∼40%, with most trials performed during the dark cycle. A forelimb motor cortex stroke significantly decreased interaction with presented seeds within the first 2 d and impaired reaching success rates for the first 7 d. Our data demonstrate that group-housed mice can be efficiently trained on a single pellet reaching task in the home cage and that this assay is sensitive to stroke induced motor impairments.

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Compared with general object detection with horizontal bounding boxes in natural images, oriented object detection in remote sensing images is an active and challenging research topic as objects are usually displayed in arbitrary orientations. To model the variant orientations of oriented objects, general CNN-based methods usually adopt more parameters or well-designed modules, which are often complex and inefficient. To address this issue, the detector requires two key components to deal with: (i) generating oriented proposals in a light-weight network to achieve effective representation of arbitrarily oriented objects; (ii) extracting the rotation-invariant feature map in both spatial and orientation dimensions. In this paper, we propose a novel, lightweight rotated region proposal network to produce arbitrary-oriented proposals by sliding two vertexes only on adjacent sides and adopt a simple yet effective representation to describe oriented objects. This may decrease the complexity of modeling orientation information. Meanwhile, we adopt the rotation-equivariant backbone to generate the feature map with explicit orientation channel information and utilize the spatial and orientation modules to obtain completely rotation-invariant features in both dimensions. Without tricks, extensive experiments performed on three challenging datasets DOTA-v1.0, DOTA-v1.5 and HRSC2016 demonstrate that our proposed method can reach state-of-the-art accuracy while reducing the model size by 40% in comparison with the previous best method.

Summary Ischemic stroke is the second leading cause of death worldwide. Following an ischemic event, neuronal death is triggered by uncontrolled glutamate release leading to overactivation of glutamate sensitive N -methyl- d -aspartate receptor (NMDAR). For gating, NMDARs require not only the binding of glutamate, but also of glycine or a glycine-like compound as a co-agonist. Low glycine doses enhance NMDAR function, whereas high doses trigger glycine-induced NMDAR internalization (GINI) in vitro . Here, we report that following an ischemic event, in vivo , GINI also occurs and provides neuroprotection in the presence of a GlyT1 antagonist (GlyT1-A). Mice pretreated with a GlyT1-A, which increases synaptic glycine levels, exhibited smaller stroke volume, reduced cell death, and minimized behavioral deficits following stroke induction by either photothrombosis or endothelin-1. Moreover, we show evidence that in ischemic conditions, GlyT1-As preserve the vasculature in the peri-infarct area. Therefore, GlyT1 could be a new target for the treatment of ischemic stroke.