Reviews & Analysis

A new technique developed by Garcia-Marques and colleagues uses CRISPR–Cas9 editing to activate an ordered sequence of fluorescent markers in stem cells and their progeny. These tools represent a new way to probe the spatial and temporal patterns of cell lineage progression.

Following learning, memories for events are reorganized in a time-dependent manner in distributed hippocampal–cortical networks. While previous studies have focused on neural contributions to this process of systems consolidation, a new study by Kol et al. reveals that astrocytes play crucial modulatory roles in the formation of remote memories.

Poll and colleagues examined the historical activity of hippocampal CA1 neurons during learning and memory recall using longitudinal two-photon in vivo imaging, providing evidence that extra neural ensemble activity disrupts memory recall in a mouse model of early Alzheimer’s disease.

Keysers et al. show why P values do not differentiate inconclusive null findings from those that provide important evidence for the absence of an effect. They provide a tutorial on how to use Bayesian hypothesis testing to overcome this issue.

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.

Recent studies separately address the neural representation of stimuli and its dynamics in networks that model neural interactions. Ju and Bassett review such recent advances and discuss the integration of neural representations and network models.

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.

The increasing use of cannabis has brought significant attention to cannabis use disorder (CUD) and its neurobiological underpinnings. Here Ferland and Hurd discuss risk factors related to the development of CUD its neurobiological characteristics.

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.

Most psychiatric genetics research has contrasted diagnosed ‘cases’ and controls. Here the authors describe alternative approaches leveraging large population-based cohorts and examining disease-related endophenotypes.

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.

Phase separation is emerging as a versatile means for cellular sub-compartment formation. Chen et al. review recent advances of dense synaptic assembly formation via phase separation and discuss implications of phase separation in synaptic physiology.