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Gene-based therapies offer the promise of long-lasting clinical benefit for both genetic and sporadic neurodegenerative diseases. Sun and Roy highlight recent successes and caveats, offering a prospective glimpse into this rapidly emerging arena.
Zhang et al. show in mice that the medial preoptic area antagonistically regulates stress-induced anxiety and parental behaviors, coordinated by opposing roles of its glutamatergic and GABAergic neurons through their competitive interactions.
RNA localization is a defining and intricately regulated feature of neuronal physiology. Fernandopulle et al. review how altered RNA transport and local translation might inform understanding of neuronal disease.
Paredes et al. identify bidirectional crosstalk between the neural and the vascular compartment in the developing CNS required for oligodendrocyte precursor cell specification and mediated by an angiopoietin1–Tie2–TGFß1 signaling axis.
Synapse loss is prominent in the cortex in multiple sclerosis (MS). In a cortical MS model, Jafari et al. show that phagocytes remove synapses by engulfment, which is triggered by local calcium accumulations and prevented by blocking colony-stimulating factor 1 signaling.
Two-photon photostimulation and imaging of a cortical short-term memory circuit reveal intercalated modules that can independently maintain memory. The modules are defined by connectivity between neurons with similar task-related tuning.
Inhibition of nucleus accumbens neurons is crucial for reward consumption. Vachez, Tooley et al. characterize arkypallidal neurons in the ventral pallidum that inhibit accumbal neurons to sustain reward consumption in a value-dependent manner.
This study shows how different myeloid cell types contribute to damage and repair following cerebrovascular injury, a pathology common to many central nervous system disorders, and offers new therapeutic opportunities to improve clinical outcomes.
Sherman et al. describe the contribution of mosaic copy number variants (mCNVs) to the risk of autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Probands with ASD carry a significant burden of mCNVs relative to their unaffected siblings.
Leng et al. uncover the molecular signature of neuronal subpopulations that are selectively vulnerable to tau aggregation and death early in Alzheimer’s disease in the human entorhinal cortex and other brain regions, validating RORB as a marker.
Zhu et al. discover that in human brain there is widespread anatomic distribution of low-frequency somatic, mosaic L1 insertions, using deep whole-genome sequencing of neuronal and glial fractions and machine-learning analysis.
Rodin and Dou et al. characterized genome-wide somatic mutation in autistic and control brains, revealing that even unaffected individuals may possess dozens of brain somatic mutations and providing insight into the role of somatic mutation in autism.