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The primary somatosensory cortex and central nucleus of the amygdala project to the spleen via the dorsal motor nucleus of the vagus nerve and regulate the T helper 2 (TH2) immune cell response in models of neuropathic pain.
Monosynaptic cerebellar projections to the substantia nigra pars compacta (SNc) increase the activity of SNc neurons and striatal dopamine levels. These projections may convey information related to movement initiation, vigor and reward processing.
The authors find that neuronal subpopulations in lateral entorhinal cortex provide reward-centric information during spatial navigation, which may contextualize spatial information from medial entorhinal cortex for forming hippocampal episodic memories.
Looser et al. reveal that oligodendrocytes detect and respond to axonal activity using K+ signaling to regulate vital metabolic support and maintain axon health.
Dopp et al. profiled gene expression in single cells from the whole fly brain, revealing how it changes with sleep/wakefulness states and circadian times. The findings highlight the role of glia in integrating sleep drive and circadian processes.
This paper shows that memory engrams are dynamic: neurons drop in and out as engrams become selective during memory consolidation. Inhibition and inhibitory plasticity are crucial for the expression and emergence of memory selectivity, respectively.
Immune activity can influence sleep, but the role of microglia has remained unclear. Ma, Li and colleagues show that microglia can promote sleep through P2Y12–Gi-coupled GPCR signaling, intracellular calcium increase and suppression of norepinephrine transmission.
This study reports a motif of local field potentials that maps onto the anatomical layers of the cortex, is preserved across macaque cortical areas and across primates and may represent a ubiquitous layer-based and frequency-based cortical mechanism.
Tasnim et al. show that ASD-associated genes act in different compartments of somatosensory circuits and that differences in developmental timing of ASD gene function and circuit maturation contribute to phenotypic heterogeneity across ASD models.
Using in vivo imaging in zebrafish, Li and colleagues found that neuron–oligodendrocyte precursor cell (OPC) synapses regulate OPC development and myelination via Ca2+ signaling, elucidating a new role for neuron–glia interactions in shaping the CNS.
Reward can both update values and convey information about the state of the world. Dopamine recordings and manipulations in highly trained mice making decisions, alongside modeling, show that dopamine supports the former but not the latter process.
de Jong et al. identify two dopamine cell subtypes with sustained or transient activity patterns in both cell bodies and axon terminals. They propose that these subtypes represent the parallel encoding of a behavioral state and its temporal dynamics.
Rabies-virus-based tracing is a widely used technique for mapping neural circuitry, but its cytotoxicity has limited its applications. Here Jin et al. present a second-generation system with minimal toxicity, using double-deletion-mutant rabies viruses.
Muller et al. show that some neurons in the cortex learn faster from better-than-expected outcomes compared to worse-than-expected ones; others do the converse, resulting in simultaneous optimism and pessimism, as predicted by distributional reinforcement learning.
Wang et al. found that catecholaminergic neurons in the ventrolateral medulla regulate fasting-induced T cell redistribution. Similar to fasting, these neurons suppressed autoimmune inflammation in mouse models of multiple sclerosis and psoriasis.
Xu et al. show that waking progressively disrupts neural dynamics criticality in the visual cortex and that sleep restores it. Deviations from criticality predict future sleep/wake behavior better than prior behavior and slow-wave activity.
This longitudinal study tracked the brains of 139 first-time mothers. Mothers showed lower cortical volume before childbirth that attenuated during the postpartum, with a distinct recovery rate as a function of the brain network and birth type.
Bush and Ramirez show that the activity of neuronal populations implicated in generating breathing evolves along a rotational low-dimensional trajectory that is stably maintained even when challenged with opioids but collapses during gasping.
In this study the authors show that in the mouse anterior thalamus, the activity of head-direction cells is selectively modulated by sensory stimuli and by the animal’s behavioral state.
Han and Helmchen demonstrate that the dynamic interactions between a higher association area and a primary sensory area in the neocortex can shape sensory representation and govern behavioral choices.