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Single-cell RNA-seq and CITE-seq were used to profile the glioblastoma immune landscape in humans and mice, revealing the diversity and dynamics of tumor macrophages as the disease progresses from initial diagnosis to recurrence.
Hennig et al. study how changes in internal state interact with learning in primates. They report stereotyped activity fluctuations in the motor cortex that reflect the animal’s level of engagement and predict how quickly the animals learned.
Dong and colleagues investigated mechanisms mediating neurodegeneration in multiple sclerosis and identified a direct role for oxidized phosphatidylcholines (OxPCs) in driving CNS cell death. Microglia activity, mediated by the lipid sensor TREM2 and a neutralizing OxPC antibody, were capable of rescuing OxPC-induced neurotoxicity.
Combining virtual reality and large-scale calcium imaging, the authors demonstrate that hippocampal place cell remapping across contexts can be precisely predicted by the experience of the animal and approximates optimal probabilistic inference.
Yin et al. show that motor learning is delayed in mice with 16p11.2 deletion, associated with abnormal ensemble activity and delayed spine remodeling in motor cortex and reduced activity of of locus coeruleus noradrenergic neurons. The motor-related abnormalities were rescued by activation of ocus coeruleus noradrenergic neurons.
Eze et al. use single-cell sequencing and immunohistochemical validation to create an atlas of early human brain development. In the telencephalon, they discover a diversity of progenitor subtypes, including two that are enriched in humans.
Early life stress (ELS) promotes susceptibility to the effects of chronic stress in adulthood. Kronman et al. show that ELS alters H3K79me2 in D2 medium spiny neurons in the nucleus accumbens and that this underlies the susceptibility to the effects of subsequent stress.
The authors define two functionally distinct external globus pallidus basal ganglia pathways and their differential contributions to motor and cognitive Parkinsonian deficits in mice.
We propose that synapses compute probability distributions over weights, not just point estimates. Using probabilistic inference, we derive a new set of synaptic learning rules and show that they speed up learning in neural networks.
How does the intricate balance of gene regulation and expression within individual neurons relate to electrophysiological oscillations and, ultimately, cognition? In a new study, Berto and colleagues take an important step toward addressing this question by correlating oscillatory biomarkers of successful memory encoding with gene expression on a within-participant basis.
Pain hypersensitivity can result from tissue injury and from depression. This study in mice shows that distinct thalamocortical pathways mediate allodynia associated with injury and a stress-induced depression-like state, respectively.
Rare rewards amplify dopamine neuron responses, even when conventionally defined prediction errors are identical. This suggests that individual dopamine neurons are sensitive to predicted reward distributions and can facilitate the learning of complex incentive structures.
Berto et al. combine human intracranial brain oscillations recorded during mnemonic processing and measures of gene expression from brain tissue surgically removed from the same individuals to uncover gene expression patterns relevant to memory in humans.
Persistent negative emotional states, such as anxiety, suppress social behavior and vice versa. A new report identifies a novel neural circuit that generates persistent anxiety states and describes how competing excitatory and inhibitory components of this circuit battle to pattern social behavior.
Mandates to include both sexes are a critical step toward improving the translational value of preclinical research, but they will not succeed without intentional, large-scale shifts in scientific incentive structures and publishing standards.
Spikes of deep-layer ID2+Nkx2.1+ cortical neurons are anticorrelated with spiking of all principal cells and interneurons, prominently during down states of sleep, and shape the sequential firing of neurons at down–up transitions.