News & Views in 2015

Conclusive evidence for defective neurodevelopment in schizophrenia is lacking. Two DNA methylation studies now draw a link between fetal brain epigenomes, epigenetic alterations in the adult diseased brain and genetic risk for the disease.

Two studies invite us to reconsider the nature of striatal dopamine signals. Accumbens dopamine appears to signal the value of overt action and prediction errors arise from deviations in these signals.

A working memory representation goes missing in monkey parietal cortex during categorization learning, but is still found in the prefrontal cortex.

Predicting an individual's behavior is a formidable challenge for neuroimaging. A study now finds a strong link between an individual's ability to sustain attention and an extended, but specific, set of brain connections.

Previous work has suggested that cortical recurrent circuits can self-sustain their activity without thalamic input. A study now demonstrates that this is not the case in the awake brain, which tightly locks cortical timing to thalamic activity.

Synaptic plasticity during learning is as fundamental as it is hard to study. The underlying synaptic plasticity rule has now been inferred using only the firing rate statistics of visual neurons in monkeys before and after learning.

Previous studies have reported 'preplay' of hippocampal neural activity patterns associated with events yet to occur. Silva et al. challenge this finding on the basis of large-scale recordings before and after experiences.

The largest survey of gene expression ever performed in the adult human brain reveals highly stereotyped transcriptional patterning across individuals. The most stably patterned genes are enriched for neuronal annotations, disease associations, drug targets and correspond to resting state functional networks.

A study now demonstrates that ephrin-B3 recruits and stabilizes PSD-95 at excitatory synapses by direct interaction. Unusually, phosphorylation of ephrin-B3, elicited by neuron depolarization, inhibits this interaction.

The serotonin 1A receptor expressed on mature granule cells in the dentate gyrus mediates the behavioral, neurogenic and endocrine effects of the antidepressant fluoxetine in the mouse.

Previous experiments have suggested that many P2X family channels undergo a time-dependent process of pore dilation when activated by ATP. Li et al. now propose a different interpretation of the key experiments.

Complex demographic and behavioral phenotypes can arise from coordinated interactions among brain systems. A single axis of co-variation spanning 'negative' and 'positive' attributes links diverse participant characteristics with specific patterns of brain connectivity.

How do fundamental synaptic processes in specific neuron populations drive behavior? A new study links a reduction of tonic inhibitory GABA current in a subset of central amygdala neurons to anxiety after fear conditioning.

A new study shows that an efficient allocation of sensory resources can lead to Bayesian estimates that are biased away from the prior, accounting for effects such as the bias toward oblique angles in orientation perception.

As conversion of odor signals to a two-dimensional map of activated glomeruli in the olfactory bulb is the key to odor recognition, decoding and deorphanizing of odorant receptors in the olfactory map is of great interest. Two genome-wide techniques now offer the ability to pair any odorant with its receptors.

Dopamine loss in Parkinson's disease affects not only the basal ganglia, but also motor cortex, causing a surprising increase of spine turnover in the cortical dendritic tree and altering synaptic plasticity and memory retention.

Our internal states can color our memories just as powerfully as the external environment. A study finds that hippocampal GABA_A receptors and associated microRNAs are important for generating state-dependent contextual fear memories.

How do individuals attribute dispositional properties, or traits, to others? A study suggests that associative learning processes underlie aspects of trait learning at both neural and behavioral levels.