Thank you for visiting nature.com. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain
the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off compatibility mode in
Internet Explorer). In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles
and JavaScript.
Han et al. find that, in addition to powerfully exciting Purkinje cells, climbing fibers rapidly suppress firing in nearby Purkinje cells. Current from glutamate receptor activation generates large extracellular signals that inhibit neighboring cells.
Yamamuro et al. show that juvenile social isolation disrupts prefrontal neurons projecting to the paraventricular thalamus and associated prefrontal somatostatin interneurons, and thereby impairs sociability in adulthood.
Toren et al. show that outcomes that are better or worse than expected lengthen or shorten the perceived duration of stimuli, respectively, and that this interaction between teaching signals and time perception occurs in the human striatum.
Babetto et al. demonstrate an axonal injury-induced glycolytic surge in Schwann cells that supplies perturbed axons with glycolytic energy substrates. Disruption of this metabolic coupling of axons and glial cells promotes axonal degeneration.
Parkinson’s disease brain neurons exhibit a widespread epigenetic dysregulation of enhancers that is linked to an upregulation of TET2. Inactivation of TET2 protects against nigral dopaminergic neuronal loss and neuroinflammation.
This study describes a series of new gene-regulatory sequences that restrict expression of viral transgenes to specific interneuron subtypes, allowing for selective monitoring and manipulation of their activity from mice to humans.
This study shows that the dorsal hippocampus is necessary for goal-directed action, but only transiently, during initial learning. Convergently, goal-directed actions also depend transiently on the physical context.
Neural oscillations, transients and variability are widely observed in sensory cortices. All these features emerge in neural networks optimized for the singular task of representing perceptual uncertainty in the variability of neural responses.
The nervous system is hypothesized to calculate reward prediction errors to estimate reward availability in the environment. The authors quantify a robust prediction error signal in the ventral pallidum derived from recently received rewarding outcomes.
Park et al. demonstrate in tauopathy models that tau disrupts the interaction between neuronal nitric oxide synthase and PSD95, uncoupling glutamatergic synaptic activity from nitric oxide production and dampening the hemodynamic response to activation.
The authors showed that the ‘moment of perception’ is causally related to dendritic activity in subcortically projecting layer 5 pyramidal neurons that project to the higher-order thalamus, superior colliculus and striatum.
Mazzone and Liang-Guallpa et al. demonstrate that consuming high-fat foods rapidly and durably tunes parallel brain circuits to drive intake of a high-fat diet while devaluing a nutritionally balanced, standard diet even under states of intense hunger.
Kol et al. show that the foundation of remote memory is formed during acquisition by the massive recruitment of ACC-projecting CA1 neurons. Remote memory acquisition involves projection-specific effects of astrocytes on CA1-to-ACC neuronal communication.
Charlet, Grinevich et al. show that social touch between female rats activates parvocellular oxytocin neurons; these neurons control social behavior by coordinating the responses of the much larger population of magnocellular oxytocin neurons.
Garcia-Marques et al. present CLADES, an innovative approach to study neuronal lineages based on CRISPR. Inspired by synthetic biology, CLADES relies on a system of genetic switches to activate and inactivate reporter genes in a predetermined order.
Yamaguchi et al. identify a little-known amygdalar region, the posterior amygdala, as a key node in male mouse social behaviors. Two largely non-overlapping subpopulations in the posterior amygdala form parallel projections to distinct hypothalamic regions to regulate mating and fighting.
Giovannoni et al. report that the aryl hydrocarbon receptor (AHR) is a novel host factor exploited by Zika virus and dengue virus to evade the immune response. AHR is a candidate target for the treatment of Zika virus congenital syndrome and dengue fever.
SPARC is an all-genetic toolkit to express effectors in precise proportions of neurons. This method enables imaging of individual neurons and manipulation of neuronal subpopulations.
Tamaki et al. measured MRS changes in sleeping humans trained on a visual task. During NREM sleep, learning gains were associated with enhanced visual cortical plasticity that was also seen independent of learning. REM sleep stabilized plasticity only after pre-sleep learning.
The complement–microglia pathway is a key mediator of synapse elimination in development and disease. Cong et al. show that neurons endogenously express a complement inhibitor, SRPX2, that regulates synapse elimination in development.