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A report of a potential therapy for some of the social behavior patterns associated with autism highlights the need for a societal dialog to discuss the ethical issues raised by these treatments.
Narrowing down the genetic basis of Down syndrome, in which hundreds of genes are triplicated, has been difficult. A new study finds that the expression of two affected genes, Olig1 and Olig2, is critical for maintaining the balance of inhibitory and excitatory signaling in a mouse model of Down syndrome.
A study shows that spatial learning is accompanied by the reorganization of place fields of hippocampal CA1 neurons, and that this reorganization is subsequently reactivated in an NMDA-dependent manner for memory consolidation.
A new study finds that neurons in the ferret frontal cortex typically respond to sound only during trained auditory tasks and that these neurons depict the task-related meaning rather than the acoustical properties of stimuli.
How do we estimate the duration of a temporal interval in a familiar context? A new study finds that it is appropriate, perhaps even advantageous, to tolerate a small bias in our estimate to reduce the overall temporal uncertainty.
The authors chronically stimulated cultured cortical cell networks. They observed changes in the timing of neural activity that depended on the intervals used during training.
Dopamine D2 receptor antagonists increase the risk of extrapyramidal symptoms (EPS) within minutes. This study reports significant reductions in the striatal volume of healthy human subjects within hours of D2R antagonist treatment; the volume changes predict structural-functional decoupling in motor circuits and acute EPS with high precision.
The authors find that disruption of primary motor cortex or dorsolateral prefrontal cortex with transcranial magnetic stimulation has differential effects on motor memory retention depending on whether training was done in blocks of trials or with different tasks interleaved. This suggests that the neural substrate for motor-memory consolidation depends on the practice structure used for training.
Down syndrome is caused by the triplication of chromosome 21, which results in extra copies of hundreds of genes. Chakrabarti et al. used the Ts65Dn mouse model of Down syndrome to show that Olig1 and Olig2, two transcription factor genes that are triplicated in Down syndrome and in the Ts65Dn mouse, are involved in the manifestation of the inhibition/excitation imbalance phenotype.
In Drosophila, activation by Wingless results in cleavage of its Frizzled2 receptor and translocation of the C terminus (Fz2-C) from the postsynaptic density to the nuclei. Mosca and Schwarz find that nuclear Fz2-C entry requires the nuclear import factors Importin-β11 and Importin-α2. This pathway promotes postsynaptic development of the subsynaptic reticulum.
Building on their previous observation that neuronal calcium spike activity can drive neurotransmitter specification during development, these authors report that cJun phosphorylation integrates activity-dependent and intrinsic transmitter specification through the regulation of tlx3 transcription in Xenopus sensory neurons.
Marrs et al. show that the serine hydrolase α/β-hydrolase domain 6 (ABHD6) controls the accumulation and efficacy of the endocannabinoid 2-arachidonoylglycerol at cannabinoid receptors. ABHD6 is located post-synaptically and its selective inhibition permits the induction of cannabinoid receptor–dependent long-term depression by otherwise subthreshold stimulations.
The authors combine optogenetics, two-photon microscopy and glutamate uncaging to study D2-type dopamine receptor modulation of glutamatergic transmission in mouse striatopallidal neurons. They find that dopamine regulates spine calcium via multiple pathways.
The authors studied hippocampal networks in mouse slices in vitro and found that theta-related place-cell activity in the hippocampus is generated through an interaction between a phasic dendritic excitation and a phasic perisomatic shunting inhibition mediated by interneurons.
Understanding of the fly visual circuitry has been hampered by the difficulty of recording from the small neurons involved. Reiff and colleagues present a technique to record visually evoked responses and find that the L2 interneurons in the medulla encode brightness decrements rather than motion.
Fear conditioning results from the association that develops between a neutral conditioned stimulus and an aversive unconditioned stimulus (UCS), which is thought to be supported by plasticity in the amygdala. Here, the authors find that information about the UCS is conveyed to the amygdala by neurons in the periaqueductal gray.
The parahippocampal region of dorsal presubinculum has neurons that preferentially fire based on the direction of the rat's head. The medial entorhinal cortex has neurons that are preferentially active according to grid-like regularity in space. Here, the authors find that pre- and parasubiculum also have these grid cells, which are intermingled with head-direction cells.
The hippocampus has place cells that preferentially fire at a particular location of spatial arena. Dupret et al. report that place fields remapped as a result of goal-directed spatial learning and that sharp wave/ripple reactivation events seen during memory consolidation predicted the strength of subsequent spatial memory. Jeffery and Cacucci highlight this work in their News and View.
Some brain areas, such as the olfactory bulb, can decorrelate (that is, separate out) very general inputs. However, the mechanisms enabling such decorrelation are unclear. This study presents a computational model that shows that efficient pattern decorrelation can emerge from a combination of nonlinear input-output functions and recurrent, sparse and strong inter-neuronal connectivity.
Fritz et al. compared activity in ferret frontal cortex and primary auditory cortex (A1) during auditory and visual tasks requiring discrimination and found that A1 and frontal cortex establish a dynamic, functional connection during auditory behavior that shapes sensory information flow and maintains a persistent trace of recent task-relevant stimulus features.
The authors find that a person's estimate of a time interval exhibits biases that depend on both its duration and the distribution from which it is drawn. This behavioral pattern could be described using a Bayesian model. These findings suggest that internal timing mechanisms can adapt to the temporal statistics of the environment to minimize uncertainty.
This paper reports the development of a K+-selective glutamate receptor, HyLighter, that reversibly inhibits neuronal activity in response to light. The low light requirement and bi-stability of HyLighter could be useful for studying neural circuitry.
