Volume 27 Issue 7, July 2024

After spinal cord injury, stromal fibroblasts originate from pericytes and perivascular fibroblasts, with pericytes more prevalent in gray matter and fibroblasts in white matter. Holl et al. show that both cell types respond to injury and inflammation, are activated, and transcriptionally converge on scar formation after injury, paving the way for therapeutic possibilities.

Cognitive control is crucial for present and future success and therefore is a frequent target of interventions. This study showed that training cognitive control in a large sample of 6–13-year-old children did not lead to any behavioral or neural changes, either immediately or 1 year after training.

We present a developmental atlas that offers insight into sequential epigenetic changes underlying early human brain development modeled in organoids, which reconstructs the differentiation trajectories of all major CNS regions. It shows that epigenetic regulation via the installation of activating histone marks precedes activation of groups of neuronal genes.

Recent studies suggest a close interaction between sensory and motor processes across the neocortex. In this Perspective, Rao proposes active predictive coding as a sensory–motor theory that explains the structure of the neocortex as well as some of its diverse computational capabilities.

This Review provides a framework for incorporating APOE into Alzheimer’s disease (AD) clinical care by bridging recent advances in APOE and AD research with emerging clinical applications for APOE testing and ApoE-targeted therapies.

Physiologically relevant stimulation of dopamine neurons does not function as a reward and does not endow cues with a reward representation. However, high-frequency stimulation is represented as a sensory-specific goal that motivates behavior.

The molecular mechanisms underlying direct neuronal reprogramming are unclear. Here the authors show Ngn2-mediated chromatin remodeling and its binding sites underlying mouse astrocyte-to-neuron reprogramming and identify Yy1, a transcription co-factor, as an important regulator.

LINE-1 retrotransposons are a type of mobile DNA element normally repressed in the body. Here the authors show that LINE-1 sequences can jump in mouse parvalbumin interneurons and also promote the transcription of key parvalbumin interneuron genes.

The origin and composition of stromal fibroblasts in the fibrotic CNS scar are unclear. Here, the authors demonstrate that pericytes and perivascular fibroblasts contribute to fibrotic scarring following spinal cord injury in mice in a region-dependent manner.

How the brain tracks blood glucose dynamics is unclear. Viskaitis et al. show that hypothalamic orexin/hypocretin cells track glucose concentration and rate of change and that their activity is important for glucose-evoked locomotor suppression.

A sparsely connected network, organized in clusters, identified in the rat lateral amygdala shows potentiation between recruited neurons after fear conditioning. This implies a mechanism for encoding multiple memories with a small number of neurons.

The circuit mechanisms underlying emotion recognition are unclear. Here, Dautan et al. show a role for a long-range feedback loop comprising somatostatin inhibitory projections from the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) to the retrosplenial cortex (RSC) and excitatory feedback projections from the RSC to the mPFC.

This theoretical study shows that dopaminergic reward prediction error neurons encode experienced rewards efficiently, which explains four major aspects of the neural population. This efficient code can be learned with local updates for each neuron.

Rational planning requires time spent thinking. Here, the authors propose a model of planning where a frontal network triggers hippocampal replay, integrating the replayed trajectory in its recurrent dynamics to improve decisions.

The authors identify reusable ‘dynamical motifs’ in artificial neural networks. These motifs enable flexible recombination of previously learned capabilities, promoting modular, compositional computation and rapid transfer learning. This discovery sheds light on the fundamental building blocks of intelligent behavior.

Cognitive control is important for later-life success and is often targeted for interventions. Here the authors show that response inhibition training in a large sample of children over 8 weeks did not change their brains or behavior in the short or long term.

The mechanisms underlying human cell diversity are unclear. Here the authors provide a single-cell epigenome map of human neural organoid development and dissect how epigenetic changes control cell fate specification from pluripotency to distinct cerebral and retina neural types.

BrainTF is the largest study to date that directly measures transcription factor (TF) binding in human postmortem brain, demonstrating improved measurements of TF activity and nominating TFs whose occupancy is enriched for risk variants of neuropsychiatric disorders.

Intersectional adeno-associated viruses are important for neuroscience research but can be limited by complex and bulky design parameters. Hughes et al. present a unique and space-saving approach that simplifies toolkit development and provides expanded functionality.

This paper presents Simple Behavioral Analysis (SimBA), an open-source platform for automated, explainable machine learning analysis of behavior. SimBA comes with extensive documentation, a graphical interface and an active community and works with any organism tracked by pose estimation.