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Gehrlach et al. show how the posterior insular cortex processes and modulates diverse internally and externally generated aversive states, and they dissect the functional contribution of segregated projections mediating inhibition of ongoing behaviors.
Breen et al. map RNA editing profiles in cortical samples from individuals with schizophrenia and controls, and find links between altered RNA editing in glutamatergic and postsynaptic density genes and schizophrenia genetic risk architecture.
Zhou et al. report a novel 5-HT circuit from the dorsal raphe nucleus to somatostatin-expressing neurons in the central nucleus of the amygdala that partially mediates depressive-like behavior in a mouse model of chronic pain.
Given a choice between food and water outcomes on a T-maze, rats preferred the outcome they did not have access to overnight, yet the content of awake hippocampal replay was consistently shifted away from the preferred outcome.
Researchers identify a transcriptional network engaged in stress-resilient mice that is regulated by a previously unstudied transcription factor, Zfp189, and elucidate molecular mechanisms controlling this network and resilience behavior.
Neural populations often encode unknown variables. Chaudhuri et al. develop a method to decode unknown variables by finding shapes in neural data. They show that a mammalian brain circuit of thousands of neurons constructs a navigational compass with only a one-dimensional ring of stable activity states.
Using data from rats and humans, the authors study the time it takes to make sensory judgments. The authors define the new regularity as the time–intensity equivalence in discrimination (TIED), which provides a mechanistic basis of Weber’s law.
Like humans, songbirds learn to communicate vocally early in life. Moore and Woolley taught birds the songs of a different species to identify how vocal experience and auditory tuning mechanisms create neural representations of communication sounds.
Everyday decisions require choosing among multiple options. This work derives the optimal decision policy and shows how it can be approximated by a biologically plausible neural circuit and how this circuit can reproduce observed behavior.
This study identifies eight significant genetic associations with intrusive reexperiencing of trauma in post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) from the Million Veteran Program (MVP), a large biobank focused on US veterans.
Detecting and responding to noxious stimuli is essential for survival. Wee et al. show that noxious stimuli elicit intense and widespread activity in zebrafish oxytocin neurons, which promote defensive behavior by activating hindbrain premotor neurons.
Henderson et al. use quantitative pathology mapping and network modeling to show that α-synuclein pathology spreads through a neuroanatomically connected network, guided by selective vulnerability and genetic risk factors.
Badwan et al. find direction-opponent responses in the most peripheral direction-selective cells of Drosophila. They analyze how this property constrains models for direction selectivity and how it impacts motion estimation in natural scenes.
Guo et al. show that synaptic alterations in ACC pyramidal neurons underlie social impairments in Shank3 mutant mice and that selective activation of ACC pyramidal neurons or enhancing AMPAR function improves social behavior in these mice.
Green et al. find that, when their internal heading estimate is rotated via neural stimulation, flies turn their body in a direction that aims to return their heading estimate back to its previous value. This suggests the heading estimate is compared with an internal goal to guide navigation.
Laboy-Juárez et al. show that barrel cortex neurons in mice are tuned for elementary multi-whisker sequences that represent tactile motion, using a computation similar to motion direction selectivity in vision. These findings provide a novel view of columnar organization.
The authors find that olfactory bulb inputs and outputs sample overlapping but distinct odor subspaces. Physical–chemical properties used to characterize odorants are not well represented in bulb activity, urging further search for better descriptors of odor space.
SFRP1, an ADAM10 inhibitor, is elevated in the brains of patients with Alzheimer’s disease (AD). Antibody-mediated neutralization of its activity stalls brain alterations and cognitive loss in AD-like mice, supporting SFRP1 as a potential target for disease therapy.
Genetic techniques to manipulate autonomic nerves in a tumor- and fiber-type-specific manner in rodent models of breast cancer reveal that sympathetic nerve denervation or parasympathetic nerve stimulation suppresses breast cancer growth and progression.
Parietal neurons encode the information gains that saccades are expected to bring for subsequent actions independently of economic utility, consistent with a boost in neural gain to facilitate the implementation of sampling policies.