News & Views

Citation count has become one of the most important methods to evaluate a scientist’s contributions. In an extensive analysis of citations from a number of leading neuroscience journals, Dworkin and colleagues find evidence of gender bias in citation practices that can have an adverse impact on women’s careers.

Our light environment can strongly influence our mental health. Kai An and colleagues dissect the neuronal circuit mediating depression-related behaviors induced by mistimed light input in mice, implicating the nucleus accumbens as the downstream target of the neural pathway between intrinsically photosensitive retinal ganglion cells and the perihabenular nucleus.

Hardening of the arteries (atherosclerosis) was linked to dementia long ago, but subsequently, Alzheimer’s plaques and tangles have received more attention. A new proteome-wide association study unveils molecular links between intracranial atherosclerosis and dementia, independent of other pathologies, providing new evidence for one of the oldest suspected causes of dementia.

General anesthetics during surgery are presumed to block pain by dampening brain activity and promoting loss-of-consciousness. A new study shows that anesthetics activate an endogenous analgesia neural ensemble in the central nucleus of the amygdala.

One hallmark of sleep is the slow oscillation, which is often synchronous across the neocortical mantle. How this synchrony is achieved remains unclear. A new study by Narikiyo et al. demonstrates how the claustrum may play a key role in the global control of this rhythm.

At the heart of C9ORF72-related amyotrophic lateral sclerosis and frontotemporal dementia (ALS /FTD) research lies the mechanistic question of whether disease is caused by toxic gain of function related to the repeat expansion, loss of endogenous C9ORF72 expression, or both. New findings provide insights to this question.

A new study shows that mapping neural signals directly to word sequences produces lower error rates in speech decoding than previous methods that use motor or auditory based features. This suggests that using higher-level language goals can aid decoding algorithms for neural speech prostheses.

Motor learning is composed of explicit ‘strategic’ components and implicit ‘automatic’ components. Miyamoto and colleagues reveal how these components work together during visuomotor adaptation, providing evidence that an implicit component corrects for a noisy explicit process.

Three new studies show that activity-dependent formation of myelin contributes to memory consolidation and recall, possibly by increasing functional coupling between neuronal ensembles encoding experience.

Postmortem studies have previously suggested that adult olfactory neurogenesis occurs in humans. In new research, Durante and colleagues obtained fresh tissue from healthy adult humans via endoscopic nasal surgery and used single-cell RNA sequencing (RNA-seq) to identify the entire neurogenic trajectory in the olfactory epithelium, confirming the existence of human olfactory neurogenesis.

Recent findings unveil a viral-like mechanism for the transmission of synaptic plasticity signals involving the activity-regulated cytoskeleton-associated protein (Arc). Arc forms capsid-like particles that package RNA and are transported across synapses. Here Erlendsson et al. present a high-resolution structural representation of Arc capsids, enabling deeper analysis of their function.

Rewards direct behavioral adaptation through midbrain dopamine signaling, though the timing of those effects is often ambiguous. Lee and colleagues find that different subpopulations of dopamine neurons obey similar constraints, indirectly regulating reward-related behavior through learning mechanisms restricted to a brief time window following reward.

A new study shows that the enzyme monoamine oxidase funnels a byproduct of dopamine metabolism, H₂O₂, directly into the mitochondrial electron transport chain, stimulating ATP production. This alternative energy pathway may protect dopaminergic neurons from the toxicity induced by dopamine metabolism while supporting phasic firing.

Humans and animals are drawn to others in an altered affective state, whether sad or happy. A study published in this issue of Nature Neuroscience shows that a specific population of interneurons in the brain is critical for discrimination of affective states.

Behavior is more than the motor outputs that we can directly measure. Here Calhoun and colleagues devise a novel method for inferring the internal states that affect how fruit flies process sensory information during courtship, providing a new framework for understanding the neural encoding of behavior.

Reitich-Stolero and Paz examined multineuron correlates of Pavlovian learning in the primate amygdala. They found repeating patterns of activity across neurons that may mediate synaptic-level plasticity mechanisms. This extends the notion of replay, often examined relative to navigation in the hippocampus, to aversive learning in the amygdala.

Unexpected experiences often lead to strong memories. A new study by Krabbe and Paradiso et al. shows that vasoactive intestinal peptide (VIP)-expressing interneurons of the basolateral amygdala control associative learning and memory formation by gating aversive stimuli scaled by their unexpectedness.

Two new studies demonstrate the importance of awake imaging to investigate microglia–neuron interactions. These studies show that microglial dynamics are influenced by neuronal activity, and they provide evidence that norepinergic signaling plays an important role in this effect.

Astrocytes are crucial contributors to brain homeostasis. Yet the lack of ad hoc analysis tools has prevented in-depth characterization of astrocyte-derived signals. In a new study, the authors present an image-analysis toolbox that captures the complexity of astrocyte activity and enables our understanding of astrocytic physiology.