Neuroscience articles within Nature

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  • Books & Arts |

    French chemist Hervé This is a pioneer of the field of molecular gastronomy, the science of cooking. From perfecting the boiled egg to making custards with meat proteins, he has advised top chefs worldwide. He tells Nature why he is moving on to 'note-by-note' cuisine using compounds to build taste and smells, and why turkey is best cooked in the dishwasher.

    • Michael White

  • News Feature |

    Last year, functional magnetic resonance imaging made its debut in court. Virginia Hughes asks whether the technique is ready to weigh in on the fate of murderers.

    • Virginia Hughes

  • Letter |

    Reactive electrophiles are noxious chemicals, such as acrolein in cigarette smoke, and are detected by the ion channel TRPA1 in humans. Here it is shown that TRPA1 channels sense these chemicals in the gustatory chemosensory neurons of fruitflies and mosquitoes, too. Further findings show that, unlike with other chemical senses such as smell or taste, the detection of reactive electrophiles relies on an ancient sensor that has been conserved in molecular detail through some 500 million years of evolution.

    • Kyeongjin Kang
    • , Stefan R. Pulver
    •  & Paul A. Garrity

  • Article |

    Snakes are notoriously apt at generating 'thermal images' of predators or prey. The underlying physiology has been unclear, although in snakes such as pythons, vipers and boas, infrared signals are initially received by the pit organ. Here it is shown that pit-bearing snakes rely on heat detection by the ion channel TRPA1. This extends the sensory repertoire of the TRPA1 family of proteins, which detect chemical irritants in mammals and thermal variations in insects.

    • Elena O. Gracheva
    • , Nicholas T. Ingolia
    •  & David Julius

  • Article |

    In mammals, embryos are considered to be sexually indifferent until the action of a sex-determining gene initiates gonadal differentiation. Here it is demonstrated that this situation is different for birds. Using rare, naturally occurring chimaeric chickens where one side of the animal appears male and the other female, it is shown that avian somatic cells possess an inherent sex identity and that, in birds, sexual differentiation is cell autonomous.

    • D. Zhao
    • , D. McBride
    •  & M. Clinton

  • Letter |

    Peptide hormones such as oxytocin and vasopressin influence social behaviour in several mammalian species. Here it is shown that a population of interneurons in the rat olfactory bulb releases vasopressin, and that vasopressin signalling is required in the olfactory system for proper social recognition in rats. Although vasopressin may not work in exactly the same way in humans, social recognition mediated by experience-dependent vasopressin release may be common.

    • Vicky A. Tobin
    • , Hirofumi Hashimoto
    •  & Mike Ludwig

  • Letter |

    The brain's capacity to respond to instructive capacity underlies behavioural learning, but how instructive experience acts on the juvenile brain, a period in which learning is often enhanced, remains unknown. Here, two-photon in vivo imaging is used to study the brains of zebra finches as they learn to sing. The results indicate that behavioural learning results when instructive experience is able to rapidly stabilize and strengthen synapses on the sensorimotor neurons that control the learned behaviour.

    • Todd F. Roberts
    • , Katherine A. Tschida
    •  & Richard Mooney

  • Article |

    Benzodiazepines, such as valium, are used both in clinics and for recreational purposes, but lead to addiction in some individuals. Addictive drugs increase the levels of dopamine and trigger synaptic adaptations in the mesolimbic reward system, but the neural basis for the addictive nature of benzodiazepines remains elusive. Here, they are shown to increase firing of dopamine neurons in the ventral tegmental area through GABAA receptor activation in nearby interneurons.

    • Kelly R. Tan
    • , Matthew Brown
    •  & Christian Lüscher

  • News & Views |

    Chronic drug use can lead to addiction, which is initiated by specific brain circuits. The mystery of how one class of drugs, the benzodiazepines, affects activity in this circuitry has finally been solved.

    • Arthur C. Riegel
    •  & Peter W. Kalivas

  • Muse |

    The finding that religion scarcely influences moral intuition undermines the idea that a godless society will be immoral, says Philip Ball. Whether it 'explains' religion is another matter.

    • Philip Ball

  • Books & Arts |

    When Rodrigo Quian Quiroga visited Jorge Luis Borges's private library, he found annotated books that bear witness to the writer's fascination for memory and neuroscience.

    • Rodrigo Quian Quiroga

  • Article |

    Insect vectors of diseases locate their animal hosts through olfaction via largely unknown molecular processes. Here the 'empty neuron' system of genetically engineered Drosophila is used to assign specific odorants to the entire repertoire of olfactory receptors of the malaria vector Anopheles gambiae. The results illuminate ecological and neurobiological differences between mosquitoes and fruitflies and provide new potential molecular targets to boost the struggle against insect–borne diseases.

    • Allison F. Carey
    • , Guirong Wang
    •  & John R. Carlson

  • Letter |

    Mammals are repelled by large concentrations of salts but attracted to low concentrations of sodium. In mice, the latter behaviour can be blocked by the ion channel inhibitor amiloride. Here, mice have been produced lacking the drug's target sodium channel, ENaC, specifically in taste receptor neurons. It is confirmed that sodium sensing, like the four other taste modalities (sweet, sour, bitter and umami), is mediated by a dedicated 'labelled line'.

    • Jayaram Chandrashekar
    • , Christina Kuhn
    •  & Charles S. Zuker

  • Article |

    Mouse and human fibroblasts can be reprogrammed to a pluripotent state with a combination of four transcription factors. Here, mature differentiated cells are directed, via a combination of a few transcription factors (distinct from those described for generating iPS cells), to form functional neurons in vitro, without having to revert the fibroblasts to an embryonic state.

    • Thomas Vierbuchen
    • , Austin Ostermeier
    •  & Marius Wernig

  • News |

    The positioning of people's photos affects how attractive and powerful they seem to be.

    • Matt Kaplan

  • Letter |

    Echolocation is usually associated with bats. Many echolocating bats produce signals in the larynx, but a few species produce tongue clicks. Here, studies show that in all bats that use larynx-generated clicks, the stylohyal bone is connected to the tympanic bone. Study of the stylohyal and tympanic bones of a primitive fossil bat indicates that this species may have been able to echolocate, despite previous evidence to the contrary, raising the question of when and how echolocation evolved in bats.

    • Nina Veselka
    • , David D. McErlain
    •  & M. Brock Fenton

  • Opinion |

    People's grasp of scientific debates can improve if communicators build on the fact that cultural values influence what and whom we believe, says Dan Kahan.

    • Dan Kahan

  • Letter |

    Rodents have an orientation map of their surroundings, produced and updated by a network of neurons in the entorhinal cortex known as 'grid cells'. However, it is currently unknown whether humans encode their location in a similar manner. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging in humans, a macroscopic signal representing a subject's position in a virtual reality environment is now detected that meets the criteria for defining grid-cell encoding.

    • Christian F. Doeller
    • , Caswell Barry
    •  & Neil Burgess

  • Letter |

    The involvement of astroglia in long-term potentiation (LTP) of synaptic transmission remains controversial. Clamping internal Ca2+ in individual astrocytes in the CA1 area of the hippocampus is now shown to block LTP induction at nearby excitatory synapses through an effect on the N-methyl-D-aspartate receptor. This LTP blockade can be reversed by exogenous D-serine, normally released in a Ca2+-dependent manner from astrocytes.

    • Christian Henneberger
    • , Thomas Papouin
    •  & Dmitri A. Rusakov

  • News & Views |

    Memory formation is known to occur at the level of synaptic contacts between neurons. It therefore comes as a surprise that another type of brain cell, the astrocyte, is also involved in establishing memory.

    • Mirko Santello
    •  & Andrea Volterra

  • News & Views |

    Parent birds commonly face the problem of distinguishing their own brood from foreign chicks. Learnt chick-recognition evolves only when parents do not mistakenly learn to reject their own young.

    • Rebecca Kilner

  • Letter |

    If the activity of genetically specified neurons is silenced in a temporally precise fashion, the roles of different cell classes in neural processes can be studied. Members of the class of light-driven outward proton pumps are now shown to mediate powerful, safe, multiple-colour silencing of neural activity. The gene archaerhodopsin-3 (Arch) enables near 100% silencing of neurons in the awake brain when virally expressed in the mouse cortex and illuminated with yellow light.

    • Brian Y. Chow
    • , Xue Han
    •  & Edward S. Boyden

  • News & Views |

    Retrieving a memory initiates a window of vulnerability for that memory. Simple behavioural methods can modify distressing memories during this window, eliminating fear reactions to traumatic reminders.

    • Gregory J. Quirk
    •  & Mohammed R. Milad

  • News & Views |

    Retrieving a memory initiates a window of vulnerability for that memory. Simple behavioural methods can modify distressing memories during this window, eliminating fear reactions to traumatic reminders.

    • Gregory J. Quirk
    •  & Mohammed R. Milad

  • Authors |

    Training helps people forget some fearful memories.

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